Teen Titans #0

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Oh boy...  So I've been extremely negative on DC's zero issues.  They have been, in my opinion?  Almost universally terrible.  Especially the ones where the writers decide to take liberties and alter/wreck/destroy otherwise good origins.  And that's exactly what I'm expecting here.  Well, no sense delaying this any longer...  Let's see how Scott Lobdell destroys the origin of one of my favorite characters in all of comicdom...

Teen Titans #0

Summary: This issue is actually pretty close to Tim's original origin in some ways, which is a good thing.  Basically you have Tim trying to figure out who Batman is.  He's realized that the prior Robin(Jason Todd) had vanished and that Batman hasn't been the same(although Bruce is kind of meh about Jason being "dead" in this one).  He sets up a way to meet Batman(something about gunrunners and other weirdness), so Bats shows up, telling Tim that he had tolerated him digging around for long enough and to knock it off, before pulling the famous Batman vanishing act.  Tim takes that as a challenge(which you think Bats would have realized) and ends up making himself a target of the Penguin, forcing Bats to rescue him(and his parents, who were nearly killed in the crossfire...).  With that, Tim's parents end up going into the witness protection program, while Tim doesn't...  For some reason.  So Tim says adios to his folks, and Bats takes him in(some how...).  From there, Tim decides he doesn't want to be Robin, out of respect to Jason dying, and becomes Red Robin('cause that's so much different).

Thoughts: First things first...  This issue seems to give us another case of Bruce being forced to take in yet ANOTHER Robin!  Anyway, this was about 7,000,000 times better than Jason Todd's origin story, and was better than Dick Grayson's as well.  Still, I don't know why we didn't just stick with Tim's original origin story...  For me, Tim's original story was better than this one, due to the weird things that happened here...  Why did Tim's parents go into witness protection, but not Tim?  Why would Tim put his parents in such mortal jeopardy if he's supposed to be so smart?  How did Tim end up with Bats?  Was he taken in by Bruce?  And if he was, wouldn't Tim still be a target of Penguin?  Plus, it appears that "Tim Drake" was the name given to him by witness protection...  Maybe...  Even that wasn't made 100% clear, especially since everybody was calling him "Tim" prior to the whole mess with witness protection.  All of that was glossed over.  The way Tim ended up being adopted by Bruce in the pre-New 52 DCU made a lot more sense than the way he ended up with Bruce here...  If he did...  Eh.  I guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.  Things could have been SO much worse(as we saw in Red Hood and the Outlaws #0).  It's funny how low I've set my standards for anything written by Scott Lobdell nowadays...  So I'll say this was an okay comic and move on.

Score: 6 1/2 out of 10.

So Tim's first Robin costume was the Superboy RIP one...  And why are they on the cover of a newspaper?!