Batman and Robin Vol. 2: Growing Pains' maudlin is a bit less maudlin than the first volume in this series, and that’s an improvement in my book. Not that I’m wholly satisfied, but Joshua Williamson seasons this volume with enough fun stuff as to make the drawbacks easier to take.

This is Williamson’s final volume, anyway, with Phillip Kennedy Johnson coming on next time. I’m wary, given Johnson brought us the insufferable Super-Twins, but also hopeful that now that Williamson’s gone deep into shoring up Robin Damian Wayne’s emotional well-being, maybe that won’t nearly have to be such a focus for Johnson.

[Review contains spoilers]

Williamson’s Man-Bat story has been going on for about 10 issues now, beginning in Batman and Robin Vol. 1: Father and Son, though he complicates it here with the arrival of Damian’s Lazarus Island girlfriend Flatline. I’m still iffy on Damian mooning over a peer at all (though I did like Damian with Djinn, come to think of it), but I’ll admit Williamson gets a few things right — Batman’s halting advice about not canoodling with criminals, the double-double cross that I didn’t see coming either time. I’ve no idea why no one wonders at the preternaturally pale Flatline attending Damian’s school and starting a food fight, but yes, hijinks are being had and they are fun.

Father and Son questioned whether Damian’s high school principal might be both one of his former League of Assassins tutors and also Man-Bat’s mystery assistant “Shush”; no, as it turns out, the principal is only the tutor Sister Harsh, and his biology teacher is Shush. If that’s still a hardy coincidence, I will say I’d forgotten about the biology teacher by the time of the reveal, so Williamson got me on that one. Neither series artist Simone Di Meo nor Nikola Cizmesija do particularly well depicting characters' ages, such that I mostly thought Shush, as a junior Hush, was closer to Damian’s age (nor do the two artists’ Man-Bats match very well). At one point Shush tells Batman, “I’m nobody,” and I was hopeful that was a nod to Damian’s ally Nobody; it was not, but happily Nobody (from Patrick Gleason’s Robin: Son of Batman) shows up later on.

Williamson wraps up with a three-parter set on Dinosaur Island, where Batman and Robin find Bane, who murdered Alfred Pennyworth in front of Damian in Tom King’s City of Bane. It was unusually cruel for Bane (the flashback here is still upsetting), arguably uncharacteristic, when so many others have written the character as an anti-hero in the 30 years since “Knightfall.”

Williamson, to his credit, presents Bane more measured; here we have a Bane trying to live in peace, who is initially unrepentant but ultimately — seeing himself in Damian or seeing his own lack of family in the Waynes' relationship — agrees to be taken in and face justice. Notably Williamson did equally well with a nuanced Bane and the same question of Alfred’s death in the Batman: One Bad Day: Bane special. Artist Juan Ferreyra is both excellent here and often resembles the work of Williamson’s Bane collaborator Howard Porter.

There is not much treacle to the close of Williamson’s Man-Bat story, but there is in the Bane story. I thought it was aptly touching when Bruce sympathizes with Damian coming down from an accidental Venom high, because indeed Bruce has been there. But Batman’s dialogue — “I’m here. I’m always here, but …,” taking off his cowl, “as your father” — was a bit much. It’s 20 years now that Batman and Robin have been father and son, and yes, they’ve been through some rough patches lately, but this title’s insistence on always coming back to their kinship (to the exclusion, it sometimes seems, of Bruce’s non-biological sons before this) has long since grown predictable, among the reasons I hope Johnson finds another motif for the title.

Then there is the story’s finale, when Damian is prompted by the school counselor to consider who he himself is, and we see Damian’s drawing of his extended family, captioned with “I am … loved.” Not to be hard-hearted, it’s great that after 20 years Damian finally feels his family’s love for him. I’m interested though, again, to see what Johnson does after Williamson put such a fine point on it. If I might bring up old grudges, 20 years ago Tim Drake was seemingly the forever Robin, and the only reason he bore replacing by Damian was that Damian was such a different, dark Robin than we’d ever seen before. If we smooth off all of Damian’s rough edges such that he’s just a teenage Robin the same as the ones who came before, I’m not sure what the point of all of it was.

Joshua Williamson introduced Flatline in his Infinite Frontier Robin series, and here he references her encounter with Ra’s al Ghul (or … his ghost?) in Lazarus Planet. Clearly there’s a story to be told (Ra’s has elsewhere been shown to be still alive!), and I’m equally curious whether Batman and Robin Vol. 2: Growing Pains will be the end for Williamson and Damian Wayne or if there’s plans to follow up on all this someday. I am sure Damian’s growth here pleases someone, and good for them. It’s a happy ending, but where do you go from there?

[Includes original and variant covers]