What is Robin without Batman? Well, the protagonist of a pretty good story, for one thing.
In Dick Grayson's Nightmare! (Batman 80, Dec. 1953), Bruce Wayne’s young ward falls victim to a gaslighting scheme before rallying as the Boy Wonder, escaping a death trap and giving the criminal gang a good, satisfying beating.
The term “gaslighting” sprang from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, in which a scheming husband tries to convince his wife she’s going insane. It’s a technique utilized by extreme political propaganda as well.
The Man of Steel also got a dose of gaslighting that same year in TV’s The Adventures of Superman during the Jackson Gillis episode The Face and the Voice.
In Nightmare!, an uncredited writer tells us that while Batman is away at a murder trial in Chicago, painters are coming in to redecorate Wayne Manor. Wayne has arranged for Dick to stay at the nearby home of his vacationing mystery writer friend Freddy Hobbs.
Hobbs’ cottage is full of weird murder-mystery artifacts. “It’s enough to give a person the creeps,” the boy thinks.
In short order, Dick encounters a mysterious veiled woman who vanishes after handing him an envelope containing $10,000, dodges a thrown dagger and sees a ghostly turbaned face in the cottage window.
“That horrible face — am I going mad?” he thinks.
The Boy Wonder discovers that a gang of Halloween-costumed criminals led by a mastermind called Doc is stealing valuable paintings from a nearby warehouse, and arranged the gaslighting to discredit Dick as a witness.
As a boy, Dick Grayson is less emotionally constrained than Bruce Wayne, who is an icon of 1950s masculinity. Dick can shiver at a horror story and be startled by developments, and gives this story a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew vibe — a different feel than it would have had if Batman were staying alone in the cottage. The unflappable Batman would have faced the same events more stoically, but perhaps less interestingly.
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