Ahead of next week's San Diego Comic-Con, DC Comics has announced plans for a new 12-issue comic book series, Batman and Robin: Year One.
It will reunite Daredevil creative team Mark Waid (Kingdom Come) and Chris Samnee (Ultimate Comics Spider-Man) for an adventure which kicks off on October 16 when the first issue arrives in comic book stores.
In Batman and Robin: Year One, while Bruce Wayne adjusts to the realities of adopting orphan Dick Grayson, a mysterious new crime boss called the General has come to Gotham to claim the city by disrupting and destroying its other mobs. But what is his connection to Two-Face?
Batman and his new sidekick, Robin, are out for answers, but it’ll take everything they have to navigate both sides of their relationship as father and son and dynamic duo, with Dick Grayson’s present and future hanging in the balance.
"While Batman and Robin are the stars of this tale and get most of the panel time, at its heart, this isn’t a Batman/Robin story, it’s a Bruce/Dick story," Waid said today. "It takes place only a month or two after Bruce adopted Dick, and it’s sinking in for Bruce that he has no idea how to be a father to a kid that age."
"He has no role model - his own father was long dead by the time he was Dick’s age. Nothing he’s ever done has prepared him for this, and Alfred - wise as he is - doesn’t have much experience here either."
Samnee adds, "Dick is everything Bruce is not - impetuous, flamboyant, reckless. But he’s also precise; he can stick a landing. He’ll take orders when they make sense to him, but he’s keen to improvise, testing his role within the Dynamic Duo. The first pages you’ll see will showcase how they’ll be acting, and reacting, as they adventure out into Gotham City on patrol together. We’re so excited for this story to finally be told."
Batman and Robin: Year One #1, co-plotted by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, written by Mark Waid, art and main cover by Chris Samnee, with colors by Matheus Lopes and lettering by Clayton Cowles, will have variant covers by Mikel Janín, Matteo Scalera, Karl Kerschl, and Lee Weeks.
It's interesting that DC Comics is choosing to revisit the Dynamic Duo now, particularly with The Brave and the Bold on the horizon (the DCU movie will, in contrast, focus on Bruce Wayne and his son Damian).
Take a first look at Batman and Robin: Year One below.