Welcome to life ain’t fair and “you’re that character that at first had zero personality and the once you got one, it consisted of you being an asshat.” So guess what, it’s the 80’s, it really hard to directly engage with your fan base. Plenty of them have never used a computer and don’t even know what the net” is.
You know you are getting older readers. So “hey, we’ve got this character and maybe we sent him down a dark journey redemption arc and it just isn’t working and basically he’s an ass hat.” We could go through many additional issues of trying to figure out a way for this asshat to possibly stop being an asshat. Eh…let’s kill the bastardized off. Sounds reasonable.”
And they killed him, Jason Todd. A fictional character. this wasn’t a real kid.
He gets brought back to life years later as The Red Hood, and “sure he’s a psychotic serial killer, but that’s ok. He only kills ‘bad guys’ so that’s ok. Cuz it’s ok to kill if we think the people that are being killed are bad people. And…besides he slows his roll eventually and even stops killing people OK…see hes a good person…a good person with a couple dozens homicides…but we all have some baggage and he’s working through it.”
Stop apologizing for Jason Todd, he was an asshat when he went out, and he is a muderous psycho when he came back.
That’s what some folks like in their Superheroes, I mean anti-heroes,no wait…hoicidal psycho.
@DeSade-acolyte And that’s your opinion and argument on the matter, I have mine you have yours.
I and everyone else is aware Jason Todd is a fictional character.
But, your argument is not very strong. The only evidence you have is that fact that he’s committed murder. Basically every character DC has, has murdered someone at one point. Sure murder isn’t right, but this is a fictional world is it not? So I think it’s ok to play a bit loose with the fact that fictional Jason Todd has killed some fictional bad guys. I’m sure fictional Superman has accidentally killed a few **fictional ** civilians leveling buildings during fights, hell that was the whole plot of a Marvel movie.
So don’t tell me to “stop apologizing for Jason Todd” I can have my opinion and argue for it and you can keep being a 100 IQ genius who’s only argument is “but he murdered fictional people!” And “he had a bad attitude” and calling Jason an “asshat”. That’s your argument, and while it’s not strong at all it’s yours so you have a right to it.
Oh and if he’s such a bad guy for being a fictional character killing fictional bad guys, why can’t I use the fact that it’s pretty messed up to kill a fictional kid? Are fictional bad guys better than fictional kids?
Yep. I’m entitled to my opinion as you are yours.
The term “asshat” falls within community guidelines.
But, I’ll now set aside pleasantries and sardonic humor.
Who has plastic man murdered?
Who has Superman murdered?
They may have taken a life because of a result of something usually out of their control and you still have gotta show the bodies. But let’s just say that lives have been lost as part of their crime fighting activities.
That is different than the calculated, premeditated killing of an individual with malice a fore thought. That is murder. Jason is a murder. And a murderer multiple times over. A murderous psychopath, with likely more murders under his belt than Riddler or Two-Face or Penguin. Hell, maybe more than all three of them combined. He is a psychotic murder and his butt should be rotting in Iron Height, Belle Reve or Arkham.
Before he died he had zero personality than after COIE, he got retconned a personality and just as Cisco remarked about Harrison Wells from earth-2, “He’s just a dick.”
Glad they killed him. Voted for them to kill him, He was a shite human being before DITF and he never should have been brought back because he is still a shite human being, and now has A string of murders to back that up.
Just gonna point out that while pointing out these are just fictional characters, you generally give them just as much agency as everybody else around here.
It would be really interesting to see how differently each one of us would teach an acting class.
Veering back from my digression, Death in the Family is one of those stories where reader POV becomes the most blatant-- it IS powerful if you want it to be, and if, like me, you are less than thrilled with it, that sense of disappointment isn’t really with the storytelling of Starlin and especially Aparo, but with the publishing and editorial decisions that created the path that led to the story.
And the Joker, like Batman, is open to a thousand interpretations within a box-- but one without a lid.
@HubCityQuestion Have you ever read Richard Dragon Kung Fu Fighter #5?
“At one point, DC had this idea of giving one of their characters AIDS so they could do an AIDS booklet,” explained Starlin. “Strangely enough, they decided to put up a ballot box and let the people who worked in the company decide who was gonna get AIDS in the DC Universe. I tried to stuff the box with Robin’s name, and at the end it was Jimmy Olsen who was elected to get AIDS. The entire project was eventually abandoned.”
Okay I HAD heard of this but what I hadn’t heard was that Starlin tried to stuff the box with Robin’s name???
What the actual hell. Why, just why Robin? Why a kid?
My understanding is that he thought the concept of Batman having a child partner was ridiculous and unrealistic. Which… yeah, okay, it was. But there were soooooo many other ways to write him off. The arc that was DitF could easily have ended with Sheila not being terrible and Jason deciding to stay with his family and riding off into the sunset.
The problem, however, is the time. It was the 80s and everyone was riding high on Watchmen and The Killing Joke and Vertigo and just generally darker and more mature comics (an era for which O’Neil also deserves both credit and blame). And those were good comics! Hell, Jason’s Post-Crisis origin is even a result of that darker turn (and I’d argue a good result tbh).
But the problem is that people started thinking that “dark” and “sad” were automatically synonymous with “good,” and we saw a wave of imitators determined to make the most depressing damn comics they could as a result. Why just write Robin out when you could instead KILL HIM? And hey, those comics that are politically relevant and incisive went well, so let’s tie it into something relevant. How about AIDS! No. Wait. International terrorism! And have him be BEATEN WITH A CROWBAR AND TIED TO A BOMB! And you could make money off it with a fan poll, too!
Unfortunately, it turns out that there’s no shortcut to quality writing, and so we ended up with Death in the Family.
It would have been a bad idea, but I can understand (A) why they considered doing it. (B) why Starlin would try to stuff the ballot box.
In the 1980’s HIV/AIDS was a big problem, a serious health issue and one of the quickest growing demographic populations were 15-25. (A major portion of DC customer base.)
People seem to forget that Surgeon General C Evereet Coop defied then President Ronald Reagan. Reagan had appointed him and and wanted abstinence education taught in Sex Ed. He wanted Coop to use the HIV/AIDS epidemic to reinforce his “ abstinence only” agenda. Coop refused and came out with his “use of a condom” recommendation.
I can see Starlin using Jason, who often didn’t think things through, was impulsive, and certainly was not always well prepared for what he got himself into, would be a strong candidate.
However, HIV/AIDS was to politically charged a situation and DC decided not to get into the fray. Which in retrospect was a good idea.
If you think the Joker & Ayatollah was political. That would have made the politics in comics radar had DC taken on the issue of HIV/AIDS.
I wonder if they’ll acknowledge any of this. I don’t recall them ever really going into anything remotely negative in their comics discussions. Which is nice in theory, but man would reacting to some of this make for some interesting viewing.
How about this:
While the story is not without its flaws, the way that it influenced what would come over the next decades cannot be denied. The Batman mythos would be vastly different without this story.
for poor Jason Todd.
