A powerful Damian Wayne 'Rises' from the dead

The good news for Batman: Robin's back from the dead. The more iffy news: His 10-year-old son's now got superpowers.

Damian Wayne returned last week in the final pages of Peter J. Tomasi's Batman & Robin No. 38, and the writer shows those moments from a different perspective and adds new aspects to the resurrected sidekick in Robin Rises: Alpha, a one-shot out Wednesday from DC Comics.

"Basically it's a non-stop action issue. Even on the humanistic moments, it hits all points," says artist Andy Kubert, who first introduced Damian during his and Grant Morrison's Batman run in 2006.

While many fans might have thought Damian's grandfather, supervillain Ra's al Ghul, would toss him in a Lazarus pit and raise him back to life that way, instead the boy's body was taken by Darkseid minion Glorious Godrey to their hellish world of Apokolips. Batman wanted to find a way for his boy to live again, followed them there with the rest of the Bat-family, he and Darkseid had a faceoff — with the Dark Knight in his "Hell Bat" suit — and the good guys return home to the Bat-cave via Boom Tube.

Batman uses the Chaos Shard — with some added mojo from Darkseid's powerful omega beams — to heal Damian. But someone else soon follows them and this guy is none too pleased.

Fortunately, Robin is alive again and now has a few superpowers — readers will see some in play, while the last couple of pages set the stage for future issues, according to Tomasi. And a 10-year-old with metahuman abilities comes with a whole load of baggage for Bruce Wayne and the rest of the Bat-verse.

Kids already think they're immortal, the writer says, and adding powers to that mix is "obviously a lot for Bruce to handle and deal with. We explore that going forward."

Ever since Tomasi started the current story line in July's Robin Rises: Omega, and even before in tackling the Batman & Robin issues following Robin's death at the hands of the Heretic last year, his whole modus operandi has been to bring a lot of emotion to Batman.

As much as he loves the Dark Knight as a hardened vigilante, Tomasi finds the hero more relatable when his more human side shows.

"Here was a guy without powers who you could sort of identify with aside from being a multibillionaire," the writer says. "If he's never emotional and he's always in the same gear, it's a shame. One of the great things about Batman is you can get into all of the emotional stuff with him and still not forsake everything he really is all about.

"The character can become sort of one-note if he's on a constant frame of kickass mode."

Batman's been around for 75 years, so to be that kind of well-rounded hero with such a lifespan, "he can't just have a frown on him all the time," Kubert adds. "He's gotta be emotional, he's gotta have those traits. Either that or he's completely boring."

It's also Robin's 75th anniversary starting in 2015, and Tomasi feel it's a good time to "shake and bake" the character a little bit. However, his plan was always to bring Damian back instead of putting another youngster, such as Harper Row or Duke Thomas, in the familiar red-and-yellow togs.

"Damian coming back is important and an amazingly key factor to the story," Tomasi says, "but the journey itself for Batman was a major part of it, too, going from the five stages of grief and dealing with everything he had to and peeling away his emotions like an onion and really digging deep into him."

There are big plans afoot next year in Batman & Robin keying off Damian's return, according to Tomasi, and there are also going to be some changes to the kid's personality as well as his power set.

Always a headstrong sort, Damian knows what happened to him and knows that he died, and that informs him going forward.

"I wanted to make sure it was hard and it wasn't something that comes across as easy and 'I don't remember anything about anything,' " Tomasi says. "As we'll discover, he remembers the pain of dying — he'lll remember his father's voice ringing out and a lot of different things.

"There's definitely a haunting aspect of being killed that will stay with him."