Grayson is depicted as being less disciplined, assured, and intellectual than Bruce Wayne, but also as a far more daring, fun-loving, emotionally balanced and self-conscious Batman. Morrison uses this change in the characters’ identities to shift the standard Batman and Robin paradigm.

Wayne’s long-lost son Damian Wayne is cast as a violent, impulsive, brilliant and pre-pubescent Robin. Morrison’s latest graphic novel, Batman & Robin: Batman Reborn, collects the first two storylines from Morrison’s ongoing Batman & Robin comic: “Batman Reborn” and “Revenge of the Red Hood.” Morrison, who deconstructed the character of Bruce Wayne and seemingly killed him off in his recent “RIP” and “Last Rites” storylines, opens “Batman Reborn” with Dick Grayson, the original Robin, reluctantly wearing the guise of Batman. Through storylines such as “Batman and Son,” “The Black Glove,” and “RIP,” Morrison has taken the Batman mythos in entirely new directions by absorbing forgotten and erased aspects of Batman’s comic book continuity, offering a potential destiny for him, and establishing new relationships and dynamics within his world.

While plenty of good Batman stories appeared after Miller and Moore’s books, the character nevertheless did not develop again in any meaningful way until Grant Morrison began writing the monthly Batman comic in 2005. Miller and Moore’s characterization of Batman as decidedly dark and tortured came to dominate virtually every depiction of the character over the next two decades. In the 1980s, graphic novels such as Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke offered a radical reformulation of Batman that transformed the character from pop icon into a gothic, existential, disturbed crusader for vengeance, more spiritually and intellectually akin to Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Lord Byron’s Manfred than to Superman or Captain America. Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Philip Tan

Batman and robin batman reborn