'We Are Robin' stars a movement of kid heroes

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Instead of just one Robin, DC Comics is unleashing a whole flock of them on Gotham City this summer.

What used to be the mantle of Batman's teenage sidekick is now worn by many diverse youngsters clad in the familiar "R" in We Are Robin, a new series debuting June 24 from writer Lee Bermejo (Batman: Noel) and artists Rob Haynes and Khary Randolph.

Part of a large crop of new comic books debuting after the Convergence event series, We Are Robin focuses on Duke Thomas, an African-American kid who's played an important role recently in the main Batman series, as he's indoctrinated into this new Robin movement to protect and serve Gotham.

When the series opens, it really doesn't have an identity, Bermejo says, but the group knows its mission statement. "It's one thing to put a hashtag on your Twitter account as a teenager and feel like you're part of something. It's a whole other thing when the (stuff) hits the fan and you have to stand up for what you believe in."

Duke is the reader's way into this street-smart world — he's had interactions with the Dark Knight before so he isn't a complete rookie — and Bermejo is focusing on him and other newbies rather than the folks who've been Robin previously such as Tim Drake, Jason Todd, Stephanie Brown, Dick Grayson and most recently Damian Wayne, Batman's son.

"I'm not going to rule anything out at this point," Bermejo says, "but what I'm trying to with this series is not address so much the Robins that have come before but the new generation of teenagers out there, really from various backgrounds."

We Are Robin is one of the post-Convergence books primed to explore diversity in the DC Universe for a growing readership — Bermejo sees it as a chance to expand the Robin character past "teenage white kids who all look the same."

And if he avoided reflecting our own cities and younger generation in the comic, "you'd be shirking a pretty big responsibility," he adds. "Just with everything that we've seen happen recently with Ferguson, there's a lot of issues here that I think can be touched on and should be touched on.

"There's that element of this particular moment we're passing right now, and with a book like this you have a chance to comment about certain things and bring them into the Bat-universe in real interesting ways."

As a longtime fan of the Dark Knight and his supporting players, Bermejo admits that he always had a hard time figuring out why Batman would have a teen sidekick and put a kid in danger in the first place — for the writer, that was the beginning of how a series such as We Are Robin could work.

"Maybe there could possibly be many of these kids out there on the streets who have different talents and different capabilities that could be useful to Batman," says Bermejo.

"With ideas and big concepts, teenagers can get really passionate about that stuff and it can be their whole life. That was something interesting to me, that this thing could be bigger than just one guy jumping around in a domino mask."

Another aspect working in Bermejo's favor: the inherent malleability of Gotham's finest.

"You can take that concept of Robin and really play with it and really stretch it and expand upon it and bend it," he says. "It still will hold resemblance to the core of the character in the Bat-mythos."