WARNING: This article contains MAJOR spoilers for Robins #4, on sale from DC Comics now!
Debuting only a year after Batman, Robin is irrevocably tied to the Dark Knight mythos. Of course, a myriad of heroes have borne the mantle and multiple Robins have come and gone, and there have been impassioned arguments about which one was the greatest partner to Batman’s crusade against crime.
Perhaps it was the first to bear the name. Dick Grayson codified the look and attitude of every Robin after him, after all. Or maybe it’s Damian Wayne, the true heir to Batman’s bloodline. But the Dark Knight’s greatest partner might have been the most forgotten Robin: Stephanie Brown.
Robins #4 (by Tim Seeley, Baldemar Rivas and Romulo Fajardo Jr.) shows how Stephanie’s position as an outsider among the rest of the Robins makes her special, and how she uses that outlook to bring the others together. After the fake Tim Drake almost broke Batman’s one rule, the three male Robins started furiously chasing the Devotees of Anarky. Instead of going on their warpath, Stephanie went to question the one they had captured earlier. Her compassion led to her revelation that they were all being played by somebody pulling the strings behind the scenes and that each devotee they had captured thought they were playing a twisted augmented reality game. Without her unique outlook, the other Robins would have continued without actually solving the investigation.
Stephanie Brown’s position as an outsider within the Robins means she’s the only one who doesn’t mimic Batman, which allows her to approach the problems they face in a completely different way than her contemporaries. While Nightwing and Red Hood have both struck out on their own to get out from under Batman’s shadow, they resemble him a lot more than they’d like to admit. They chase down their villains without a care for anything that stands in their way, all the while not caring how much harm they inflict on them. Ironically, Damian Wayne is the only one who calls out that they should listen to her.
Of course, Stephanie and Damian’s lives are somewhat similar, making them the two who most understand where the other is coming from, even though Damian does it through an air of smugness. He directly calls out that she’s different than them, the only one who “started from the bottom.” Because she only joined the Bat-Family after having to face the mean streets of Gotham by herself, Stephanie has a unique viewpoint she brings to every investigation that’s laid out in front of her; the other Robins, and even Batman, don’t bring to the table.
Created by Chuck Dixon and Tom Lyle, Stephanie Brown first appeared in Detective Comics #647. When her C-list villain father Cluemaster returned to his life of crime after claiming he was reformed, she donned the identity of Spoiler to ruin his criminal plans. Her work as Spoiler brought her in close contact with Tim Drake, and after he quit being Robin, Stephanie snuck into the Batcave and convinced Batman to train her. But the Dark Knight cut her time as the Girl Wonder short because she disobeyed his orders. She went on to go back to her original Spoiler identity and subsequently took the Batgirl costume after Cassandra Cain gave up the mantle.
Ultimately, Stephanie Brown’s time with Batman ended because she was not willing to bend to his will and obey his very harsh rules; the same rules that led to all the Robins deciding that taking the name was a bad thing. But it’s exactly that rule-breaking streak that allowed her to detach from Batman’s training, which led to the other Robins following a single-minded warpath. Her outsider experience is the key to the abilities she brings to the field, ones that the other Robins can’t hold a candle to, thanks to the very nature of who they are.