I struggled with Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s original Robin & Batman. Ultimately I felt Lemire didn’t offer many new ideas about the early days of the Dynamic Duo, but at the same time introduced some problems to the partnership that the narrative never resolved. Aside from spotlighting two popular creators, I wasn’t sure what Robin & Batman brought to the table among a glut of other Batman books and even Batman and Robin origin stories.

I knew, then, that Lemire and Nguyen’s follow-up, Robin & Batman: Jason Todd, would get extra scrutiny from me. When I might otherwise know better than to pick up the sequel to a book I didn’t like, that the original Robin & Batman got a sequel at all surprised me. I’m also a sucker for stories of “rebellious” Jason Todd’s early days, given that period is largely apocryphal in the split between “good” Jason pre-Crisis and “bad” Jason post-Crisis, swiftly killed off.

My fervent hope was that Jason Todd would distinguish itself as the second part of a trilogy, or at least speak to some of the original Robin & Batman’s failings. In that way, it could redeem Robin & Batman, revealing those quibbles not as failings but as ellipses, always meant to be resolved later on. The answer is that Jason Todd does, a little, but not so overtly as to fully convince me there’s a plan in place. If there’s a third book, probably I should learn my lesson, but c’mon, like I’d pass up Jeff Lemire exploring the early days of Tim Drake?

[Review contains spoilers]

Obviously mainstream superhero comics trade in familiar character traits; Batman’s going to be the “dark knight,” Superman’s going to be optimistic, and so on. It is not then wholly incorrect that Lemire’s Robin books should go about how you would expect; Dick Grayson resolves in the end to be the light in Batman’s darkness, while Jason decides to embrace his own darkness, Batman’s efforts to redeem him notwithstanding. The opposite would be confusing, as if Lemire had his two Robins backward, but that each story’s resolution is to confirm the status quo equally seems reductive.

To an extent in each of these books I’m more concerned with Lemire’s Batman, and his Alfred, than with his Robin. The Robins, again, are foregone conclusions, starting and ending in Lemire’s book where they historically need to be. With Batman and Alfred is where Lemire has more leeway; in the first Robin & Batman, Bruce seemed to be training Dick to be more mercenary, for instance infiltrating the Teen Titans as a spy, and Bruce downplayed even the need for Dick to go to school, much to Alfred’s strident dismay. We saw the resolution of that at the end of Robin in Dick making school friends and rejoining the Titans as an equal, though that closed the arc only for Dick, not for Bruce.

So, again, I was interested to see where Lemire would pick up, given the last scene of Alfred in Robin was his yelling at Bruce about Dick’s schooling. There’s not an overt reference to that in Jason — for better or worse, the events of the books are independent of one another — but in Jason we see Batman (with yellow oval) taking a decidedly more nurturing tact, telling Jason that he doesn’t expect Jason to be perfect because he’s “still learning.” At another point, Jason complains to Dick, now Nightwing, that Batman seems to have gone soft, the presence of Robins having mellowed him too much. It’s not explicit, but between the books we can see the progression of hard-nosed Batman with a laughing Robin to a more familial Batman with a Robin shifted to the other end of the spectrum.

If by chance we’re looking at a trilogy, then we might be able to predict the next part, following as it does the trajectory of the comics themselves. Call Jason Todd this series' “Empire Strikes Back” — Batman at the beginning has rather grown from his foibles in the first book, but the story ends with a dark Robin whom we know will be killed in the intervening pages. Inevitably, we know for sure, that will drive Batman back into his original darkness, until third Robin Tim Drake comes along to show Batman why there must always be a Robin and to reinforce those lessons from the first book. I’d read it, to be sure — and Tim’s costume needs less updating than Nguyen provides to Dick and Jason — but again there’s not really much surprise here.

A big driver of Lemire’s Jason is the inclusion of the Wraith, a “villains deserve to die”-type vigilante that takes Jason under his wing. The brief mystery of the Wraith’s identity and my own confusion as to whether this character was Lemire’s take on Elliot Caldwell kept me interested more than I might have been otherwise — though the Wraith’s identity isn’t much of a mystery, and I realized later I was thinking of Wrath, not Wraith. As such, even this unexpected turn comes to naught, and the story is still not much different than what we’ve seen before, Nobody Morgan Ducard and Robin Damian Wayne and on and on.

And much like Robin & Batman, I finished the book not quite feeling like Lemire had finished his thought. At the end of Robin & Batman, as mentioned, Alfred yells at Bruce and then disappears from the story. Here, Alfred admits to Bruce that he felt he had trouble connecting to Jason and at some point “I stopped trying.” Bruce and Jason reconcile, but Alfred once again disappears from the story. The consistency of it all gives me hope that this is intentional, but as with the first book, Lemire sets this up as a story about the relationship among three members of Wayne manor but then appears to forget that by the end.

At one point in Robin & Batman: Jason Todd, Jason dreams of finding his mother after she overdosed, except she transforms into the visage of the Red Hood; in another of the book’s trademark quick hit panels, Dustin Nguyen draws an image of a bloody crowbar. Which is to say, Jeff Lemire’s Jason is highly self-aware, a paean to those who might come to Jason as fans of Death in the Family. I’m not sure how well that serves the book; the Red Hood reference, for instance, is completely unexplained, something we only understand by virtue of exterior elements, and even then it never made much sense. If there’s a third time in this series, maybe that will be the charm; Lemire’s Robin & Batman remains exactly what you’d expect, but unfortunately from my perspective, nothing more.

[Includes original and variant covers, penciled and colored pages]