That's What's Up: How Jason Todd Became One Of DC's Most Hated Characters

Each week, comic book writer Chris Sims answers the burning questions you have about the world of comics and pop culture: what's up with that? If you'd like to ask Chris a question, please send it to @theisb on Twitter with the hashtag #WhatsUpChris, or email it to staff@looper.com with the subject line "That's What's Up."

Q: What's the deal with Jason Todd being so hated that fans voted for his death? — via email

In the entire history of DC Comics, I don't think there's ever been a character as controversial as Jason Todd, the second Robin. Even Kyle Rayner, the Green Lantern of the '90s who had an organized group of of fans called H.E.A.T. that was advocating for the return of his predecessor for years, never got to the point where the company was actually letting fans decide whether he should be killed off. I mean, replacing a beloved character is always going to stir up some resentment, but spending 50 cents a vote to call for his death by crowbar beating? That's pretty extreme even for superhero comics.

As for how we got there, though, that one's easy. It was all a setup, my friends. Jason Todd never had a chance.

Comics in the Bronze Age were weird.

Other than that, he was a standard issue Robin that allowed them to go back to using "Boy Wonder," letting Dick move on from being the "Teen Wonder"—they actually made a pretty big deal about this on the covers, although it's the kind of semantic difference that only really matters if you're really paying attention—and into the Nightwing identity that he's more or less had ever since. If you read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' classic "For the Man Who Has Everything," probably the second-most famous story that Jason appeared in, you could be forgiven for mistaking him for Dick Grayson. Without much in the way of solo stories, Jason was the cake that DC got to have while they ate Dick, too. Uh, you know what I mean.

But then, in 1986, DC decided to throw out the baby, the bathwater, and most of the bathroom with a yearlong event called Crisis on Infinite Earths that allowed them to restructure their universe. Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman all got new origin stories, and while Batman's month-to-month adventures didn't really change that much after the events of Batman: Year One, Jason Todd was updated for the grim and gritty '80s. When he was reintroduced in Batman #408—remember that number—he was a streetwise orphan raised on Crime Alley, who was so fearless (and so unswervingly headed for a life of crime) that he first appeared trying to boost the tires off the Batmobile.

This one was actually the first Batman comic I ever read—and the second half of the story, where Batman fights a bunch of dudes in a junkyard, is one of my all-time favorites—and it turned out to be a pretty pivotal issue.

The story concerns Felipe, the son of a South American diplomat who's heavily involved in the cocaine trade. This gives him that good ol' Lethal Weapon 2-style diplomatic immunity, which leads Batman — Batman, a man who dresses in a devil costume so that he can punch out criminals without concern for the law—to come to the conclusion that there's nothing he can do to really stop him. This doesn't sit well with Robin, especially since Felipe is also beating his girlfriend, and eventually drives her to commit suicide. Jason decides to confront Felipe himself, and when Felipe winds up falling from a skyscraper, Batman is left wondering if he slipped, or if Robin threw him to his death.

And they sold this comic to me when I was six.

It sparked a whole new rash of letters, which isn't surprising. At the time, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke had just been released to huge acclaim, and DC followed it up by announcing that they were going to do a story where the Joker was going to potentially kill Robin, with the outcome determined by the fans voting over the phone. And almost immediately, the letters started pouring in about whether Jason should die.

The only thing everyone seemed to agree on was that Felipe definitely hadn't slipped, and that even if they didn't agree with it, Jason was pretty justified in giving him a shove off a balcony. That's a reading that continues to this day—writer and critic Katie Schenkel and I once had a conversation about how that story is one of the cornerstones for how she views Jason as an ardently feminist character, willing to take action even when Batman wouldn't.

That's a point that's rarely brought up about this story: Starlin and Aparo are so heavily invested in building Jason as an unhinged, rage-filled teen that their version of Batman winds up doing very little to prevent his death. There are a lot of grim looks and slow head-shaking in those stories, but beyond that, Batman doesn't really bother to do a lot. In "Diplomat's Son," he's satisfied with giving Felipe a criminal record that'll keep him from getting a job as a diplomat himself someday, and that's all he does. With Batman, who once founded an entire super-hero team because the JLA wouldn't let him create an international incident by attacking a foreign government, arbitrarily deciding that there's some red tape that he doesn't want to cut through, Jason's frustrations aren't difficult to sympathize with.

At the same time, it's easy to see that they were setting him up for a fall. He breaks Batman's code against killing and then lies about it, and with Starlin gearing up to write Death in the Family, it's hard not to look at that issue as a justification for why he'd have to die, or at least why his impulsive and violent nature would lead to some severe comeuppance. It's worth noting that he finds himself going up against the Joker alone because he consciously rejects Batman's help and walks right into a trap—and that even if the poll hadn't killed him, he still would've been beaten with the crowbar and blown up. The story would've played out the same way. The next two decades, though? Not so much.

Regardless of how you feel about Jason Todd as a character, having the Joker kill him is a much better story.

It's not entirely positive, of course. The textual message of the story is that Batman can't save everyone, and while that helps to ground the story in "realism" in the way that a lot of readers wanted in the mid-'80s, the other half of that is that there are some people, like Jason, who are just beyond saving. Again, not entirely unrealistic, but it's a short walk from there to wondering why we should even bother having Batman to begin with. Plus, between this and Killing Joke, DC had taken its first steps down a path they'd be on for the next 20 years that ends with dudes like the Riddler and Crazy Quilt essentially being mass murderers.

At the same time, Batman is a character rooted in tragedy and loss, whose greatest victories often come from rebuilding his life after them. The Joker getting the victory here not only enhances his character by making him a deadly threat who isn't always defeated in the nick of time, and whose actions have lasting consequences, it also allows Batman to suffer a motivating loss at a time when new readers were coming in.

Ask anyone who likes Batman more than Superman why, and they'll often tell you that it's because Superman's invulnerability makes him boring. That's not true, of course—Batman wins his fights just as much as Superman, because they are protagonists in fictional stories — but I really do think a lot of it comes because the freshest, most pivotal Batman stories that you could read when that movie came out in 1989 and Batman was everywhere were the ones where he winds up taking the L.

Plus, it paved the way for the arrival of Tim Drake, the best Robin, and eventually Damian Wayne, the Robin who did "killer teenager" a whole lot better than J.T. ever did. All because Jason's death was a lasting consequence, a tragedy that had been woven into the fabric of the story.

Until, you know, it wasn't.

Even though Batman wasn't great in the story—his reasoning for not killing the Joker himself is basically nonsense, and doesn't need to go any further than "Batman doesn't kill"—the idea here was very intriguing. Jason returned after years as the son that Batman thought he'd lost, taking on the hero who swore not to kill as the vigilante who never understood why not. It's a setup that's rife with drama, especially because it brings back to the one thing that was really lost from Batman when Jason was killed: his belief that Jason was worth saving.

Bringing Jason back, and eventually bringing him back into the Batman family as an on-again, off-again ally who didn't adhere to the rest of the fam's aversion to guns, fulfilled the promise of the character in a way that just keeping him around forever as the second Robin never would've. Everyone, honestly, came out a little better for it.

Of course, the debate still rages over whether what we got was better than what we lost by undoing his death. But there's one thing that kind of made it all worth it: