Boy Wonder (Feeling Sorry for Jason Todd)
I remember where I was when I heard Robin died. In my parents' kitchen, looking over my mom's shoulder during breakfast as she pointed it out to me in the LA Times.
I wasn't reading comic books back then, but I knew who Batman and Robin were - had some cool read-along books-with-tapes featuring them, had seen the old TV show, and thought they were awesome. When I heard Robin had died, I was shocked and saddened. My parents viewed fiction primarily as a vehicle for escapement, and not much else. When Joe Hardy's girlfriend was killed in the updated Hardy Boys Casefiles, my mom banned me from reading them (for a little while, at least).
Because in fiction, at least, the good guys shouldn't die.
So for me, one of the defining moments in the history of Batman is the death of Jason Todd.
Mind you, I didn't know it was actually Jason Todd who had died - I imagine my mom didn't understand the distinction at the time. All I knew was that Dick Grayson was Robin, and Robin was dead.
It was a while until I learned otherwise. In fact, I was a bit terrified of Burton's Batman movie because I was pretty sure they'd kill Robin onscreen. But I gave in and saw it, and the guy who took my brother and I to see it also unloaded a bunch of his old comic books on us (mostly Marvel, because seriously, what else would you read?) and I was pretty instantly hooked. At some point, I read Craig Shaw Gardner's The Batman Murders novelization, and was elated to find out that Dick Grayson was alive and well and some other kid wearing the Robin costume had been killed. IIRC, Bruce Wayne was still mourning the death of the new Robin.
For those who don't know, the Robin mythos goes like this: Dick Grayson, the original Robin, grew up some, moved out of Wayne Manor, trying to make something of himself on his own. He retired the Boy Wonder's costume, eventually became Nightwing, and the mantle of Robin was passed onto troubled-teen Jason Todd around 1983. Fans...were not overly fond of Jason Todd.
Eventually, I read Batman: A Death in the a Family (1988), saw how the whole thing went down (not only in storyline, but how the editors had decided to put Jason Todd's life and death up to a fan phone poll). And I thought wow: Brutal.
Rereading it again this weekend, it's interesting that I came up with pretty much the same conclusion. Totally brutal.
Turns out I'm not the only one. According to Wikipedia, Frank "I'm the goddamned Batman" Miller, who wrote other definitive Batman books (The Dark Knight Returns, Year One) said, "To me the whole killing of Robin thing was probably the ugliest thing I've seen in comics, and the most cynical."
Dave's Note: When Frank Miller suggests you're being ugly, you might want to pause and consider.
In the comic, Jason finds out his biological mother is still alive, runs away from Gotham City and Bruce Wayne to travel to Lebanon, Iran, and Ethopia hoping to find her. Batman eventually finds him. Unfortunately, so does the Joker. The Joker beats the shit out of Jason Todd, then sets a timebomb to finish him off. Batman vows revenge, even makes the decision to break his moral code so he can kill the Joker (he doesn't actually get to, of course).
The third issue ended when the bomb went off. In the back of the comic, readers were given two 900 numbers to call. One number was a vote to keep Jason Todd alive, another vote was to kill him off. 5,343 votes for him to die, 5,271 for him to live. Pretty thin margin of error, really. Interesting to note (and probably unsurprising), Batman editor Denny O'Neal is on record as saying that there's evidence one person voted hundreds of times for Jason Todd to die.
Okay, first off, the story has it's fair share of plot holes. I feel kind of silly dismantling these too much, but the most obvious ones are: Jason's discovery that he's never known his biological mother, whose name on his newly discovered birth certificate was illegible, serves as a catalyst for him to track down three women who's names were in his father's address book. Why he didn't try researching it through other means is beyond me? Kid's impulsive, I guess. Also: Joker blows up Jason because he wants to cover his tracks and hopes Batman won't discover his part in the scheme. Then in the next issue, Joker leaves a message in blood for Batman, and signs it (after Joker's become an Iranian ambassador. I shit you not). I mean, he is an insane homicidal maniac. So okay. Sure. I can roll with it, I guess.
It's also interesting to me all the political stuff the comic tries to tackles. The Joker smuggles a nuclear weapon to the middle east, which plays no cold war fears. There's also allusions to the Iran-Contra affair, Reaganomics, and the famine in Ethopia. Unfortunately, the storyline doesn't do so well when Ayatollah Khomeini appears to make the Joker an Iranian Ambassador to the U.N. And when the Joker does appear before the U.N., he's wearing Arabic robes which of course hide canisters of his lethal gas. Oh, and the Joker's speech? Essentially equates Muslims (and specifically Iranians) for being just like him. Madmen and outsiders, all for one, etc. (Keep in mind the Joker calls every Arab he speaks with "Abdul," which I guess shows we shouldn't take him as too much of an authority. But still. Uncomfortable? Very.) And the majority of the Arabs we see are terrorists.
Also: Batman and Robin in the Middle Eastern desert, fighting said terrorists? Just looks odd to me.
That's not to say it's a bad comic. It is a product of its time. I will give props to the ending, though. The Joker takes a couple bullets and goes down in a helicopter crash, Batman knows they won't find his body, that he's not dead. That he'll be back. And it allows the story to end in a very uneasy sort of fashion.
So despite the missteps, ADitF is one of the definitive Batman stories for me. I started seriously reading Batman comics after this took place, and the way Bruce Wayne's haunted by the guilt of Jason's death made Batman so much more human and fallible.
At least, that's always been my perspective.
Perspective is a funny thing, though. After re-reading ADitF, I did some research. As I mentioned, Jason Todd was killed in 1988 (Batman 428). Less than a year later - less than 12 issues later, a new Robin (Tim Drake) was introduced (Batman 436). I had just started reading comics around the time, and the arc where Tim Drake's introduced were some of the first Batman comics I bought. (Batman and Nightwing - Dick Grayson - team up to fight Two-Face and fail; it's awesome.) But for me, it felt like years - maybe even a decade - had gone by in which Batman had gone without a Robin. But in reality, that wasn't the case.
Also interesting - I can't remember when I read Miller's Dark Knight Returns, whether it was before or after ADitF. But I didn't realize until this weekend that Miller's comic, which makes references to Jason Todd's death, predates ADitF by two years. Miller's comic isn't considered continuity by D.C., but I guess when people call it visionary...well, there's some of the proof. But I suppose between reading that book, and the Craig Shaw Gardner novelization, time expanded in my mind.
Jason Todd's death was a big deal in comics. People voted for him to die (even if the system was gamed). And it took D.C. 20 years to figure out how to resurrect him, and that's an eternity for comic books. And yet shortly after his death, he was replaced, by a newer, far more popular kid. (And for the record, I think Tim Drake kicks ass.)
Still, I'm kind of fascinated by how certain things imprint on your mind. How less than a year can feel like forever. And how something that feels definitive to me, could've just been a bump in the road for someone else.
I know a lot of times people talk about how violence in movies/comics/books desensitizes kids. There may be some truth to that, but I feel like for me ficticious violence can feel just as horrible and have a lasting impact on someone.
I wasn't reading comic books back then, but I knew who Batman and Robin were - had some cool read-along books-with-tapes featuring them, had seen the old TV show, and thought they were awesome. When I heard Robin had died, I was shocked and saddened. My parents viewed fiction primarily as a vehicle for escapement, and not much else. When Joe Hardy's girlfriend was killed in the updated Hardy Boys Casefiles, my mom banned me from reading them (for a little while, at least).
Because in fiction, at least, the good guys shouldn't die.
So for me, one of the defining moments in the history of Batman is the death of Jason Todd.
Mind you, I didn't know it was actually Jason Todd who had died - I imagine my mom didn't understand the distinction at the time. All I knew was that Dick Grayson was Robin, and Robin was dead.
It was a while until I learned otherwise. In fact, I was a bit terrified of Burton's Batman movie because I was pretty sure they'd kill Robin onscreen. But I gave in and saw it, and the guy who took my brother and I to see it also unloaded a bunch of his old comic books on us (mostly Marvel, because seriously, what else would you read?) and I was pretty instantly hooked. At some point, I read Craig Shaw Gardner's The Batman Murders novelization, and was elated to find out that Dick Grayson was alive and well and some other kid wearing the Robin costume had been killed. IIRC, Bruce Wayne was still mourning the death of the new Robin.
For those who don't know, the Robin mythos goes like this: Dick Grayson, the original Robin, grew up some, moved out of Wayne Manor, trying to make something of himself on his own. He retired the Boy Wonder's costume, eventually became Nightwing, and the mantle of Robin was passed onto troubled-teen Jason Todd around 1983. Fans...were not overly fond of Jason Todd.
Eventually, I read Batman: A Death in the a Family (1988), saw how the whole thing went down (not only in storyline, but how the editors had decided to put Jason Todd's life and death up to a fan phone poll). And I thought wow: Brutal.
Rereading it again this weekend, it's interesting that I came up with pretty much the same conclusion. Totally brutal.
Turns out I'm not the only one. According to Wikipedia, Frank "I'm the goddamned Batman" Miller, who wrote other definitive Batman books (The Dark Knight Returns, Year One) said, "To me the whole killing of Robin thing was probably the ugliest thing I've seen in comics, and the most cynical."
Dave's Note: When Frank Miller suggests you're being ugly, you might want to pause and consider.
In the comic, Jason finds out his biological mother is still alive, runs away from Gotham City and Bruce Wayne to travel to Lebanon, Iran, and Ethopia hoping to find her. Batman eventually finds him. Unfortunately, so does the Joker. The Joker beats the shit out of Jason Todd, then sets a timebomb to finish him off. Batman vows revenge, even makes the decision to break his moral code so he can kill the Joker (he doesn't actually get to, of course).
The third issue ended when the bomb went off. In the back of the comic, readers were given two 900 numbers to call. One number was a vote to keep Jason Todd alive, another vote was to kill him off. 5,343 votes for him to die, 5,271 for him to live. Pretty thin margin of error, really. Interesting to note (and probably unsurprising), Batman editor Denny O'Neal is on record as saying that there's evidence one person voted hundreds of times for Jason Todd to die.
Okay, first off, the story has it's fair share of plot holes. I feel kind of silly dismantling these too much, but the most obvious ones are: Jason's discovery that he's never known his biological mother, whose name on his newly discovered birth certificate was illegible, serves as a catalyst for him to track down three women who's names were in his father's address book. Why he didn't try researching it through other means is beyond me? Kid's impulsive, I guess. Also: Joker blows up Jason because he wants to cover his tracks and hopes Batman won't discover his part in the scheme. Then in the next issue, Joker leaves a message in blood for Batman, and signs it (after Joker's become an Iranian ambassador. I shit you not). I mean, he is an insane homicidal maniac. So okay. Sure. I can roll with it, I guess.
It's also interesting to me all the political stuff the comic tries to tackles. The Joker smuggles a nuclear weapon to the middle east, which plays no cold war fears. There's also allusions to the Iran-Contra affair, Reaganomics, and the famine in Ethopia. Unfortunately, the storyline doesn't do so well when Ayatollah Khomeini appears to make the Joker an Iranian Ambassador to the U.N. And when the Joker does appear before the U.N., he's wearing Arabic robes which of course hide canisters of his lethal gas. Oh, and the Joker's speech? Essentially equates Muslims (and specifically Iranians) for being just like him. Madmen and outsiders, all for one, etc. (Keep in mind the Joker calls every Arab he speaks with "Abdul," which I guess shows we shouldn't take him as too much of an authority. But still. Uncomfortable? Very.) And the majority of the Arabs we see are terrorists.
Also: Batman and Robin in the Middle Eastern desert, fighting said terrorists? Just looks odd to me.
That's not to say it's a bad comic. It is a product of its time. I will give props to the ending, though. The Joker takes a couple bullets and goes down in a helicopter crash, Batman knows they won't find his body, that he's not dead. That he'll be back. And it allows the story to end in a very uneasy sort of fashion.
So despite the missteps, ADitF is one of the definitive Batman stories for me. I started seriously reading Batman comics after this took place, and the way Bruce Wayne's haunted by the guilt of Jason's death made Batman so much more human and fallible.
At least, that's always been my perspective.
Perspective is a funny thing, though. After re-reading ADitF, I did some research. As I mentioned, Jason Todd was killed in 1988 (Batman 428). Less than a year later - less than 12 issues later, a new Robin (Tim Drake) was introduced (Batman 436). I had just started reading comics around the time, and the arc where Tim Drake's introduced were some of the first Batman comics I bought. (Batman and Nightwing - Dick Grayson - team up to fight Two-Face and fail; it's awesome.) But for me, it felt like years - maybe even a decade - had gone by in which Batman had gone without a Robin. But in reality, that wasn't the case.
Also interesting - I can't remember when I read Miller's Dark Knight Returns, whether it was before or after ADitF. But I didn't realize until this weekend that Miller's comic, which makes references to Jason Todd's death, predates ADitF by two years. Miller's comic isn't considered continuity by D.C., but I guess when people call it visionary...well, there's some of the proof. But I suppose between reading that book, and the Craig Shaw Gardner novelization, time expanded in my mind.
Jason Todd's death was a big deal in comics. People voted for him to die (even if the system was gamed). And it took D.C. 20 years to figure out how to resurrect him, and that's an eternity for comic books. And yet shortly after his death, he was replaced, by a newer, far more popular kid. (And for the record, I think Tim Drake kicks ass.)
Still, I'm kind of fascinated by how certain things imprint on your mind. How less than a year can feel like forever. And how something that feels definitive to me, could've just been a bump in the road for someone else.
I know a lot of times people talk about how violence in movies/comics/books desensitizes kids. There may be some truth to that, but I feel like for me ficticious violence can feel just as horrible and have a lasting impact on someone.