Joker captured him, famously beat him with a crowbar, and then trapped him in a warehouse full of explosives. In Batman #427, Batman ordered Jason not to confront the Joker until he returned from stopping a convoy full of deadly gas, but, fearing for his mother’s life, Jason went in anyway. Oddly enough, these two missions led them to cross paths, foil the Joker, and find Jason’s real mom - where they cross paths with the Joker once more. Meanwhile, Batman discovered that a cash-poor Joker was recouping his funds in an alarming way: by selling a nuclear warhead to Lebanese terrorists. Jim Starlin and artist Jim Aparo’s 1988 comic Batman #426 kicked off A Death in the Family, which saw Jason Todd discovering that his biological mother might still be alive, then running away on a globe-trotting trip to unearth her identity. Was he new take on Robin that offered pathos, drama, and a challenge for Batman? Or was he an annoying pest, unfit to wear the mantle that Dick Grayson had made so legendary?Ī democratic vote would answer the question. Where Dick Grayson quipped, Jason Todd sneered, and where Dick was the more empathic side of the Dynamic Duo, now it was Batman who was reigning in reckless impulses of his protege.įans were split on Jason, at least from what DC editorial could tell. Now he was a street urchin who met Batman for the first time when he attempted to jack the tires from the Batmobile a hard-hearted and rebellious kid who Bruce encouraged to be Robin in the hopes that it would keep him from a life of crime. But a few years later, when the Crisis on Infinite Earths offered an opportunity to reimagine anything and everything in the DC Universe, Jason was significantly reimagined. Created by Gerry Conway and Don Newton, Jason was introduced in 1983 as as a carbon copy of Grayson, another circus kid with a heart of gold. In the early 1980s, Dick Grayson, having aged out of the Robin identity, became Nightwing, leaving Batman without a partner for the first time since 1940. Jason was something very familiar in our current age: The first rebooted version of an idea backed by 40 years of fan nostalgia. This was not because O’Neil or any of the other Batman office staff disliked the character, but because their readership seemed so divided on him. Jason Todd was “the logical candidate,” O’Neil said. It had to be one that DC editorial genuinely wanted reader input on, and - since each phone call would cost a reader all of 50 cents - it had to be one that fans genuinely cared about. “In effect,” O’Neil said in 1988, “extend our policy of heeding the opinions fans express in letters and conversations at conventions and comic shops.”īut the poll couldn’t be just any question. Staff at the company had been toying with the idea of using a then-cutting edge phone-polling system to allow DC readership real input on a story. Why would DC editorial leave the decision to kill a major character to readers? The answer is a mix of new technology and tradition. In the first line of his postscript in the first collected edition of that story, Batman editor Denny O’Neil protested his own culpability in Robin’s death with one quote, “We didn’t kill the Boy Wonder. The readers did.’Ī Death in the Family originally ran through Batman #426-429. On the 80th anniversary of Robin’s first appearance, Polygon is excited to present a look at some of that unfinished issue, including a high-resolution scan of rarely seen work from writer Jim Starlin, penciller Jim Aparo, and inker Mike DeCarlo straight from DC Comics’ archives. The tragic ending was the one chiseled into comic history. To meet the publishing schedule, the creative team prepared for either eventuality by writing, and partially illustrating, a comic which Jason survived the Joker’s attempted murder and one in which he died. In 1988, DC Comics left the decision to off the character in the four-issue storyline A Death in the Family up to an incredibly close-running reader poll. Out of all the characters who have put on the Robin suit, Jason is the one who died in it. But it’ll be quite some time before Jason manages to eclipse the story he’s most famous for. He’s appeared in movies, TV shows, and video games, while even his comic book self became the leader of his own team of antiheroes. The last decade has been a renaissance for Jason Todd, the second character to fill the role of Robin, the world’s most famous superhero sidekick.
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