2.0
This book is crap, because of TimBer
What does Tim, see in him?
It’s not because Bernard’s a guy.
I will take anyone else.
Pleeeaaasssee (Please go away), Just make him ple-ease go away (timber), Plleeeaaaaseee (timber)
Wooooah (timber), anyone else (please), wooooah (this book is crap)
Alright one of the first things we see is Rossmo drawing Nightwing……shudders. This comics starts in midst of the search for Bernard and Dick tries to calm Tim down, and Tim slaps his hand away. Now, it’s no secret I’m no fan of Bernard but the way Tim acts here is character regression. He has gone through helping saving people in danger several times, loved ones have been kidnapped before, including Bernard! Tim did show plenty of concern in the past for those put in danger because of him but he always maintained a cool demeanor while on the inside he was filled with self-doubt and guilt. This Tim is a whiny little bitch complaining about everything. Tim, you have saved Bernard before, you’ve saved other from far more dangerous circumstances, you’re more confident than this!
Then Dick starts talking to Tim how it’s always difficult starting a new phase in life…Tim knows this…he’s done it before! Several times in fact. Tim’s keeps doubting himself and how he has “imposter syndrome” about being Robin. My god, he grew past that self-doubt YEARS AGO, this isn’t pushing Tim forward it’s just bringing him backwards.
Then he finds Bernard and someone sneaks up on him again. So much for being trained by Batman, considering how often people keep sneaking up on him.
But then something happens…Tim wakes up and he looks…different. gasp A new artist, that doesn’t draw Tim like a 14 year old with a thumb for a head! Someone splashed some water on his face as he hangs upside down chained up and bruised. And the reveal…GASP THE VILLAIN’S BERNARD!!!
Oh my god! This is SO interesting!! It changes the whole dynamic between them. It make Tim question even more while he’s in the confusing time of his life! Bernard actually has a personality, and is starting to become compelling! And his godawful portrayal of a queer character was all a facade to hide his true intentions. Aaaaaaaannnnnnddd it’s not actually him….it’s an illusion caused by the real villain…James, Tim’s landlord…….
ARE YOU F@#KING KIDDING ME?!?!?!?! YOU HAD SOMETHING GREAT THERE, BUT INSTEAD YOU GIVE US THIS BORING PREDICTBLE PLOT?!?! That means the portrayal of Bernard in all of the previous issues was all genuine. Y’know it’s sad that I have far better and far more nuanced portrayals of queer characters in “The Golden Girls” a sitcom FROM THE 80’S than a comic made in 2023!
Okay…where was I…oh yeah. So while the art is a massive improvement, the writing still sucks. This guy is obsessed with being Tim’s nemesis and throwing all these illusions at Tim. And Tim escapes them by literally throwing up on one of them…..honestly kind of how I feel about this book most of the time.
Then the bad guy reveals his name as “Moriarty”…..wow….how original. You had a decent concept going on here, but leaning into the obsession with detective novels is bringing this down. You’re trying to push this drag Queen version of one of the greatest literary antagonists of all time, and want him to be Tim’s new nemesis. Hate to break it to you Morty, but Tim’s already got The General, Anarky, King Snake, Lynx, The Council of Spiders, Scarab, Jaeager, Johnny Warlock, and plenty of other villains who have more of a grudge with Tim than you.
But then at the final page Rossmo returns to draw Bernard bound up and gaged in chains, like the “perfect damsel” he is. This is one of the most frustrating issues so far….and it is sadly also the best issue so far. more
1.0
Just when I thought Fitzmartin had finally left all those old detective stories alone, we're greeted with the most uninspired villain touting himself as worthy of comparison to the Joker. To be fair, this current version of Tim Drake is by no means giving Batman a run for his money at this rate either. Moriarty. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to take this seriously when nothing about this run has given us anything on par with Sherlock Holmes. This reads as a bad joke, one in which, yet again, Fitzmartin seems to think herself clever with it while once more burying any potential she had with this story in its failed detective aspects. Tim says he would have known about Bernard if he was the villain because the clues would have been right there for him. He supposedly knows Bernard that well. And yet, Tim, who is usually a few steps ahead (granted this doesn't mean he's always at the right place at the right time nor has it made him infallible), who is so quick to pick up on elements in his environments and how to make use of them, could not see what was glaringly obvious in his own boat and the marina he inhabits. He was utterly clueless until the very end.
I would still like to know why James could just waltz onto Tim's boat. Does James actually own it, and like most apartment landlords, has the key and access to it 24/7 should he need it? Or does Tim own the boat and is simply renting out his space at the marina, which is usually the more common thing? I'm still baffled as to why Tim is running his Robin game out of this boat when so many people seem to wander in and out of it. It is in no way secure, and Tim has made absolutely no efforts to secure it either. Why didn't he have some sort of surveillance on the boat to know when it had been accessed? Sure, maybe I'd buy that if he's just renting the boat (but why would he ever rent something so utterly dilapidated then and impossible to secure?) and didn't want to tamper with it, but he'd tamper with hotel rooms so I don't see why a rented boat would make him less inclined for this. Again, this feels like something overlooked purely for the sake of making this plot point work instead of actually crafting a story that fit someone like Tim Drake and his approach. Especially if he knew about these drones watching him, knew anyone could be looking into his windows, see his gear which he seems to forget about, all his clues, which were meant for Robin and not Tim Drake, the civilian. If he wasn't already chasing James as a lead and setting him up, which clearly he wasn't, why didn't he take any security measures?
Which again also makes me ask why he wasn't doing something to track Bernard if he was that concerned about this whole stalker thing and the murders at the marina. The way Fitzmartin writes Bernard the guy would forgive Tim for murder himself, so I don't see how Tim tracking him and apologizing later if found out wouldn't elicit the same response. It felt like a cheap set-up for Tim to angst over his "leaving" Bernard alone and "making it his fault." I get it, things like this happen, but the story doesn't lend itself well to this sort of melodrama, which seems better placed in the CW than what should be a comic of Tim Drake's caliber. Tim can be insecure. He does make miscalculations and mistakes. He is not infallible. However, this comes off more as a whiny teenager than someone who understands the stakes and has understood them for a good portion of his teen -college years (and what is Tim now because I swear he's supposed to be college-aged/early twenties even though so little of her writing between this comic and Dark Crisis:YJ reads like he is). It felt like watching a Tim Drake meltdown rolling into a temper tantrum with Dick, and instead of focusing and trying to solve anything, he's spending his time feeling sorry for himself and his inability to do anything while everyone around him does the work and tries to help. As others have pointed out, his reactions here feel like a complete regression of Tim's character instead of building on the work he did for himself as a character previously. It's painful to watch, and once more, I'm left wondering if this isn't Fitzmartin trying to build her idea of Tim Drake rather than utilizing the character most have known because it's starting to read a lot like someone rewinding a tape just to record over it.
As for the "mystery" itself, we still have no idea how these creations (I'm assuming we're dealing with some sort of golem/homunculus given the clay and salts and alchemy here) are being made other than the clues given that Moriarty is into alchemy on some level at least. Again, why didn't Tim notice any of this before when he clearly had broken disc material to study from his previous encounters, or is there something about these discs that just POOF! once broken, leaving absolutely no trace of them for Tim to work with? It is still never explained how these things have been both intangible and tangible, sometimes to the tune of they can damage things, implying they are physical, and yet no one can hit them, and other times to the song of they're completely corporeal and Tim can climb into their guts. Speaking of, was there no residue at all on Tim for him to study from his Robin uniform to give him some sort of clue about their nature? He makes this claim of them being salt, was there nothing at all from any of his previous fights to take traces from?
And Tim is aware that acid isn't the only thing that dissolves salt, right? He fell into water. Salts can be dissolved/transformed by any number of things, acidic or basic, including water, but depending on the composition of each component and the environment, you might make some unintended/volatile side products, which makes me question him just throwing any random acidic thing on these salt-based creatures. What sort of salt was used? Table salt? If so, why not utilize all the water around you to break them up? And what happened to just breaking the discs since that also seemed to work so well? I still struggle to understand how Tim seems so utterly stupid here. I mean the boy pukes on a shark monster, and I'm assuming he had to have eaten recently because if you have nothing on your stomach you will not puke up any sort of potent volume, certainly not the degree to which you'd need to dissolve a shark. So, did he take a midnight snack break with Dick out there? Most of the contents from your stomach should be passed into the rest of your gut within two hours, so again, where did all that come from if Tim has been searching all this time? Otherwise, he should have been dry heaving at best with that.
(And to imply that Batman taught him how to puke on command seems. . .honestly, most people know how to make themselves puke, it's not some super secret Bat thing. Unless that's Tim referring to Bruce teaching him to think on his feet, in which case, I think Bruce may have some very serious questions about this whole fight. Also I'd just like to state that I'm not a fan of how Fitzmartin has thrown the Batfam under the bus before with Tim's comments and then contradicts them with things like this later on. One minute they're an inconvenience to who he wants to be and then the next they're vital parts of his history that he loves/respects. Yes, these things can co-exist but she writes it in such a jarring way it's like she has no idea at all who her version of Tim Drake actually is.)
Don't even ask me how he escaped his quartering incident because it makes no sense. If these things were that easy to escape from then why were all our heroes having such issues with them across their various incarnations?
And Moriarty. Given how Tim is being written, as quite frankly the dumbest iteration of Tim Drake out there, then, yeah, this villain fits him. That his sole purpose is to be a villain simply because being a goon wasn't enough, and yet having no actual aspirations for his villainy other than to be a villain is quite frankly idiotic. He's got no drive. Just another villain who wants to exist because a hero exists, and it honestly gives absolutely no stakes to the greater world for Tim Drake. Especially given who Moriarty was in the original work and how he went about things and why. There doesn't seem to be some big agenda here, just someone who wants to make Tim's life miserable (and maybe that's the point, someone to make Tim's self-indulgent angst valid), but if that's not the shoddiest bit of villainy there is. Not even a personal connection here to really play on. I mean at least Taylor's Heartless villain had a better build-up and story behind it. And the original Moriarty is so far above this sort of play it's almost painful to watch Fitzmartin use his name in this. The man would be rolling in his grave seeing someone take his name and yet act like this. Everything in this story reads as a caricature honestly. From Tim himself to this new villain of ours.
Finally, Bernard certainly lives up to Fitzmartin's explanation that he's there to be a damsel in distress. It's borderline insulting at this point. (Don't think it escaped me either that we got both Tim and Bernard "bound and gagged" in this issue as well, all things she claimed spoke to their clear unspoken attraction back in their previous run together.) I'm tired of the typical damsel in distress plots. Bernard's already played it out once before, and now we have it again. Is this honestly all he's good for? To show us how incapable Tim Drake is as a detective and how all of Bernard's worth amounts to his ability to be kidnapped and rescued? Do we really need another "princess in the dragon's tower?" Because there's nothing new or genuine being told here with it. It's cliche. It's tired. And no, it's not "reclaiming" or "subverting" anything here. It's just poor storytelling. more
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