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There are a lot of Robins, so many that some are no longer canon or may not yet to be. Often times, you do your time as a Robin, then grow out of it and become a different kind of hero all your own. Duke Thomas is sort of that but different as well. Who is this guy and what am I talking about? Let’s find out!

Duke Thomas was born to Elaine Thomas and raised by her and Doug Thomas in the Narrows section of Gotham City. Gotham has never really been the safest city but when Duke was in elementary school, the Riddler devastated the power of the entire city and made it a wild land of plants and drones monitoring the people. Duke’s family would rescue Bruce Wayne during this time, unaware that he was Batman.

Years would go by before Duke would get involved with Batman’s adventures. When he was a teenager, the Joker gassed a huge portion of the Narrows, infecting them with a form of chemically induced madness similar to his own. This gas hit Duke’s parents, he was able to be saved by Batman, his parents would go missing along with many others. Entering foster care, Duke would often run away from home in search of his parents.

While out searching for them, he would find a group of people planning to bomb parts of Gotham. They would try and catch him and was almost killed when a group of Robins arrived and saved him. While they were able to free him from the attackers, he was still taken in by the police. Or so he thought as he found out that his arrest was all an elaborate ruse to prepare him for joining this new team of Robins. Given his own bullet-proof Robin leather jacket and motorcycle, he would join the others to deal with crimes they were alerted to thanks to the mysterious Nest, who was actually Alfred Pennyworth.

Duke would prove himself a good leader for the team alongside the others. Things were tough but they worked well together. It all started to go to hell when the Robin Laws went into effect, no one in Gotham was allowed to wear Robin paraphernalia. This got Duke and company to run across Damian Wayne, the current Robin who did not take kindly to these kids he found to be pretenders. It would take the intervention of the other three former Robins to arrive and decide that Duke and his Robins needed more training that the others could provide.

During this time, Bruce Wayne had not been Batman, he was out and Jim Gordon had taken over in a mech. The return of Bruce Wayne meant that he had seen the great work Duke had been doing and wished to help him more. Both agreed that Duke wasn’t going to be another Robin but a new identity and symbol for the Bats, a Signal. Duke would become the daytime correspondent for Batman, where as Bats are nocturnal, Duke would deal with Gotham’s growing super-powered crimes during the day.

Now working alongside Batman, Duke would begin a grueling regime that would condense the training Batman himself had gone through into a year’s time so he’d be just as capable as the caped crusader. Duke would work with Green Lantern, fight the Joker, and discover he had metahuman powers of his own. He could see in across all forms of the electromagnetic spectrum, he could reconstruct a few minutes into the past using the light around him, and he was able to use this power to somewhat predict possible futures for minutes ahead granting him advantages in combat. Granted, he was going to have to learn to use these powers on top of his Bat training.

While all this was going on he had to deal with the fact that his parents had been found and that it was considered irreversible what the Joker gas had done to them. Duke still held out hope even though both his parents would often react to him the same way the Joker had. He would also meet his biological father and discover he was a villain with powers similar to Duke’s. Duke would eventually integrate into the rest of the Bat family as he had completed his training.

There you have it! Duke is one of the more recent recruits into the Bat family. He’s yet to be introduced on the big or small screen but hopefully one day soon, that will be remedied. Duke had the unusual beginnings as not just Robin, but one of many. He is now just as much a Thomas as he is a Wayne, living with his big bat and bird family, as their signal. See you next time!

Suggested Reading
Batman: Zero Year
Batman: Endgame
We Are Robin
Robin War
Batman and the Signal

Dr. Bustos
drbustos@comicattack.net