Frank Robbins Deserves Credit For Helping Create "The Dark Knight"

Frank Robbins is the only writer in Batman's history that has the distinction of being THE transitional Batman writer. Having taken over from Gardner Fox, Robbins worked on:

Batman #204–207, 209–212, 214–217, 219–222, 226, 230–231, 236, 246, 249–250, 252, 254 (as writer from 1968–1974) and Detective Comics #378–383, 386, 388–436 (as writer); #416, 420–421, 426, 429, 435 (as writer/artist from 1968–1973).

Batman fans often hear about how Denny O'neil and Neal Adams changed the character from the campy Caped Crusader into The Dark Knight. This is true, but it's a partial truth. Frank Robbins was writing and drawing Batman before Denny and Neal and it was his work that first brought maturity to Batman. He also wrote both flavors of Batman, campy and dark. As much as I love Denny O'neil, who I consider to be in the top 5 comic book writers of all-time, he and Neal (perhaps DC's greatest artist of all-time) cannot take, nor do they deserve, all the credit, despite what most popular blogs like IGN or CBR might have you believe.

Robbins' Batman stories started out in the same vein as Gardner Fox. They were simple, juvenile detective and mystery stories. About halfway through his run, he created Man-Bat with Neal Adams, and started the shift that marked the beginning of the transition from The Caped Crusader into The Dark Knight. In fact, Batman's appearance first changed, under the pencil of Neal Adams, in one of Robbins' stories.

He also wrote Batman #217 where Dick Grayson moves off to college and this forces Bruce to return to his roots, becoming, once again, the lone obsessed vigilante. Robbins also penned The Batman Nobody Knows, a short story from Batman #250. With art from Dick Giordano, this serves to illustrate that the Batman is a legend who is frightening to criminals. One of Batman's greatest stories, it was loosely adapted for both The New Batman Adventures episode, Legends of the Dark Knight, and as one of the shorts in the Batman Gotham Knight animated anthology film from 2008.

As much as Denny O'neil deserves credit for The Secret of the Waiting Graves (Detective Comics #395), which cemented the change in both focus and tone, without Frank Robbins to lay the stepping stones Julius Schwartz may never have hired Denny to write it. The record has to be set straight... Denny and Neal had a little help in creating The Dark Knight version of Batman. It was a recipe with many cooks, including other artists such as Irv Novick, and Jim Aparo. Robbins gets ignored by history just as, sometimes, Denny and Neal get casually ignored for bringing Batman back to his darker roots in favor of Frank Miller's 1980's work. But Frank Robbins is important to Batman too.