It's a great episode for showing more of Dick's personality too, getting a good number of trademark Robin one-liners (some can be found in the Quotes section), as well as showing some more tension between the Dynamic Duo. This collected edition chronicles some of the key adventures in the short-lived career of Jason Todd, the second Robin, after his origin story was completely rebooted in the wake of Crisis on Infinite Earths.

And I have the benefit of several decades worth of hindsight and the knowledge that he will grow to be an awesome character! The result is a jumble of small arcs and one-offs that aren’t brought together for any thematic purpose. No, I'm not talking about Jason Todd's origin story, or the issue where Nightwing confronts Batman about his hypocrisy in firing one sidekick and immediately finding another.

Overall, the stories are surprisingly well written and mature for the time period (and still good today). He has black hair, he's been living alone for a long time after his mother died of a drug overdose and his father was killed by Two Face, who he worked for. Though "White, Gold and Truth" segues perfectly into Batman: A Death in the Family, Second Chances is nonetheless capped with a short Penguin story from 1987's Batman Annual that doesn't belong here, but is worth inclusion for no other reason than it features the artwork of the amazing Norm Breyfogle, who became my favorite Batman artist of the nineties. Batman is equally rash: one story features him totally mucking up a case because a young blonde socialite who shared his penchant for helping others gets brutally murdered. Collins’ pens the first six stories and they are a mixed bag (the standouts being Jason Todd’s origin and the two-part Batman imposter story), but for the most part, it still feels stuck in the Bronze Age.

Of course, some of those moments were a little cheesy, but that honestly just felt nostalgic, so I can't really complain.Meanwhile, Two-Face continues to flip his coin and let it hit the ground, but it keeps landing on edge. This graphic novel begins with a two-part story that is completely superfluous to the titular arc, featuring Batman's struggle against a costumed imposter. Was it destiny that Batman and Jason met so the mentor could give this orphan a better path than he had? PLEASE NOTE: This series of graphic novels is intended for adults and may not be suitable for younger children.

This leads to a story that continues Batman’s training of Jason and reveals that the new Robin’s father was killed by Two-Face.It is a perfectly self-contained story that not only recaps the "retirement" of the first Robin, Dick Grayson, but Jason's revamped origin, as well. It’s a decent story, but more like a one-off, you might have come across during the Bronze Age, not feeling like a stylistic difference from anything pre-Crisis. All of these stories never quite feel modern, as with the work being published in Detective Comics at the same time. I prefer Jason as a carefree kid, trying to make the best of a new life, even though on the other side of the comic book page, unknown readers were making plans to kill him.