The bad guys take center stage in DC’s Suicide Squad, which hits theaters this weekend (you can read our takes here and here). The release will put to rest what seems like an eternity’s worth of theories and speculation about the film’s plot, production woes, and Jared Leto’s elaborate Method technique. One of the most popular rumors revolved around the mysterious suit seen in the Batcave during Dawn of Justice with the message ‘HAHAHA, The Joke’s On You, Batman’ scrawled across its chest. Snyder confirmed this past March in an interview with IGN that this was the suit worn by Robin, who’d been killed by the Joker roughly 10 years prior.
Whether we’ll be getting more insight into this in Ben Affleck’s upcoming solo Batman movie remains to be seen. If that film does touch on the loss, though, it will have some famous source material to build from, specifically writer Jim Starlin and artist Jim Aparo’s Batman: A Death in the Family, a four-issue 1988 story arc that ran in Batman issues 426 through 429. While comic books are often known for their over-the-top hyperbole, A Death in the Family let the fans decide if that foreboding title would live up to its name, as DC comics left the fate of the second Robin, Jason Todd, up to a vote.
Glen Weldon, author of The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture explains that it was these fans’ negative feelings toward the second Robin that helped encourage the idea of killing the character off.
“You have to remember that when Jason Todd was introduced the first time, he was just a ripoff. He basically had exactly the same origin as Dick Grayson because [Grayson] had moved on to The New Teen Titans, which was DC’s number one book. In that first incarnation, Jason Todd was a cipher, because all they did was, ‘We need another Robin, just do it.’ Those were the instructions.”
After DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline, which streamlined its universe and retconned many characters, Jason Todd’s origin was re-done to separate him from his predecessor, Dick Grayson. His new origin remade him as a rebellious street kid who first meets Batman while trying to boost the wheels off the Batmobile.
This change didn’t make fans any less unhappy with Jason Todd, and eventually, DC began looking into options on how they could remove him from his role as the Boy Wonder. “Robin is meant to be an audience surrogate,” explains Weldon, “and maybe one of the reasons that people didn’t like Jason Todd so much was because he was a punk. He was ungrateful. This kid gets to hang out in the Batcave and fight crime, granted the suit’s a little iffy, but he gets to be with Batman and he’s ungrateful and he wants more.”
The easiest solution seemed to be to kill him off, an idea that built off of two noteworthy incidents in Batman lore. The first was the crippling of Barbara Gordon by the Joker in 1988’s Batman: The Killing Joke (whose recent animated adaptation is receiving critical ire), and the second was a nod to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns in 1986. In Miller’s story, an aging Batman keeps Jason Todd’s suit under glass in the Batcave, and there is a line where he calls him “a good soldier.”
“That was hugely important because [The Dark Knight Returns] was a sensation,” says Weldon, explaining that fans were very receptive to this — that Robin had died, even if it happened in a story that wasn’t considered Batman canon. This idea carried over into the vote over Jason Todd’s fate in A Death in the Family. “By giving readers that chance to kill off Robin, they were effectively saying, ‘We can make this canon.'”
To put it to a vote, DC put an advertisement in the back of Batman #427 urging fans to “prevent” the death of Robin. There were two phone numbers set up, one for Robin to live, the other for him to die. Each call cost $.50, and the final count tallied at 5,343 to 5,271 in favor of killing him off. Fans got their wish, and in Batman #428, Batman arrives too late to save him, only to find the lifeless body of Jason Todd in the wreckage.
Once the issue hit the newsstands, there was enormous fallout. DC Editor Dennis O’Neil explained in the book The Dark Age: Grim, Great & Gimmicky Post-Modern Comics that he was surprised by the kind of response they were getting, including him being accused of “running a Roman circus.”
That was probably the biggest surprise for me… how seriously people took it. I thought it was a way to have the readers participate in the storyline. You know, no real kid died. This is paper and ink, and it’s stuff that people come up with at 3 o’clock in the morning in front of their computer. But wow, the backlash was enormous.
Weldon asserts that at least some of the backlash was due to a misunderstanding about which Robin had died. “People thought that the Robin that was killed off was the original Robin. That turned out to make a huge difference. If they had known it was a second, third, fourth, fifth Robin, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal.”
Misunderstanding or not, the backlash was unavoidable. O’Neil said he spent three days “on the phone to radio guys,” and explained that DC was trying to downplay the attention from a PR standpoint, which prevented him from doing any talk show appearances to discuss the matter further.
O’Neil has since stated that the experience taught him a great deal.
“It changed my mind about what I do for a living. Superman and Batman have been in continuous publication for over half a century, and it’s never been true of any fictional construct before. These characters have a lot more weight than the hero of a popular sitcom that lasts maybe four years. They have become post-industrial folklore, and part of this job is to be the custodian of folk figures.”
This reformed attitude about his role as a custodian of beloved characters may help to explain why these fan-polls never became terribly popular, which made A Death in the Family that much more of a milestone — though it does seems unfair that so much of this backlash was directed toward O’Neil and DC directly. After all, it was the decision of the 10,000-plus fans who called in to vote, even though the difference came out to be less than 100. Weldon agrees, saying that he was “always struck by how it’s only a few thousand people,” adding that “those were the ones who were motivated.”
Regardless, even though Weldon himself voted in favor of killing Robin all those years ago, he insists that “Batman could have gone on being Batman without it. It did feel like they were putting their hand on the scale because you can have stakes, you can have consequences, and there’s more than one way to go about it.”
Nevertheless, the fans voted and the DC gave them what they wanted, and for better or worse, it did weigh down Batman’s world with a real sense of consequence, breaking away from the perpetual narrative where nothing ever really changes in comic book characters’ lives. Aside from the backlash, A Death in the Family was immensely popular, and Les Daniels, author of Batman: The Complete History, has said that the story arc helped set the stage for “the biggest blizzard of Batmania the world has ever known.”
Less than six months later, Tim Burton’s Batman arrived in theaters, and moviegoers were introduced to a dark, stylized version of the iconic character for the first time. Since then, Batman’s appeared in more than eight major motion pictures — two of which featured Robin (three if you count The Dark Knight Rises).
Perhaps inevitably, Jason Todd’s death was eventually undone. He returned from the dead and began operating under the mantle of The Red Hood, an alias once used by the Joker. At first, he was an adversary to Batman, then later rejoined the Bat-family alongside several other former sidekicks. Regardless, Jason Todd’s death-by-popular-vote will always remain an important milestone in comic book history. It showed that Batman’s world was one of recurring, lasting consequence, and showed the readers that you can leave an important character’s fate up to fans and they’ll be unhappy no matter what happens.
