DC Pride: Tim Drake Special #1: Finding Yourself

The Tim Drake Special collects the previously published stories from Urban Legends that explored and canonized Tim Drake’s queerness, as well as the holiday story from Batman: Urban Legends #10 that included Tim opening up about his journey and a brand new story that cements Tim’s identity and settles what his status quo is.

Megan Fitzmartin pens all three parts of this Special, allowing a clear narrative thread to show Tim’s journey. For my full ramblings on the impact of a queer Tim and how Fitzmartin wrote his self realization in Sum of Our Parts, the three-part story in Urban Legends #4-6, click here. She takes the story to the next steps in both Happy Holidays and The Elephant in the Room. It goes beyond just a story of Tim Drake trying to discover who he is; now, he needs to tell people.

Both Belen Ortega and Jimenez Alburquerque’s art and the colors by Alehandro Sanchez, Nick Fillard, and Luis Guerrero are able to pull focus to the action and emotion in the characters and balance the text-heavy pages. While the style of Aburquerque’s art and Nick Filardi’s colors in Happy Holidays differs from that in both other stories, it works with the focus shifting away from Tim’s internal journey to include how he is seeking to help Batman.

The inclusion of The Elephant in the Room implies that a lot has continued to progress for Tim off-panel. With only Tim’s story in the recent DC Pride issue, neither Tim nor Bernard have had much page time. But it seems that at the start of the story, Tim has been at least partially open with his closest friends. Fitzmartin’s narrative focus continues to show that it is about how Tim is piecing together the parts of his life, not how the pieces of his life react to his new identity.