VALENTINE WEEK : THE DEADLY WEDDING OF ROBIN AND BAT-GIRL

I honestly know at least three people who might make this their actual wedding theme.

The Batgirl and Robin team-ups which ran through the Batman Family anthology (What a weird title for a comic – Batman Family, starring his dead parents and all the ancestors who were actually time-travelling Bruce Waynes!) maintained a few occasional ongoing plotlines, including the duo’s ongoing battle against the original Joker’s Daughter. If you can’t tell her apart from the new Joker’s Daughter, then I assume the medication isn’t working and we’ll have to increase your dosage.

The pair also battled MAZE, a highly secretive criminal organization whose attempts to assassinate the less-Dynamic Duo come to a head in Batman Family #11. Hired by an unnamed older gentleman to snuff Batman’s sidekicks (or at least these two, I don’t know if he had any designs on Mogo the Bat-Ape), Maze makes a couple of muffed attempts at a basketball game, inside a parking garage, and then finally having decided that the problem with their strategy was that they hadn’t yet been unnecessarily complicated enough for a Batman killing, staged a fake wedding for an apparently kidnapped and drugged Batgirl and Robin at the Ford Theatre after the culmination of which the whole audience would stand up and shoot them to death. Now we’re talking! Someone get a giant typewriter in here and we’ll hit all the marks!

The end.

The Batgirl/Robin team-ups had an interesting life in the letters page as well with at least a few readers a little concerned about the apparent age difference between the pair, whose dialogue was– inevitably – a little flirtatious and the relationship portrayed as attracted, if not romantic. Keep in mind that Barbara Gordon was a congresswoman and Dick Grayson a teenaged college student (although the lettercol did its best to firm up the age difference at the minimum stretch – 19 for a still-teen wonder, and the minimum age for serving in congress, 25, for Babs. It’s not exactly Byrnesian in its extremes, but still…). Promising a wedding between the two – even obviously staged as a deathtrap – was probably acknowledging that concern with a tongue firmly placed in cheek.

Although I do like Robin’s tuxedo.

What school of martial arts is this, exactly?

By the end of the tale, it turns out that a disguised Robin had been paying MAZE to attempt these assassinations in order to collect the entire criminal crew in one room and creatively slug them into prison. Either that or Robin’s making a really serious cry for help. All hiring the mob to take potshots at him. I bet he cuts, too. If Batman doesn’t eventually acknowledge this, it’s gonna end in Robin breaking down in the middle of a fight and the Ventriloquist having to reassure him that everyone gets tired sometimes, it’s okay, it’s gonna be all right, and is there someone he can call to come pick him up?

AAAAH AAAAHH AAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!