Looking Back on Jason Todd

Today’s comic-book marketing depends heavily on creator interviews put out on the web for retailers and fans. Amazingly, every writer, artist, and editor feels excited about the stories that are just going on sale. Of course, they can’t say why they’re excited without giving away plot twists, but excited they are. I find these interviews to be nearly indistinguishable and almost useless for seeing how superhero comics get put together.

But give the same creators a couple of years, a new assignment, a managerial change or two, and then the interesting behind-the-scenes stories come out: the arguments, the unexplored paths, the mistakes. Many of those stories are probably even true.

Batman editor Dennis O’Neil offers an interesting example. In 1987, soon after taking that job, he gave an interview to the first issue of Comics Scene (a printed fanzine in those pre-web days, quoted on Titans Tower) about the new Jason Todd:

Jason steals the tires off the Batmobile. And Batman decides, “This kid is going to end up dead or in prison by the time he’s 20 anyhow, I might as well see what I can do with him.” He also likes the kid, he feels a kind of chemistry. . . . And thank God for people like Jason Todd, because without him and Alfred, Bruce Wayne would be sort of a monster. They’re a very humanizing influence.

That’s how things looked—or at least how O’Neil and his employer wanted fans to see things—in 1987. Within two years, Jason Todd was dead, killed off by his unpopularity.

Less than two years after that, in an interview for The Many Lives of the Batman, edited by Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (1991), O’Neil ruminated about how the wheels had come off:

Q: Why did everyone hate him so much? Why did he get killed?

A: Boy, that’s a good question. They did hate him. I don’t know if it was fan craziness—maybe they saw him as usurping Dick Grayson’s position. Some of the mail response indicated that this was at least on some people’s minds. I think this is taking the whole thing entirely too seriously.

It may be that something was working in the writers’ minds, probably on a subconscious level. They made the little brat a little bit more disagreeable than his predecessor had been. He did become unlikeable, and that was not any doing of mine. Once we became aware of that, of course, we began playing with it.

Q: And this decision was influenced by the fan letters you were getting?

A: Yeah. The general response. The fan letters and then being a comic book editor, artist and writer in the eighties mean you go out and meet the fans a lot. What we get in the way of verbal response and mail is certainly not definitive, but it is probably as informative as the television ratings. It’s sort of an informal sampling.

I think that once writers became aware the fans didn’t like Jason Todd, they began to make him bratty. I toned some of it down. If I had to do it again, I would tone it down more. But you make these decisions from hour to hour and sometimes not under the best conditions.

So we did a story, for example, in which it was left vague as to whether or not Jason pushed someone off a balcony. The writer, Jim Starlin, thought he did—I thought he didn’t, but we let the reader decide. There was certainly no doubt that throughout much of the story he wanted to push this guy off of the balcony.

And then when we were building up to the death of Robin we made him rebellious—he ran away, and in a way he got what he was asking for. He disobeyed Batman twice, and that’s what led his demise.

Starlin himself sees things differently, according to interviews he gave in the past decade (i.e., many years after the events) to Universo HQ and Adelaide Comics:

I always thought that the whole idea of a kid side-kick was sheer insanity. So when I started writing Batman, I immediately started lobbying to kill off Robin. . . .

And Denny O’Neill [sic] said “We can’t kill Robin off”. Then Denny one night got this flash that “Hey, if we get this number where people call in and they can vote on it, they can decide whether Robin lives or dies.” . . .

So we did this and the book came out, Denny was on all these talk shows across the country that day saying, it’s kind of funny because he was taking credit for the whole project. But as soon as the book came out and Robin died, the executives up at DC started going “Whoof!” because they had all these lunch pails with Robin’s picture on it—suddenly it was all my idea again.

I don’t find Starlin’s recollection as convincing as O‘Neil’s. Despite his contempt for the idea of a kid sidekick, Starlin wrote Jason Todd as a very traditional Robin in a 1988 miniseries called Batman: The Cult. He’s a pro; he would have continued to write stories about both Batman and Robin if the fans had continued to demand them.

It’s true that the last chapter of A Death in the Family was Starlin’s penultimate issue of Batman. But if there was pressure from DC executives about “all these lunch pails with Robin’s picture,” why did the company embark on a big redesign of the Robin character in 1990?

I think the recollections from both O’Neil and Starlin reveal the human tendency to massage our pasts into stories with coherence and meaning. For Starlin, Jason Todd died because his character made no sense, and Starlin saw that before others at DC. For O’Neil, the lesson of the Jason Todd debacle was not to let fans perceive a new Robin as usurping the place of the first one. O’Neil might also posit that Starlin’s hostility toward Jason was unconscious resentment about such usurpation, which I presume Starlin would deny.

Which man is right? Usually in a disagreement like this, the boss wins. O’Neil was the editor, Starlin a freelancer. O’Neil wanted to get Robin right, and Starlin wasn’t the writer to do that. So in early 1989 Starlin was off the Batman book, and O’Neil was seeking a way to introduce a new Robin that showed proper respect for Dick Grayson.

Buy This Magazine or We’ll Kill This Robin

In early 1988, Batman magazines editor Dennis O’Neil faced two novel challenges. First, he’d proposed that DC Comics set up and publicize 900 numbers to let readers vote on some question in the DC Universe. This would strengthen the link to readers and get some publicity, O’Neil argued. But what question would be appropriate?

Publisher Jenette Kahn didn’t want to use the effort for a minor issue, such as a new costume or a year’s free membership in the Justice League. At the same time, the vote’s effect had to be limited enough that one magazine could be ready to reflect the readers’ choice. Readers couldn’t be invited to vote on something that would affect the entire line, such as reversing the recent Crisis on Infinite Earths.

O’Neil’s second challenge was the “Robin problem” that arose after writers Max Allan Collins and Jim Starlin had given Batman’s young sidekick Jason Todd a new background and more challenging personality. To O’Neil’s surprise, readers disliked the result. For example, in Batman, #424, reader George Gustines wrote of recent issues:

The best part of all these stories is that there have been few appearances of Robin, who I think is an insult to the real hero who once wore that costume.

Even Starlin was reportedly lobbying to get rid of the new Robin. The character had stopped appearing in Detective Comics as Alan Grant and John Wagner became its writers. (Here’s Greg Burgas’s appreciation of those issues.) O’Neil and his Batman team had already decided to remove Jason from the Robin role, but not how to do that or what to do with him next.

O’Neil saw the “Robin problem” as the answer to his 900-number challenge, and the 900-number vote as the answer to his Robin problem. Jason was on his way out, but readers would be invited to decided whether he would die or would survive but no longer be able or eager to serve as Robin. Turning the result over to readers would also spare O’Neil the need to impose a choice himself.

Starlin scripted a series of Batman issues under the title “A Death in the Family.” The family was Jason’s: he discovers that the mother he remembered wasn’t his birth mother and runs away from Gotham City to track down three candidates. As for the death, that would be his mother’s—and it could be his as well. Ads in all the DC magazines told readers:

Robin will die because the Joker wants revenge but you can prevent it with a telephone call.

The options under the two phone numbers were, “The Joker fails, and Robin lives,” and “The Joker succeeds and Robin will not survive.” (The copywriters appear to have shied away from using the word “die” or “kill.”)

The issues went out. The calls came in. Readers voted for Jason to survive the Joker’s bomb. Batman found him badly injured in the wreckage, and the character was shipped off for rehabilitation, thus removing him from the comics for an indefinite time. But before he disappeared, Jason promised Bruce Wayne that he would adopt a new attitu—

Oh, wait, that’s what happened in an alternate universe. In our universe, fans voted 5,343 to 5,271 for Jason to die. Artist Jim Aparo had prepared two versions of the final panel in Batman, #428. One showed Batman anguishing over Jason’s corpse, the other Batman celebrating that Jason had survived. The panel to the left is the one that never got colored.

The difference was only 72 votes out of more than 10,000, or .68% of the total. O’Neil, who had been reading the fan mail, expected the vote to be much higher in favor of death. Editorial Director Dick Giordano bet that the fans would go the other way.

In an interview O’Neil later said, “I heard it was one guy, who programmed his computer to dial the thumbs down number every ninety seconds for eight hours.” But it’s not clear whether the source of that statement was the company that recorded the calls or an untraceable comics-convention rumor.

Either way, Jason Todd was dead.

COMING UP: Reactions from a couple of Robin fans, and why death was the best thing that ever happened to the character of Jason Todd.

Jason Todd: Capable of Killing?

The last two weekly Robins have discussed how the personality and narrative function of the second Jason Todd varied greatly depending on who wrote the stories. Those differences arose from the approach of the new editor on DC’s Batman books, Dennis O’Neil. He had helped to usher in the modern Batman after 1969, then worked as an editor at Marvel, and finally returned to DC.

O’Neil recently described his ideal approach to editing:

During my first stint as a card-carrying, full-time comic book editor entitled to health benefits, personal days and my own invitation to the office Christmas party, I screwed up. I thought that the bossfolk had hired me because they thought I could write and therefore all I had to do was make the work of the writers I hired indistinguishable from my own. Which was dunderheaded. . . .

the editorial task was simply to get the best possible stuff from the creative people, given whatever limitations and restrictions were established. To cram another’s prose into the procrustean bed of my own productions was to get, at best, third rate O’Neil when what we should have wanted was first rate (fill in the name of some poor freelancer whose labor was massacred by the younger and dumber me).

Artist Norm Breyfogle confirmed what it was like to work for O’Neil at DC in an interview with Graphic Novel Reporter: “He allowed his creative teams great freedom while providing basic visionary parameters.”

What did that mean for Jason Todd? It meant O’Neil okayed the ideas that his writers thought would produce the best stories. As quoted at Titans Tower, O’Neil described this genesis for Jason’s reinvention:

In 1986, Max Allan Collins inherited the Batman writing assignment and told his editor he had an idea for an improved Jason Todd. Make him a street kid, Collins said. Make his parents criminals. Have him and Batman on opposite sides at first.

Sounded fine to the editor and, since DC was in the middle of a vast, company-wide overhaul of storylines anyway, Collins was told to go ahead. I was the editor; I did the telling. And I’d do it again, today. Collins’s Robin was dramatic, did have story potential.

But readers didn’t take to him. I don’t know now, and will probably never know why. Jason was accepted as long as he was a Dick Grayson clone, but when he acquired a distinct and, Collins and I still believe, more interesting back story, their affection cooled.

O’Neil’s hands-off approach allowed Collins’s Jason to differ from Mike W. Barr’s, which in turn differed drastically from Jim Starlin’s. O’Neil let each writer play to his strength rather than dictate a single approach. With troubling consequences.One of Starlin’s storylines in 1988 involved Batman and Robin tracking down a serial rapist, only to learn that he has diplomatic immunity because of his father. Jason, hot-headed and angry, wants to go after the guy. Bruce, eyes on the law, tells Jason to hold back.

It’s easy to see why O’Neil approved this plotline: it has good storytelling potential (as well as being gritty, the way the new DC wanted). Starlin laid out an interesting conflict between Batman and Robin, letting them act out important debates:

• What do you do when justice appears to be in conflict with the law?
• How do you balance the good of an individual against the good of a principle?
• Can a crimefighter lose his sense of justice by becoming too emotionally involved, or sacrifice it by not being emotional enough?
• What are the downsides of Batman’s principle not to kill?

In Batman, #424, Jason finds one of the rapist’s victims has hung herself, fearing he’ll come after her again. He swings over to confront the man on his balcony. In the next panel we see the man plunging to the street. Batman arrives.
Jason says the man slipped and refuses to answer any questions. What happened on that balcony remains ambiguous twenty years later. In some stories, that sort of ambiguity can be powerful. But for Jason Todd it was fatal.

Because Robin isn’t evil.

COMING UP: The decision point.

The Two Paths of Jason Todd

As the last weekly Robin described, in 1987 Max Allan Collins turned Jason Todd into a new kind of Robin, offering new storytelling possibilities. He explored Jason’s criminal background, rashness, and anger for a handful of issues, and then left the Batman magazine.

Meanwhile, at Detective Comics Mike W. Barr was writing a very traditional and fun set of Batman and Robin adventures. Alan Davis drew many of those stories, depicting Jason as a cute, spindly-legged kid in his early teens. (Greg Burgas has profiled the Barr/Davis run of Detective for Comic Book Resources.)

This run of issues straddles the period when Collins introduced Jason’s new origin, but Detective made almost no reference to the boy’s now-troubled past. Instead, Barr’s Robin acts very much like Dick Grayson from the 1940s through the 1960s, fulfilling the usual reasons for the character:

• giving Batman someone to talk to and not talk to.
• expressing emotions.
• offering comic relief.
• slipping and falling.
• boy hostage!

Barr’s scripts did edge into the darker universe that DC was trying to create in the late 1980s. Detective, #571, ends with an image of Jason’s tombstone, albeit an imaginary one. In issues #573-4 Jason gets shot, forcing Bruce Wayne to examine the danger he exposes his sidekicks to. Those stories show the dark side of Batman himself. In #570, he almost beats up a helpless Joker, but Jason holds him back—because Barr’s characterization also fulfilled Reason for Robin, #10: Robin Isn’t Evil.

Barr’s last story gave Jason another encounter with Two-Face, who killed his father. To his surprise, Jason discovers he can pity the villain. Those two issues, illustrated by Jim Baikie, depict Jason in his late teens, and in addition to growing up physically he’s clearly grown up emotionally.

However, over at the Batman magazine new scripter Jim Starlin moved in the opposite direction, going deeper into the dark side of Jason Todd that Collins had established. Starlin worked mainly with artist Jim Aparo, who had already illustrated many Batman stories in The Brave and the Bold and Batman and the Outsiders.
In a 2001 interview, Starlin declared that the character of Robin simply didn’t make sense: “The idea of taking a kid along to fight crime is ludicrous.” Barr had probed that very topic, but for Starlin the remedy was more drastic: “I wanted to kill off Robin as soon as I started writing Batman.” At least that’s what he said over a decade after that fact.

Back in late 1987 Starlin’s built stories around conflicts between Jason and established characters. In issue #416, he brought Dick Grayson back to Gotham to meet the new Robin, and to confront Bruce Wayne over their break-up. The result was an emotion-packed issue, worthy of reprinting. In the end Dick praises Jason’s potential. But for a lot of readers that tale probably turned them against Jason Todd.

Because it’s one thing to show Jason sassing Batman, acting cocky, or roughing up criminals. It’s quite another to show Jason disrespecting Nightwing—the leader of DC Comics’s most popular team, the character readers had grown up alongside, the one hero who’s most assuredly not evil. Jason was in serious trouble.
This recent panel from The Black Cat captures the character of Jason Todd by late 1987, tugged between competing portrayals.

COMING UP: Jason goes to the dark side?

When Robin Might Have Had AIDS

Mary Borsellino, co-founder of the Girl-Wonder.org website and author of Girl and Boy Robins, interviewed Judd Winick for Sequential Tart this week. The occasion was the release of the Batman: Under the Hood animated feature that Winick scripted, based on his comics storyline depicting the second Jason Todd’s return from the dead.

Borsellino wrote:

Deciding to put my disturbingly encyclopedic knowledge of all things Jason Todd to good use, I ask Winick if he’s ever heard about a storyline that was planned but never done, wherein Jason’s death would have been from AIDS.

“I think it was a stunning, unbelievable thing. In the time of fears and epidemic, to have had a superhero have it, I was stunned and proud to hear about that. But they were not able to do it. I always forget to ask Denny [O’Neil] about that, about what happened.”

Winick speaks from his present perspective, having become friends with AIDS educator Pedro Zamora on The Real World and writing Pedro and Me (2000), the most influential treatment of AIDS in the comics format (and also, I’ve argued, a milestone in the acceptance of graphic novels in American libraries).

However, the idea that Borsellino spoke of appears to have had a less noble beginning. Back in 2003, former Batman scripter Jim Starlin had this to say to Adelaide Comics:

I always thought that the whole idea of a kid side-kick was sheer insanity. So when I started writing Batman [in 1987], I immediately started lobbying to kill off Robin. At one point DC had this AIDS book they wanted to do. They sent around memos to everybody saying “What character do you think we should, you know, have him get AIDS and do this dramatic thing” and they never ended up doing this project. I kept sending them things saying “Oh, do Robin! Do Robin!” [laughs] And Denny O’Neil said “We can’t kill Robin off”.

Starlin eventually got to depict Jason Todd’s death in a different way. Such a slapdash way, in fact, that I’m pleased DC didn’t take up his idea for a storyline about Robin contracting HIV, which was clearly not motivated by a wish to educate the public or to explore the character. In fact, I doubt the company seriously considered his suggestion.

In 1987, American popular culture was just waking up to the reality of AIDS. That year brought ACT UP, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On. Children like Ryan White and the Ray brothers were being kept from school even though experts said ordinary contact with HIV-positive people posed no unusual health risks.

In that environment, progressive executives at DC Comics might well have discussed how to use the company’s conduit to readers in their teens and twenties to spread useful information, as it had tried a few years before with the very special issues of New Teen Titans. But the corporation would surely have balked at linking one of its oldest and most valuable trademarks to the still-dreaded disease.

In 1988 DC Comics published stories about gay and HIV-positive characters in New Guardians, Swamp Thing, and Hellraiser, a title from its more mature Vertigo imprint. But those characters were new creations, and they weren’t teenagers.

In the early 1990s the company addressed AIDS in all its magazines by featuring its heroes in a series of one-page public-service advertisements. Some of those ads were nearly explicit about the fallacies behind gay-bashing mobs or assuming “nice women” couldn’t be infected.

But the popular new Robin, Tim Drake, was seen as a character for younger teens. The ad that featured him was therefore especially circumspect about AIDS. It offered reassurance that “casual contact” was safe, advice to learn more, and complete silence on how HIV is transmitted. Ironically, Tim complains, “Nobody tells us. It’s like adults think we can’t handle it or something.”(Remember when getting some facts meant leaving the supercomputer?)