So way back in 1988-89 Jason Todd (The 2nd Robin) was so disliked that DC Comics did the 'Death In The Family Storyline (the first one) … and readers ACTUALLY got to VOTE on whether Jason Todd Lived or Died.
The character was so disliked at that time more votes came in to kill him then let him live.
My question is… Were you around back then and did you vote? What was your vote? (and how do you feel about it now??)
If you were NOT around back then… would you have voted? What would YOUR VOTE have been?
Keep in mind the Batman Family would look slightly different if this vote had gone the other way.
For a lot of fans, self included, the street urchin who turns crime fighter just didn’t feel earned, more contrived. I also didn’t want him to come back. The one he couldn’t save was a powerful moment in Bats career. But with Redhood that ended up working out.
I’m not nearly that old, but I would’ve voted to let him live if I had no future-knowledge going in. If I knew then how well Tim Drake would work out, I would reluctantly vote to kill him, because twenty-five or so good years of Tim as Robin is worth going-on-ten annoying years of Jason as the Red Hood.
As for why: Pre-Crisis Jason was kind of a waste of space, but Post-Crisis Jason was interesting, as a tougher, more streetwise Robin who was insecure about living up to Dick Grayson. I think he made an interesting contrast to both Dick and Bruce and could’ve rounded out an interesting little trio with them. He just never got any really good stories before he died, and he was killed off in such an anticlimactic, poorly written arc that even if I didn’t like him, I wouldn’t want him to die like that.
I wasn’t quite old enough to vote, but I think I would have opted to let him live. I have a bleeding heart and really love hard to handle characters so I probably would have been pretty invested in who he was as Robin.
That said, I really do love him as the Red Hood, personally.
Although seeing it now, it might seem interesting to let him live, we’ve got to keep in mind this was at a time before any real deaths had really happened in comics, so having Jason die would have been seen as a really compelling prospect at the time.
Was around, was reading the books. I voted for him to die (thrice)
He a was a horses’s ass then, now and always. I just hope Joker kidnaps him again can do the job properly this time.
Did I vote? No. That was the year before I got into DC.
Would I have voted? Yes.
What would I have voted? To quote James Lipton: “What would you say when you arrive at the pearly gates?”
I liked Jason Todd as Robin, but the opportunity to invite some new storytelling blood into the mythos by having an ally of Batman’s die at the hands of his greatest enemy is too good to pass up.
Batman had saved Robin (regardless of who was under the domino mask) so many times, that it was an incredibly refreshing idea to have a story of where Batman just doesn’t save the day for his ally this time.
The ramifications and storytelling opportunities to come out of that story affected Batman for decades. If he had saved Robin, it would have been a “just another day, just another dollar” kind of story and likely nothing more.
Jason Todd’s death is a textbook example of how a daring change to the status quo of a character can bring some much needed fresh blood to the proceedings of a decades old character and reinvent them anew for decades to come.
The polls weren’t hacked. As I recall, they were 1-900 numbers. If you called, you paid a fee to vote. And everyone was free to vote as many times as they wanted.
I’ve never really been into Batman, and I was too young to call 1-900 numbers at the time. But I was around, and I remember being very curious after Jason died. The marketing worked pretty dammed well.
I probably would have voted for him to live. Jason got pretty messed up in the Legends crossover event (multiple broken limbs), and he’d been beaten up a few times in the Batman titles. And of course, Batman best on him during training on a regular basis. If he’d had lived, I can see him snapping anyway.
It was a1-900 number.
They did get someone with a few bucks who robocalled the “kill” line. It was in the thousands as I remember it and Jason dying won out by a few hundred votes.
Jim Starlin is on record as saying no one ever asked him to write an alternate ending where Jason II lived. I say Jason II because he had been recently changed after Crisis on Infinite Earths.
I did not vote, but would have voted to let him live, tweak him back somewhat, and move on with the story.
