Writer: Lee Bermejo
Artist: Jorge Corona
Publisher: DC
Released: 28th October 2015
Introduce fatherless young diversity tropes, a cackling villain, a philanthropic Bat-friend. Daddy-state needs children, reinforces violent coercion with paper law justification, always needing young recruits. Can’t portray ‘controversial’ truth in DC, reduced to politically correct diversity programming. Push female emancipation. It’s the 1950's. Don’t mention statism. I see patterns here.
Rating: 3/10
Did that ‘review’ make any sense? Probably not, so I’ll explain. ‘We are Robin #5’ is a book about young superhero types. As is to be expected in mainstream comic books of 2015, these young superheroes are very diverse, and largely female. The story follows them as they beat up a sexist male, and argue about a mystery bloke who wants to fund their crime-fighting comic book escapades. The book concludes with a cackling villain trying to recruit them into his evil gang of murderous miscreants. Will they join him, or will they accept an offer of help from the mysteriously minted (Bat) bloke? Why should we care about them, and why should we care about their choice of future employer/benefactor? I don’t know. I couldn’t get anything out of these characters. I guess if you’ve read the previous four issues (I haven’t) then you’ll give a damn? This is my first look at the title, and what I’m reading here is a book that’s pushing the usual youth diversity message that you get in pretty much all mainstream/corporate/statist programming vehicles. The kids are shown as vulnerable, as needing a ‘father’ as they are out on the streets alone, so why isn’t the real life father substitute (the state) given a role within the narrative? The state doesn’t exist in this book. Why is that? I find that to be very weird. Is this a Batman book thing? Did the state collapse at the end of the Endgame arc? Does that mean that there is no longer any collectivist in a suit who is pretending to represent the people of Gotham? Does that mean that the people are finally free from the collectivised violence of top down state control? Does that mean that we don’t have to sigh at the television as creepy would-be controllers go through their tired routines of offering bribes to their increasingly disenfranchised fool voters? If so, if the world of Batman is now an ‘anarchist’ world, then the absence of the state within this narrative would make sense. Is that’s what’s happening here, or is it just a case of a comic book writer not thinking about the state at all, and how it recruits traumatised children into their control system of human enslavement? If you write a comic book about kids looking for a father substitute, and don’t include the NUMBER ONE father substitute in the entire world (the state) you are either not paying attention to reality, or you are deliberately ignoring uncomfortable truths about the nature of the world as it is today. I’ll give writer Lee Bermejo the benefit of the doubt and assume that he hasn’t really thought about the violently coercive nature of the modern state and just wants to write a PC comic book about ‘diverse’ characters. If that’s what you are after, then buy the book, but for anybody interested in reality, you’re not going to get a lot out of this one.
* If the world portrayed within this book is in a state of anarchy (freedom from state control) please let me know, and I’ll happily take back everything that I’ve just written.
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