Posted by Dan Greenfield on Apr 4, 2026
BATGIRL & ROBIN: The Ballad of Babs and Dick
PART 2 of BATMAN FAMILY ALBUM: Writer/editor Bob Rozakis on the love that was never meant to be… — UPDATED 4/4/26: Bob Rozakis turns 75! Perfect time to reprint our four-part interview series with the Bronze Age stalwart — BATMAN FAMILY ALBUM — from 2015. Dig it. — Dan — — In my adolescence, Bruce Wayne was the ideal adult, the man I could aspire to be: Driven by his demons but not consumed by them. Dick Grayson, on the other hand, was someone I could more directly relate to. His problems were more accessible. He went out and fought bad guys, sure, but he also had to do homework. Then there were the girls. Bruce had Silver St. Cloud and Selina Kyle. Thing is, I wasn’t likely to start dating a cosmopolitan career woman or a reformed super-criminal any time soon. Dick had a girlfriend named Lori Elton at Hudson University, but she seemed so … average. Relatable, sure. But not terribly exciting. Enter Barbara Gordon, the perfect objet du crush: Unattainable, yet … maybe not. See, now, in the days of Batman Family, which launched in 1975, Dick was toiling at Hudson while Babs was a congresswoman representing Gotham. He was 19, 20 at best. She was, what, 28? 30? An unlikely match-up, to be sure. But there she was, like that senior girl who was just close enough to make a freshman boy wonder “… Do I have a chance? Nah…. Unless… “ The powers that be at DC decided that the crux of the mag was going to be the Batgirl-Robin partnership, the ostensibly platonic Dynamite Duo. But right off in that first issue, Elliot S! Maggin threw in that sexual tension at the end of their debut story, helped in no small part by Mike Grell’s alluring artwork. That was followed up by the all-reprint Issue #2, which spotlighted this Freudian concept first published in Detective #369: So by Issue #3, when Dick and Barbara established that they’d figured out each other’s identities, all the cards were there to play. Except for that pesky age difference. Batgirl and Robin’s will-they-or-won’t-they, um, dynamic became the underpinning of the title — and arguments on the letters pages. These stories so influenced the decades that followed that eventually both were made the same age and their bat-crossed...
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