Speaking as a Marvel fan, after the last few weeks, it's nice to be reassured that DC also have the ability to publish something which is high profile, has top name creators attached, and yet is utterly underwhelming.

ALL STAR BATMAN & ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER #1 is a weird book. Leaving aside the dreadful title, which sounds like the product of a committee of accountants and intellectual property lawyers struggling to reach a minimum word count in time for lunch, it's rather unclear what it's actually for. It's described in the solicitations as an "imaginative reinvention of these classic characters", which isn't really true. It's the first book of the All Star line, which doesn't really take us much further forward, since DC's explanations of the All Star line have been oblique at best.

As near as I can make out, DC's explanations consist of muttering about building on history yet not being tied to continuity; being contemporary, yet timeless; aiming for a wider audience; and mentioning the word "iconic" every couple of sentences. If you can actually extract a coherent agenda from DC's attempts to explain the line, you're a better man than I am.

'Robin? In 2005? Seriously?' What the book actually contains, far from being any sort of reinvention, is a retelling of the origin of Dick Grayson as Robin, with various plot details tweaked, and filtered through the sort of sensibility that you might expect from Frank Miller and Jim Lee when aiming squarely for the mainstream. It's well trodden ground, there's no real new ideas being offered, and the book doesn't exactly benefit from a silly five page sequence of Vicky Vale wandering around her apartment in high heels and lingerie for no reason whatsoever.

But really, no matter how you do it... Robin? In 2005? Seriously?

If you spend enough time reading superhero comics then the most bizarre and ridiculous ideas can come to seem completely normal. "Victor von Doom" starts to sound like a perfectly normal name for a villain. Death on skis becomes a completely familiar part of DC cosmology. And kid sidekicks start to feel entirely natural. Well, in the DC Universe, anyway.

If you were a superhero in the 1940s, then a kid sidekick came fitted as standard. It was a genre staple. Most of the major DC heroes had them. For that matter, so did Captain America and the Human Torch over at Timely. No major superhero was complete without the loyal accompaniment of a miniature version of himself. Mind you, "sophistication" and "credibility" were not exactly the watchwords of Golden Age superhero comics. They were, after all, kiddie books ? not that there's anything wrong with that.

'The sheer absurdity of the concept becomes harder to justify' In a world of simple stories aimed at young readers, the kid sidekick made perfect sense. He was the reader identification figure. You, the reader, were not the superhero. The superhero was your dad, and he took you on adventures. And in the stories of the time, this all fitted together.

Of course, the style of the Golden Age is long since past. Even by the time of the Silver Age, while the DC teen sidekicks didn't seem grossly out of place, Lee and Kirby certainly weren't creating any new ones. It's surely no accident that Captain America was brought back without the annoying brat in tow.

Subsequently, the kid sidekick has started to seem more and more out of place. It's been decades since anybody created a successful new sidekick character, unless you count retro jokes, or characters intended simply to fill the shoes of an existing sidekick who had died or grown up. Instead, teen superhero characters have either been used as the lead characters in books of their own (Teen Titans, Runaways, New Warriors), or at least been positioned as apprentices (such as the New Mutants).

This isn't a particularly surprising development. As the audiences have grown older, the readers no longer want to identify with the sidekick in preference to the hero. And as the stories have become more sophisticated, the sheer absurdity of the concept becomes harder and harder to justify even with the considerable suspension of disbelief that the genre enjoys. Captain America taking children into battle in 2005 seems ridiculous ? which is why Ed Brubaker has been trying to explain Bucky away as a trained crack commando of some sort.

'If he didn't exist, would anyone even think of creating him?' And yet, over at DC, there's Robin, a little primary coloured splodge, ludicrously out of place against the prevailing "grim and sullen" take on Batman. Why is he there? If he didn't exist, would anyone even think of creating him? Ultimately, Robin continues to exist for one simple reason: inertia. He's there because he always has been, for as long as most people alive can remember. He makes no sense, he's out of synch with the style of the book, and his time passed half a century ago ? but by god, he's still there.

To long-time comics fans, Robin's presence simply seems natural. We just tune out the silliness of it. To a more casual audience, he must surely leap out as a symbol of everything that's slightly embarrassing about superheroes. Mention the word "Batman" to the average man on the street, and there's a passable chance he'll think of one of the relatively dignified recent films. Mention "Batman and Robin", and he's probably thinking of Burt Ward in tights.

Robin's fine for what he was originally created for ? a figure for kids to identify with. And in stories actually aimed at children, perhaps he has a function. As a member of the Teen Titans, he's arguably workable. But as a straightforward teen sidekick, he's a walking relic of a much more innocent time, when plots were basic, expectations were low, and readers were mostly in primary school.

For me, this is why ALL STAR BATMAN doesn't really work. There's a ridiculous clash between Robin (the character, the concept and the story) and the style that's being used to do the story. Women parading around in their underwear for absolutely no reason is the sort of thing that just about worked in SIN CITY because that book operates under the rules of noir. Put them next to the origin of Robin and the result is a horrible clash of subgenres. It reads like a comic aimed at people with a reading age of seven, and a wanking age of thirteen.

It's a style clash that really doesn't work even for many long time comics fans. It must seem utterly bizarre to the more casual readers that the All Star line seems to be trying to reach. Batman is a genuinely flexible character who's endured for decades in a wide variety of interpretations, which tends to suggest that he might just about merit the much-abused "iconic" tag. Robin is just a brightly-coloured brat who's been around a while. It's not the same.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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