Red Robin’s Wings: Do They “Work”?

In spite of artist Brett Booth taking some heat over his redesigns of Wonder Girl and Superboy, the Red Robin design he used on this week’s Teen Titans #1 was met with broad approval from comics fans on the Internet.But what would Bruce Wayne think?Thanks to our friends over at Cracked, I stumbled across an Elseworlds one-shot called Batman: Knight Gallery, which was meant to be the personal sketch diary of Batman, trying to come up with new costume concepts for himself and Robin. What Cracked had on their site was pretty hilarious, but Batman’s repeated emphasis that Robin having a “winged” look to his cape was impractical and silly (as opposed to his own bat-wing cape) caught my eye in light of the new DC Universe and Red Robin’s redesign.The wings, of course, are a bit different in the new DC Universe than they were in the Knight Gallery sketches, mostly because they’ve been depicted as functional; in the first issue (out this week), Tim Drake uses them to glide/fly away from attackers and then to deflect heavy-caliber bullets. That said, Batman’s cape has at times been depicted as able to do the same things, in spite of its looking like just cloth.