Hey folks! This was supposed to go up a while ago, but, well, between an illness that just wouldn’t go away and my laptop unexpectedly dying, I haven’t been able to do all the stuff I intended to do for the site over the last few weeks. With any luck, I’ll get back on track now. No promises, though–I’m on a loaner laptop right now and I’m not sure how that whole situation is going to shake out.
Regardless–this was meant to go up around the time the first episode released: a brief history of Tim Drake as a character, charting his appearances throughout DC Comics’ history!
Introduction
Tim Drake first appears in Batman #436, part of the “Year 3” storyline, but doesn’t become important until the arc “A Lonely Place of Dying” begins a few issues later in Batman #440; the event would carry through both Batman and New Titans. Tim is initially a mysterious figure that we don’t see on-panel; the B-plot of “A Lonely Place of Dying” is about this unknown person secretly observing Batman’s fights and trying to track down Dick Grayson, AKA Nightwing, who has taken a leave of absence from the Teen Titans. We finally meet Tim when he succeeds in locating Dick.
Tim reveals that he knows Dick is Nightwing, formerly Robin. He explains that when he was a child, his parents took him to Haley’s Circus and that he even took a picture with the Flying Graysons shortly before their act. Unfortunately, his circus visit was the same day that Dick’s parents were killed, and he saw Batman swoop in to protect the youngest Grayson. This early brush with Batman left a strong impression on young Tim, giving him recurring nightmares and an obsession with Batman. Later, hen Tim saw a television broadcast with footage of Batman and Robin, he recognized the acrobatic tricks of Robin as the same ones he’d seen Dick Grayson perform at the circus; from there, he extrapolated that Robin must be Dick, and further, that Batman must be Bruce Wayne, the eccentric millionaire who had adopted Grayson shortly before Robin first appeared alongside Batman.
Tim explains to Dick that Batman has been acting erratic since the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd; Tim surmises that Batman needs a Robin to balance him–that having a partner to look after makes Batman more careful and thoughtful. He attempts to convince Dick to resume the Robin mantle. Dick refuses, but he does agree to help Bruce with his current case–a crime spree committed by Two-Face–as Nightwing.
Batman and Nightwing are ultimately trapped in a collapsed building by Two-Face, only to be rescued by Tim. Batman is furious that Tim got involved, especially when he sees that Tim has dressed himself as Robin. Tim explains his concerns to Batman, who begrudgingly acquiesces to Tim’s request to join the pursuit of Two-Face. After Two-Face is successfully captured, Batman agrees to train Tim.
The Road to Robin
Unlike previous Robins, Tim Drake is not an orphan–instead, his parents are wealthy business owners who spend much of their time abroad. In the story arc “Rite of Passage” (Detective Comics #618-621), Tim’s parents are kidnapped in Haiti, where they are held for ransom by a voodoo cult led by the Obeah Man. Batman heads for Haiti while Tim distracts himself from the situation by tracking down a computer hacker operating under the name Moneyspider. Tim correctly deduces that Moneyspider is actually the villain Anarky and alerts the authorities, ending Anarky’s series of cybercrimes. Meanwhile, Batman succeeds in stopping the Obeah Man, but not before Tim’s parents drink poisoned water; Tim’s mother dies and his father falls into a coma.
In the “Identity Crisis” arc (Batman #455-457), Tim begins living with Bruce Wayne while his father is comatose. He becomes desperate to complete his training and take up the mantle of Robin, feeling that the costume will allow him to ignore the pain of his mother’s death and father’s debilitating injury. Batman recognizes this instinct and refuses to let Tim become Robin for such unhealthy reasons, sidelining Tim during an investigation into a series of seemingly random murders throughout Gotham.
Tim eventually figures out that the murders are in fact the result of a scheme by Scarecrow. He tries to reach Batman to warn him, but is too late. Ultimately, he helps free Batman from Scarecrow’s clutches, saving the day–all without wearing the Robin costume, as he didn’t want to tarnish the suit if he failed. Following this, Batman presents him with his own Robin suit and officially takes him on as a sidekick.
Early Days
This leads directly into Tim’s first solo miniseries, Robin. Feeling unprepared for the role now that it’s actually his, Tim elects to travel to Paris to learn martial arts from an exiled Tibetan master who lives there. While in Paris, he meets a young woman named Ling who appears to be the captive of a street gang called the Ghost Dragons. While trying to find and rescue Ling, Tim falls in with a rogue DEA agent named Clyde and Lady Shiva, who are both hunting down Sir Edmund Dorrance, AKA King Snake, a blind martial artist, drug runner, and leader of the Ghost Dragons.
Shiva trains Tim in the use of the bo staff, which becomes his signature weapon from this point forward. While all of this is going on, King Snake recovers samples of bubonic plague from a secret Nazi laboratory beneath Paris, which he is planning to use to poison Hong Kong. Robin, Clyde, and Shiva try to recover the plague from the Ghost Dragons before it can be sent to Hong Kong, but they are only partially successful–their efforts are thwarted by Ling, AKA Lynx, who was never a captive of the Ghost Dragons at all, but a member (and one of Dorrance’s trusted lieutenants).
The trio head to Hong Kong, where Dorrance kills Clyde. Tim kicks Dorrance out a window, leaving him hanging off the side of the skyscraper they’re fighting in. Lady Shiva appears and encourages Tim to break Dorrance’s grip, forcing him to fall to his death, but Tim refuses. He simply leaves, and Shiva apparently kills Dorrance instead.
Shortly afterwards, in the “Shadow Box” arc (Batman #467-469), King Snake and Lynx show up in Gotham, where it is revealed that King Snake only fell a few stories before landing on a balcony and breaking his back. He blames Robin for his injury; as a result, he’s come to Gotham for revenge.
Coming Into His Own
Tim continues to work as Robin leading up to his second miniseries, Robin II: Joker’s Wild! In this mini, Joker escapes Arkham while Batman is out of town and kidnaps a computer expert named Osgood Pellinger, keeping Pellinger in a drugged state and forcing him to play havoc with various electronic systems in the city. Tim knows that he’s no match for Joker and attempts to set up a hologram of Batman on the rooftops of Gotham, but this backfires when Joker attempts to shoot the hologram and sees his bullets pass through harmlessly.
Tim attempts to combat Pellinger’s computer virus, but to no avail. An emboldened Joker, convinced that Batman is absent and upset that there’s a living Robin again, demands that the city give him a billion dollars, delivered by Batman, or else he will step up his chaos further. He believes that this is an impossible demand, but is pleasantly surprised when Batman–actually a dummy in a batsuit in the driver’s seat of a truck being controlled remotely by Robin–arrives at the designated bridge to make the handoff. Joker blows the bridge and begins to celebrate, at which point Robin strikes. The two fight their way over to a sewage plant, where Robin knocks Joker into the sewage; the police arrive and a humiliated Joker swears revenge.
Upon Batman’s return to Gotham, the two share several more adventures (including the notable “Electric City” arc in Detective Comics #644-646, in which Robin saves Batman from death at the hands of the Electrocutioner). Eventually, Tim’s father awakens from his coma, though is confined to a wheelchair. Upon Jack Drake’s discharge from the hospital, Tim resumes living with his father, though he does convince him to move to a mansion adjacent to Bruce’s.
In Detective Comics #647-649, Batman and Robin come up against the Cluemaster, a Riddler-esque villain who feels compelled to send the police clues about his upcoming crimes–or at least, that used to be the case. Cured of his compulsion, but not of his criminal ways, Cluemaster is planning a new heist and is confused when the police begin receiving clues that he isn’t sending himself. It transpires that the Cluemaster has a daughter, Stephanie Brown, who has been sending the clues to the police in the hopes that they’ll catch her father. She calls herself the Spoiler and briefly works with Batman and Robin to take down Cluemaster.
At this point Tim gets a third miniseries, Robin III: Cry of the Huntress, in which he teams up with the Huntress to fight some Russian gangsters who are carrying out a counterfeiting scheme. This story introduces Ariana Dzerchenko, a Russian immigrant Tim’s age, who he rescues from the mobsters. By the end of the series, the counterfeit money has fallen into the hands of King Snake, but Tim reveals to Huntress that he’d tampered with the machinery and rendered all of the money (specifically, euros) useless anyway.
Tim and Ariana begin dating, though the relationship is hampered by the fact that she doesn’t know he’s Robin. Around this time, a man named Jean-Paul Valley arrives in Gotham under the guise of Azrael, a brainwashed assassin from the Order of St. Dumas. After Batman and Robin defeat Azrael, Jean-Paul decides he wants to be more like Batman, and Bruce puts Tim in charge of rehabilitating the former villain.
This leads into the “Knightfall” event, which spans about twenty issues across Detective Comics, Batman, and more. Robin is sidelined for the majority of this event as an increasingly exhausted Batman tries to take on an army of his deadliest rogues, who have been released from Arkham by the mysterious new villain Bane. Robin himself is captured by Bane at one point, but manages to escape.
Bane ultimately breaks Batman’s back. Bruce has Tim recruit Jean-Paul to fill in as Batman for a time, as Bruce is wheelchair-bound and it’s unclear if or when he will recover.
Bruce begins seeing Dr. Shondra Kinsolving for physical therapy–the same physical therapist that is working with Jack Drake. When Bruce goes to the Drake residence looking for Dr. Kinsolving, he finds Bane’s men there; the thugs abduct Jack Drake and Dr. Kinsolving, but Bruce takes a mask from one of Bane’s men and uses it to determine that they are from the South American nation Santa Prisca. He and Alfred head to Santa Prisca in the hopes of recovering Tim’s father.
Jean-Paul immediately takes things too far as Batman, and his working relationship with Tim becomes strained as the latter attempts to rein in the former. Jean-Paul eventually bans Tim from the Batcave, though the two seem to come to some kind of understanding at the end of the arc, when Jean-Paul refuses to kill Bane; this gives Tim some hope that perhaps Jean-Paul will adjust to the role of Batman after all.
These hopes are quickly dashed in Detective Comics #667-668. Tim receives his driver’s license and sneaks back into the Batcave to retrieve the Redbird, a car that Bruce had promised to give Tim when he got his license. Jean-Paul grows furious when he sees Tim in the Batcave and the two fight. Jean-Paul starts to strangle Tim, but realizes what he’s doing and has a minor breakdown, giving Tim the chance to escape in the Redbird.
Solo
With his father still missing, Bruce out of the country, and an irreparably damaged relationship with the new Batman, Tim strikes out on his own in the first Robin ongoing series. His first notable caper involves the Cluemaster, which necessitates teaming up with the villain’s daughter, Spoiler.
Tim’s relationship with Ariana grows more strained due to his double life, even as he grows closer to Stephanie while the two work the Cluemaster case. While he seems disinterested in Spoiler’s obvious attraction to him, Tim does kiss Stephanie after he believes that she rescued him from certain death at the climax of the Cluemaster arc.
Things become more complicated for the Boy Wonder when he witnesses Jean-Paul, still acting as Batman, allow a villain named Abattoir to fall to his death. Days later, Bruce Wayne and Jack Drake return to Gotham and Bruce–now mostly recovered from his fight with Bane–tells Robin that he plans to retire. Those plans are shelved when Tim reveals just how far Jean-Paul has fallen, spurring Bruce to train with Lady Shiva until so that he can reforge himself fully and retake the mantle of the bat.
So begins the “KnightsEnd” story arc, which runs through Batman, Detective Comics, Shadow of the Bat, Legends of the Dark Knight, Robin, and Catwoman. During this crossover, Tim spends much of his time with Nightwing, keeping track of Jean-Paul and lending Bruce support as needed.
Following this event, Tim serves as Robin for Dick’s turn as Batman during the “Prodigal” story arc. In yet another crossover event, “Troika,” Robin wins a rematch with the KGBeast and saves Harvey Bullock’s life. He also foils another of Cluemaster’s plots, sharing another kiss with Stephanie Brown. Meanwhile, Tim’s father starts dating physical therapist Dana Winters.
Bruce retakes the mantle of Batman, and Tim serves as his sidekick once more. The Ghost Dragons rear their heads again when they kick off a gang war in Gotham’s Chinatown; Lynx betrays King Snake and takes control of the Dragons, while Snake is arrested.
School Days
Tim has various crime-fighting adventures while also attending Gotham Heights Academy, taking on villains like “General” Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong, Maxie Zeus, and others. Ariana’s family’s shop is attacked by mobsters when her uncle refuses to pay into a protection racket; she’s almost forced to move out of Gotham until WayneTech buys up the property the shop was on, allowing her family to move to Gotham Heights, where she begins attending the same school as Tim.
A few attempts are made at tackling contemporary issues like gun violence: Tim’s classmate Karl Ranck is shot and killed in a school hallway, which compels Tim to team up with Spoiler again to get guns off of Gotham’s streets. It’s here that Stephanie affirms her choice to become a true vigilante, rather than only targeting her father.
In the “Contagion” and “Legacy” story arcs that ran through the Bat-family books, Tim is infected with a deadly virus nicknamed ‘the Clench,’ but recovers after suffering severe hallucinations and helps Batman, Nightwing, and Gotham’s other heroes foil Ra’s al Ghul, who had arranged for the virus’s release in the first place.
Robin teams up with Spoiler once more when the Ghost Dragons, still under Lynx’s command, move into her neighborhood. Around this time, Ariana asks TIm to take their relationship further, which he gently declines because he isn’t ready. Ari’s uncle walks in while Ari is still in her lingerie and assumes the worst, and Ari is transferred to an all-girls school.
In Robin #46, Tim fails to save Young El–the school shooter who killed Karl Ranck–from drowning. Forced to watch the young man die as his every attempt at rescue fails, Tim questions if he truly deserves the Robin mantle. He travels back to Paris to complete the training that he never finished in his original miniseries, but gets caught up in a civil war in the nation of Transbelvia. Lady Shiva and King Snake are also involved.
Tim heads back to Gotham just in time for the “Cataclysm” event, where he helps Batman defeat the Ventriloquist. He briefly resumes a relationship with Ari before they mutually decide to break up; he begins dating Stephanie, with the caveat that he can only date her in the Robin persona. Shortly into their relationship, she reveals that she’s pregnant from a prior relationship. Around this time, Tim becomes a founding member of the superhero team Young Justice.
Tim’s family briefly moves to Keystone City during the “No Man’s Land” event, but Tim returns to Gotham to be with Stephanie through her difficult labor. Steph gives the baby up for adoption and Tim’s father decides the family should stay in Gotham after all. Unfortunately, Tim then ventures into the city to assist Batman and goes missing for a month, causing his father to send him to boarding school after “No Man’s Land” ends.
Boarding At Brentwood
Tim begins a new chapter at Brentwood Academy in Robin #74, attempting to maintain his vigilante ways while dealing with the private school’s strict rules and curfew. Bruce sends Alfred along as Tim’s valet, but he’s without the Redbird.
While Tim is at Brentwood Academy, Stephanie’s mother discovers her activities as Spoiler; shortly afterward, Tim goes missing on an adventure and Batman recruits Stephanie to help locate him, revealing Tim’s true identity to Steph in the process. When Tim finds out, he feels deeply betrayed by his mentor. Around the same time, tensions between him and the other members of Young Justice cause him to leave that team. Stressed and upset, he departs on a road trip with a classmate named Danny Temple. In the course of the adventure, Danny learns he has ties to the criminal cult Kobra, which King Snake has joined. King Snake briefly regains his eyesight only to lose it again, and is seemingly killed when Kobra’s base is destroyed.
Tim plays a small but pivotal role in the “Joker’s Last Laugh” story when his apparent death at the hands of a Jokerized Killer Croc sends Nightwing over the edge, causing the older hero to beat Joker to death. In truth, Tim had escaped Croc. Batman swiftly revives the Joker, but Nightwing is still horrified by his own actions.
During the “Batman: Fugitive” storyline, Bruce is accused of murder. Tim and Dick’s friendship is strained when the former refuses to remove Bruce’s name from the list of suspects, despite Dick’s insistence that Bruce would never kill anyone.
Meanwhile, Jack Drake–who has recently married Dana Winters–finds himself in dire financial straits and is forced to pull Tim out of Brentwood Academy. The family moves to a penthouse in Gotham, bringing Robin back into the city proper.
Return to Gotham
Tim’s return to the city coincides with the departure of Chuck Dixon from the book, who had been the sole writer of the first 100 issues of the Robin solo series. Under the pen of his replacement, Jon Lewis, Tim reunites with his old friend Ives and supports Stephanie after her father dies during a mission with the Suicide Squad. At the same time, he returns to Young Justice and remains with the group until that book ends; shortly afterwards, he becomes a member of the new incarnation of the Teen Titans.
Jon Lewis’s run is a fairly short one, with writership passing to Bill Willingham around Robin #120. Under Willingham’s pen, Tim begins attending a new school, where he befriends Bernard Dowd and becomes the object of affection for a girl named Darla Aquista, the daughter of a mob boss. He also makes an enemy of Johnny Warren, a mafia enforcer who works for Darla’s father; Johnny is then possessed by a mysterious artifact and redubs himself Johnny Warlock.
In Robin #124, Jack Drake discovers that his son is Robin, leading Tim to quit the position in the following issue. Shortly thereafter, Stephanie sees Darla kissing Tim and assumes he’s cheating on her; in a fit of anger, she approaches Batman and asks to be the new Robin. Bruce accepts, but her tenure is short-lived; she serves as Robin for only three issues before she’s fired for disobeying orders.
This leads into the massive “War Games” crossover, in which an enormous gang war breaks out across Gotham. During the event, Tim takes up the Robin mantle again, which his father begrudgingly accepts. Stephanie and Darla Aquista are both killed before “War Games” ends, while at the same time, Jack Drake is murdered by Captain Boomerang in the pages of Identity Crisis.
All of this also coincides with an arc in Teen Titans #17-19 in which Tim meets a future version of himself who is a gun-toting, villain-killing version of Batman.
Dark Days
Following Jack’s death, Dana has a mental breakdown and is moved to a mental health facility in Bludhaven. Tim relocates there as well and begins working solo as Robin, protecting the city while Nightwing is absent. Cassandra Cain also moves to Bludhaven, allowing the two to work together on occasion.
Because of Dana’s condition, Bruce offers to adopt Tim; however, Jack Drake’s will reading reveals that, in the event of Jack’s death, Tim is to be left in the care of his uncle Edward Drake. Batman quickly deduces that “Uncle Eddie” doesn’t really exist: Tim had forged his father’s will and hired an actor to portray his uncle, allowing Tim to continue living in Bludhaven on his own. All of this is rendered pointless when Bludhaven is destroyed in the leadup to Infinite Crisis, an event which results in the death of Tim’s best friend, Superboy. It’s unclear whether “Eddie Drake” or Dana survive the destruction, but neither are mentioned again.
Following the one-year time-skip after Infinite Crisis, Tim has changed his costume to be predominantly red and black in honor of Superboy. He has also moved back to Wayne manor and been officially adopted by Bruce Wayne. Adam Beechen takes over the title and starts to get Tim back to a more familiar status quo, fighting criminals in Gotham while dealing with high school problems, including a new relationship with a girl named Zoanne Wilkins that doesn’t last long. Meanwhile, in the pages of Teen Titans, it is revealed that Tim is trying to clone a new Superboy; he has an awkward attempt at a relationship with teammate Wonder Girl, and once more comes into contact with his evil future self.
The next big shakeup in Tim’s life comes in the form of Damian Wayne. Tim and Damian immediately clash, with the latter attempting to murder the former to take his place as Robin; even after Damian’s bloodlust is tempered, the two remain at odds.
Around this time, Stephanie Brown is revealed to be alive again, having faked her death in “War Games.” This retcon happens courtesy of Chuck Dixon, who returns to the book for a short arc re-establishing Steph as a part of the Bat-Family and bringing back Tim’s old friend Ives, now revealed to have cancer. After Dixon’s arc ends, Fabian Nicieza takes over the book.
Steph and Tim’s reunion sours when Stephanie secretly hires a group of villains to fight Robin in a misguided attempt to make him a more efficient hero–something a now-missing Batman had asked her to do before his disappearance. One of the villains is Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong, now a few years older and with delusions of becoming Tim’s personal nemesis. To that end, Armstrong retrieves the Red Robin costume that Jason Todd had once worn and uses it to become a masked villain. Tim manages to defeat Ulysses, but Armstrong’s younger siblings are accidentally killed by a bomb during the confrontation. Angrier than ever at Tim, Ulysses takes on the mantle of Anarky, having put the former Anarky–Lonnie Machin–in a coma.
Things only get worse for Tim when Dick Grayson once more assumes the role of Batman and gives the mantle of Robin to Damian Wayne. Tim, frustrated to have the title of Robin stripped away and ostracized from the Bat-Family by his belief that Bruce Wayne is not dead (as most people believe following the events of Final Crisis), adopts the Red Robin mantle and leaves Gotham. This marks the end of the Robin solo series and the beginning of Red Robin, written by Christopher Yost.
While searching for proof that Bruce Wayne is alive, but somehow displaced in time, Tim runs afoul of a group of killers called the Council of Spiders. He finds an unlikely ally in Ra’s al Ghul, who also opposes the Spiders and supports Tim’s efforts at finding Bruce. Ra’s gives Tim a leadership position in the League of Assassins, which the young hero uses to incapacitate the Spiders before turning on Ra’s and destroying the League’s information systems and several of their bases. Ra’s swears revenge and heads to Gotham to destroy Batman’s legacy.
Tim returns to the city as well, and together with the Teen Titans and Bat-Family, prevents Ra’s plans from succeeding. He remains in Gotham (now under the pen of Nicieza once more), working with Dick and Damian, for the remainder of the series.
The New 52
Following Flashpoint, the DC universe is rebooted, with many characters receiving drastically altered backstories–Tim included. This new version of the character was an Olympic-level athlete who came from a poor family. More importantly, he never actually discovered Batman’s identity on his own; he attempted to, but only managed to find a false identity that Batman had deliberately planted as a test of sorts. Following a rejection from Batman, Tim began stealing money from supervillains and redistributing it to the poor, ultimately stealing a large sum from the Penguin. This turned Tim’s family into a target; Batman managed to save them from Penguin’s goons, but they were forced into witness protection. Bruce adopted Tim at the request of Tim’s parents, who didn’t want him to lead the life of quiet anonymity they would be forced into.
Notably, this version of Tim was never Robin, electing instead to take the name Red Robin immediately; he felt that using the late Jason Todd’s codename would be in bad taste.
All of this has already happened by the time the New 52 begins, and we are introduced to Tim in the pages of Scott Lobdell’s Teen Titans. In this universe, Tim is the founder of the first iteration of the team, creating it as a way to protect young metahumans from a predatory organization called N.O.W.H.E.R.E. For several years, Tim’s main role in the new DC universe is to lead the Titans and pop up in occasional Bat-Family crossovers, never having a very substantial role.
Rebirth
DC Rebirth brought the character back to the forefront thanks to his key role in James Tynion IV’s Detective Comics. Here, he works closely with Batman to establish a new base of operations called the Belfry and assembles various members of the Bat-Family into a team he dubs the Gotham Knights.
The Knights are quickly targeted by the Colony, a paramilitary group inspired by Batman, but using lethal force. The head of the Colony’s weapons development is none other than Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong, making his debut in the post-Flashpoint timeline. Armstrong and the Colony’s leader, Jacob Kane, activate an army of drones to wipe out suspected members of the League of Shadows in Gotham, not caring that hundreds of innocents will die in the crossfire; Tim hacks the drones so that he will become their primary target instead. While he manages to destroy a large number of drones by himself, he is seemingly killed when a second wave arrives.
In reality, he is transported to a strange prison by the mysterious Mr. Oz. Flashbacks during his imprisonment re-establish his classic origin story, apparently re-canonized by the Rebirth event. Tim hacks his way out of his cell and finds a fellow prisoner: himself. Specifically, the evil future self from the “Titans of Tomorrow” storyline in the pre-Flashpoint run of Teen Titans. The two escape together, but come to blows when future Tim tries to kill Batwoman in order to change his timeline. He is ultimately sent back to his own time, but not before Ulysses Hadrian Armstrong has a chance to learn about the dark future from data stored in future Tim’s suit.
Armstrong uses that information to hack into Batman’s secret Brother Eye project. Using its One Man Army Corps program, Armstrong is able to brainwash Tim into assuming his dark future persona; however, he’s saved by the intervention of Stephanie Brown. Ultimately, Tim decides to leave Gotham with Stephanie to explore the mysteries of different universes and timelines.
To that end, Tim contacts Zatanna in the pages of Brian Michael Bendis and David Walker’s Young Justice. Zatanna restores Tim’s memories of the pre-Flashpoint universe (or, at least, of the original Young Justice team). He and Spoiler split up so that she can focus on taking down her father’s criminal empire while Tim investigates his new memories.
Tim is ultimately lost in the multiverse for a time, meeting an evil version of himself who goes by Drake–a name Tim adopts for a while. Returning to his home universe, Tim reunites with Stephanie, though several months later–in the pages of Batman: Urban Legends–it’s revealed that the pair have broken up again. This opens the door for Tim to explore his sexuality by starting a relationship with his old high school friend, Bernard Dowd.
It Came From Off-Panel! 