Tim Drake is Finally Confirmed To Be DC’s Best Robin

Warning! Spoilers for Nightwing #80!

Nightwing might have had a blast donning the red, green and yellow as Batman’s original sidekick, Robin, but he just admitted who the best hero to have ever worn the “R” symbol really is…and it isn’t him. That honor goes to the Bat-Family tech expert extraordinaire, the third Robin in the long line of individuals to take a crack at the mantle and fan favorite character from the 1990s, Tim Drake! Sorry, Damian Wayne, but Nightwing just isn’t having any of your shenanigans today.

Revealed in the pages of the Infinite Frontier initiative’s Nightwing #80 by Tom King and Bruno Redondo, Nightwing is stuck in a situation that sees him needing to find a missing kid whom he personally feels responsible for. Wanting Tim’s specific help not for his skills as a vigilante but simply because of his knack for going undercover (being much younger than Dick also helps in this specific situation), Nightwing asks Tim to help him gather information by blending into a tent city of homeless kids to hopefully find some leads as to what exactly happened to this missing person.

Bringing along Nightwing’s new puppy sidekick to seem more approachable, Tim infiltrates the homeless area and immediately proves his worth. But it’s just before this act of Bat-Family assistance that Nightwing admits that Tim is indeed the best Robin of them all, and is a moment long coming for a character that often gets the short end of the bo staff compared to his other bat-brothers.

While talking to Barbara Gordon aka Oracle about what he needs to continue his mission in finding this missing youth, Nightwing tells her that he’s going to contact “my brother” for help. Cutting to a panel of Tim sitting crouched on a building ledge high above Gotham, Nightwing’s inner thoughts reveal what fans have always known. Thinking, “Tim Drake. Thought of by many as the best Robin. I totally get it,” Nightwing nonchalantly admits that Tim is hands down the best Robin, and that he too agrees with this obvious line of thought.

Having premiered in 1989 after Batman had suffered the loss of the second Robin, Jason Todd, as well as the sting of Dick Grayson making his transition into the role of Nightwing, Tim held onto the Robin role for quite some time before Batman’s biological son, Damian Wayne, took over the job. Floating around the DC universe for what seemed like an eternity waiting to find his purpose now that he wasn’t the “main” Robin, Tim carried on for a bit by taking up new codenames like Red Robin and Drake to try and find his place in a city, and for that matter, a world that seemed to have wrongfully passed him by.

But now, with the confirmation by the original Robin himself that Tim is the best Boy Wonder of them all, Nightwing has given Tim the credit he’s always deserved from the beginning. And while Tim might still be metaphorically battling it out with Damian for who the “real” Robin currently is in DC Comics, Tim Drake will go down in bat-history as the one Robin who can truly lay claim as being the best version of a sidekick that Batman just can’t do without.

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