Detective Comics: Tim Drake Is A Futurist

The Detective Comics team is having a much harder time without their optimist, Tim Drake

Tim Drake aka Red Robin, is missing and presumed dead by Batman and the rest of the Detective Comics time. You’d presume Tim was dead too if the last time you saw him he was swarmed by attack drones with no way out. But Tim was saved at the last second by Mr. Oz, only to be held prisoner. So he’s still effectively dead as far as most of the Bat-family is concerned.

Now the team is facing a new enemy that is making Batman face the consequences of his actions, The Victim Syndicate. Detective Comics writer James Tynion IV explains what the concept of the Victim Syndicate is, and why Tim Drake above all would’ve been able to rally the team against them:

"Tim is such an optimist. He’s a futurist. He sees the future in everything. The rest of the characters are formed from so much darkness that ripping out the optimistic heart of the team and attacking them with a really substantial concept is really difficult to counter.It’s not just that Batman creates his villains, it’s that Batman’s battles with his villains create victims all over the city, that the simple act of Batman being Batman just causes damage that wouldn’t happen otherwise in Gotham.With that idea, how do you keep fighting? When you know that’s true.I can sort of imagine the kind of conversation that Tim Drake would have with each of these characters, in the way that he had the kind of build-it-up moment with Kate Kane in the first arc. She had lost all hope; her father had just betrayed her and the whole team; and Batman had been captured and all that. And Tim was able to say the exact right thing to get the team rallied together.So I wanted to create a moment where everything is destabilized, and then I wanted to destabilize it further and see what happens."

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That’s not the only upheaval the Detective Comics team is facing. Tynion IV has described the team as fluid, which will lead into Batwoman getting her own series and Azrael joining the team to name just a few changes. Read the full interview over at Newsarama and pick up the latest issue of Detective Comics!