See here for what the Tim Drake revelation is. Otherwise, wait until you've read Batman: Urban Legends #6.
Is this something that has been hinted at before the current storyline? I don't recall anything like that, but I'm not the most devoted follower of the character, either, so maybe it's been hinted at and I just missed it.
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Huh.
"Is this something that has been hinted at before the current storyline?"
Not that I know of, but that's what I would have guessed.
It's been a matter of fan conjecture for ages. Lots of people shipped Tim and Connor. But as far as I know, there's been nothing canon before.
I'm if two minds about it. On the one hand, it's an opportunity to open dialogs and perhaps explore something that hasn't really been explored much.
On the other hand, I've seen previous efforts by Marvel and DC to try to cover this territory, and what I've seen suggests that it will be poorly handled and forgotten in the near future. The cynical side of me thinks this is just pandering for publicity.
I haven't read it, but the pages I've seen online look like it's being handled pretty well.
And as for any publicity this is generating, they're certainly not capitalizing on it right away. This story appears in Batman: Urban Legend 6, and there's a blurb that says the Robin feature will be coming back in issue 10! From what I've seen of it so far, and from the creator statements, it looks like a pretty organic development to me.
Here's an article quoting the writer extensively. tl;dr, she said after re-reading all Tim Drake appearances that the story was there and it needed to be told.
*Shrug* My take is that there was room for the story the writer wanted to tell, and so she told it. I don't have a problem with that. Tim Drake isn't exactly a well-defined character.
I don't know that there is much of a controversy to be had here.
Statistically, _some_ DC characters should be in the situation Tim finds himself at right now.
Kudos for DC for presenting it.
I didn't think it should be controversial. I was just wondering if it had been hinted at before, or not.
Here's another story I ran across, from Screen Rant. It's on my "iffy" list for a tendency to turn a single anodyne sentence from a Kevin Feige interview into 1,000 words of pointless speculation. But it seems to have done some homework on this one:
Tim Drake’s Bisexuality Has Been Teased By DC For Years
When I returned to buying comics (after ten years) in 1989, the first one I bought was Legends of the Dark Knight #1 (which was an excellent series). I didn’t immediately start buying the Batman title, so I missed Tim Drake’s introduction that year. I had continued to follow CBG, so knew about Jason Todd and all of the good stuff from the 80s.
I really got to like Tim Drake in the Robin title. I enjoyed the concept of Batman having a fairly large family of heroes. The thing that sticks in my mind about the Tim Drake Robin title was his relationship with Stephanie Brown. Her unwanted pregnancy (by date-rape) was well-handled, and Tim was a good friend.
In recent years the Alan Scott Green Lantern was portrayed as gay. For a time it seemed iffy whether that would stick or not. Now it seems to be canon.
I think the only time I “met” Conner Kent was in the Death of Superman arc, before he had that name.
Reading the article, it seems they’ve had this in mind for Tim Drake for a while, and they telegraphed it with small and large hints.
Like their capabilities, the personalities of comics characters are up to their creators and later writers, guided by the editors and influenced by their readers. For most of the superhero “lifespan” (1938 to very recently) men were all White and straight. Women, even when heroes, were usually shown as a little ditzy. The pendulum has swung and continues to swing. As with everything else in the world, pendulums (pendula?) swing back and forth and finally come to rest in (I hate to use the phrase) a new normal where things will be more natural and won’t seem forced. I’m especially glad that today’s kids won’t think they are freaks because they see characters like them in comics and on TV. A lot of young people have come to bad ends because they thought they were very alone.
Something just occurred to me: this means Fredric Wertham was right all along.
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