A coffee table book titled The Dark Knight Manual has sparked even more speculation about the potential of Robin appearing in The Dark Knight Rises. IGN recently made an attempt to make sense of the information that has been released and we have put it all together for you below.
It has been been debated at great lengths as to whether or not Joseph Gordon-Levitt‘s character John Blake is actually Christopher Nolan‘s version of Robin, despite Nolan saying that Robin does not have a place in his movies.
Yet, the rumors are still circulating. And they were further fueled by the section on The Joker in the manual, which can be seen below.
“The Joker does not appear to have any connections to Gotham’s crime syndicates, though he knocked over a mob bank. One possible motive for this, which could also explain the clown motif, is the Haley Brothers Circus. The circus was recently in town for a two-month engagement and it was rumored their boss had connections to Sal Maroni. The Joker could be a former Haley Brothers employee with some kind of grudge against the mob.”
The Haley Brothers Circus? That sounds eerily similar to Haly’s Circus, which was the home of The Flying Graysons. One member of The Flying Graysons was the young Dick Grayson, who would later be known as Robin.
The manual also refers to Blake’s past in a way that certainly leads to images of Robin.
Speculation that Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s cop character John Blake is a potential Batman successor/would-be Robin will only be fueled by the revelation in The Dark Knight Manual that Blake, like Bruce Wayne, is an orphan who “channeled his anger and pain … into his work serving and protecting the people of Gotham.”
Readers of the comics will remember that Grayson was orphaned after his parent’s high wire was sabotaged by the mob, leading them to fall to their deaths.
Is it a stretch to say that John Blake is Robin because the Joker may have been an employee of a Circus by a similar name? And that Grayson and Blake can’t possible both be orphans? Probably. But it does make it a lot more likely that a Robin exists in Nolan’s Batman universe.
What do you think? Is it possible? Tell us in the comments below.
