That's actually one of the points I wanted to make but didn't do right. Yeah. It was a wildly popular construct.
I think that a lot of people kind of want their comics to grow up with them, y'know? They want to read the adventures of Batman as an adult, not as a teenage boy, and forget the literature is essentially juvenile (I mean that in the sense of for young people, I should add, not inferior).
And in modern DC comics, they are generally making quite a to do about legacy heroes, like in the JSA, and a lot of that flows from the existence of Robin - the idea that the "mantle" of that hero-dom can survive the "original" hero. It also is part of the process through which comic characters have at least partially acknowledged time, an heir means that, y'know, some day you're not gonna be the guy doing this. That time passes. Robin is the first introduction of the concept of time into comic books, AFAIK and in an admittedly roundabout way.
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I think that a lot of people kind of want their comics to grow up with them, y'know? They want to read the adventures of Batman as an adult, not as a teenage boy, and forget the literature is essentially juvenile (I mean that in the sense of for young people, I should add, not inferior).
And in modern DC comics, they are generally making quite a to do about legacy heroes, like in the JSA, and a lot of that flows from the existence of Robin - the idea that the "mantle" of that hero-dom can survive the "original" hero. It also is part of the process through which comic characters have at least partially acknowledged time, an heir means that, y'know, some day you're not gonna be the guy doing this. That time passes. Robin is the first introduction of the concept of time into comic books, AFAIK and in an admittedly roundabout way.