Drake Winston

Origin

Drake Winston was a young auto mechanic at Royal Autobody in Gotham’s Burnside neighborhood. At night he wore a green and yellow costume, protecting citizens in low-income housing and preventing the looting of small businesses in this vigilante disguise. Winston hoped to inspire the community to help each other, while he felt Batman only terrified thugs and the community. Winston eventually deduced Bruce Wayne’s secret after helping rescue Harvey Dent from the burning auto shop. Impressed with some of his efforts to help their community, Drake proposed to work with Bruce as a partner.

Creation

Winston was created by Sam Hamm and Joe Quinones, loosely based on “The Kid” from the Daniel Waters‘ Batman Returns script, before being cut from Wesley Strick‘s shooting drafts. Marlon Wayans was cast to play the un-named character, Wayans’ likeness and hairstyle influenced the design of Drake Winston.

Character Evolution

Michael Keaton suggested the idea of never even referring to the character by name, during the development of the script. Later director Tim Burton was able to convince the studio to let them drop the character entirely as they had done before filming the previous movie in 1988. The character was always intended to be skilled auto mechanic, impressed with the Batmobile and helping Batman make a quick repair. Near the finale he briefly aided Batman in combat, still wearing his garage uniform with an ‘R’ on it. When the Batman ’89 comic was commissioned by DC nearly three decades later, it was decided to make a new Robin loosely based on this concept rather than using an existing character from the comics. Hamm gave him the fully identified name Drake Winston and increased the character’s skillset, giving him advanced computer programming experience and a stronger sense of business management from his mentor Jerome Otis.

Major Story Arcs

Winston debuted in the Shadows storyarc.