(Spoiler after the jump, so don’t click if you haven’t read the issue yet!)

…the person who just stuck a very sharp chunk of metal a few inches into the torso of current Robin Tim Drake (dressed as Batman above, bleeding profusely) wasn’t former Robin Jason Todd (also dressed like Batman, walking away saying, “Just one more to go”), who was resurrected via dubious agency after having been dead himself for 16 years real time.

That’s the problem with these sorts of resurrections. A problem which is perhaps much worse when the characters aren’t super-people and the books the resurrections occur in are more realistic, street-level ones like those of Batman franchise than, say, The Flash or Superman, where the god-like super-being protagonists exist in a milieu full of constant comic book science, time travel and magic.

Certainly every reader knows that if a massively unpopular character who suffered an equivocal here’s-the-body, there’s-the-funeral death like Jason Todd can be brought back to life, there’s no reason to worry about the fate of his more popular successor. Even if you were worried Tim Drake was going to die due to the grievous, mortal wound he receives at the end of this issue, you would be comforted by the knowledge that someone will be bringing him back to life eventually, be it next fall or in 16 years or in 23 years.

Not that DC really wants you to think that they were really going to ahead and kill of Tim Drake in this series. I mean, this week’s DC Nation column ran a cover for a book called Red Robin featuring two people dressed in Robin costumes, and we know there’s a third Robin showing up in the upcoming Grant Morrison-written Batman and Robin title. Surely one of them has gotta be Tim Drake. Still, it would be kind of nice if they at least pretended things like this were meant to be suspenseful, wouldn’t it?

By the way, what’s up with Tim’s physique in that picture above? For a sixteen-year-old kid, he’s one massive dude. He’s going to look like the Incredible Hulk if he hits another growth spurt before graduation.

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