SCOTT: Hey everybody. Jason Todd, A.K.A the second Robin, A.K.A The Red Hood, A.K.A other
names I'm sure. He's sure had his ups and downs, becoming orphaned and living on the street
looks pretty not great, but getting to be Robin and fighting alongside Batman definitely
seems cool. Dying on the other hand does sound like the worst, and coming back to life might
sound like a good thing but the process seems kinda scary and probably painful. Oh hey we're
talking about the death and resurrection of Jason Todd today.
Jason Todd! Nope, already did that, sorry. As you know here at CM, we don't do
just regular 'origin stories' and 'history of' videos because there are many great channels
here on YouTube that already do that sort of thing better than we could. What we do
like to do, is to dive into the behind the scenes of how characters and stories were
created as well as answer very specific questions that you might ask. For example, Charlie Williams
asked if I could do an episode explaining how Jason Todd really came back to life because
the whole thing is a bit confusing. Yes, Charlie, I will do that for you. Before we can talk
about the death and return of Jason, we first need to know a little bit about his creation
as a character. Jason Todd first appeared in Batman #357 from 1983 but why was
he created in the first place and why did he take the name Robin? Why didn't he have
his own name? Well honestly the people at DC didn't even want a new robin character
in the first place. They wanted the first robin, Dick Grayson back at Batman's side,
but he was off doing Teen Titans stuff. Marv Wolfman and George Perez have liked what they
were doing with Dick at the time. They aged him up a few years, made him smarter, did
away with a lot of the puns that he used to spout off while fighting. And the readers
seemed to like Dick's character development as a leader and not just Batman's sidekick.
However the creative team behind the Batman titles during the early '80s was desperate
to have Robin back with Batman. The problem is, that they wanted to bring Dick back down
a few years to make him younger. Marv Wolfman said that they wanted to make him even younger
than he had been before he left Batman. They couldn't just introduce another kid into the
mix. It would screw up the whole marketing. The saying is "Batman and Robin" not "Batman
and someone else." They needed Robin back but Wolfman was not giving him up, so he came
up with this idea that he said quote "motivated totally by greed." He suggested that he could
change Dick Grayson's name to something else: Nightwing. And that would free up the name
Robin to be used by some new younger kid. And that's basically how we got the character
of Jason Todd. And this especially makes a lot of sense when you look at the original
origin of the character that was almost a carbon copy of Dick Grayson. Jason was a circus
acrobat with his mom and dad, and together made up The Flying Todd's. After is parents
were killed, he was adopted by Bruce Wayne where he would eventually become Robin, very
original. But it makes sense because they didn't want to change things up that much.
They wanted Dick Grayson back but they couldn't get him so they created a very similar character
who was a few years younger to fill the need without shifting the dynamic too much. This
origin would change after the continuity-altering Crisis Infinite Earths event. Now I don't
really want to get into a bunch of detail into what that is but all you really need
to know is that DC's continuity was super inconsistent, so they used this event as a
way of cleaning up histories and origins and characters and stories, patch up a bunch of
holes, and change things up. It was after the Crisis in Infinite Earths where Jason
Todd's origin was changed from a circus acrobat to an orphan on the street, where he would
meet Batman after stealing tires off the Batmobile. It was changed again in the New 52, where
he and Batman first met after he was caught stealing prescription drugs from doctor Leslie
Thompkins. After only a short time after the second Robin, Jason Todd was killed by the
Joker in the Death in the Family story arc. In the arc, his death as famously decided
by the fans. The Death in the Family story arc had Jason find out that his mother was
still alive so he went to Ethiopia to re-unite with her but it turns out that she was being
blackmailed into working with the Joker, who captured Jason and beat him up with a crowbar,
leaving him and his mother locked in a building with a bomb, which exploded before Batman
could get there. In a big cliffhanger, the team at DC let the fans decide the outcome.
Would Jason survive the explosion or would he die? Dial these numbers to cast your vote,
but probably don't do it now because I assume they don't work. Eh, do whatever you want.
But why would DC want to kill him off in the first place? Comic book writer and artist,
Jim Starlin, who wrote A Death in the Family, said that he never liked the idea of a kid
sidekick, in fact once he started working on Batman he started campaigning to kill Jason
off. And here's where it gets kind of interesting and maybe a little messed up. During this
time period where Starling was trying to get Robin killed, DC was workshopping a story
about AIDS. According to him, they sent around memos to everyone asking which character they
think should get AIDS and to no one's surprise, Starlin enthusiastically volunteered Jason
Todd. They never ended up doing the story, but Starlin's determination to kill off Robin
gave editor Denny O'Neil the idea to let the fans decide on his death. At the end of Batman
#427, there were two numbers that you could call depending on if you wanted Jason
to live or die. Thousands of votes were counted and the sentence was death. It was incredibly
close though, with less than a hundred votes making the difference. Now because of how
close it was, there's been this conspiracy that the voting system was stacked by one
guy who called in a lot. Denny O'Neil said that he had heard it was some lawyer who lived
in California and programmed his computer to dial the number to kill Robin every few
minutes. And if that indeed what happened, and because the votes were so close, that
guy would've been THE guy responsible for killing Jason Todd. Now there's really no
way that we'll ever get to the bottom of this one unless you are that guy and you have the
evidence of those phone calls, in which case...I'd love the exclusive if you could contact me.
But it doesn't really matter cause in the end, Jason was dead, which brings us to his
resurrection. Part of me wonders if he was brought back to life at least partly because
of that voting conspiracy and that he was never really meant to die. As you can see
here in this panel where it says "he was never really meant to die." That aside, this is
the heart of the question that Charlie asks. How was Jason Todd brought back to life? If
you go by the genuinely wonderful animated movie Batman Under the Red Hood, it's as simple
as Ra's al Ghul stealing Jason's corpse and submersing him in the Lazarus Pit. The Lazarus
Pit, in a nutshell, is just like the Fountain of Youth. It's a pool of unknown chemicals
that can heal the sick and injured, and as well as can restore youth depending on how
long you're submerged, which is...which is how Ra's has lived for centuries. The New 52
also references Jason coming back to life via the Lazarus Pit, but it's still kind of
a little vague on the details, at least in the time that I'm making this video. We don't
definitively know what happened between his death and him waking up in the Lazarus Pit
though it seems to imply that Talia al Ghul dug up his body and restored him in the pit.
In the comic's pre-New 52, it was something a little bit more creative. I'm going to try
to explain it in an easy to understand way, but it is kind of complicated and just weird
so hang in there. After Crisis on Infinite Earths, an alternate version of Superman known
as Superboy-Prime was locked away in a pocket dimension where he grew incredibly homesick
for a world that no longer existed. Frustrated and angry he uses all of his might and punches
reality! Really, he just punches the barrier of the pocket dimension so hard that it shatters,
creating continuity changes in the DC universe, showing us yet again that if you're Superman
you can just get out of most scenarios by punching things. I hope that makes sense.
I mean I know it doesn't make sense, but I hope the explanation was clear. I probably
skipped through over a lot of the important details, but you know. One of the continuity
changes in these reality punches was that Jason Todd woke up in his coffin buried alive
as we can see in Batman Annual #25. With nothing but his sheer will to live, he
dug himself out of his grave and survived in a brain-dead state where he could do nothing
but act on instinct. He was taken in by Talia al Ghul who, against her father's commands, pushed
Jason into the Lazarus pit, not to bring him back to life like the other interpretations,
but to simply restore his mind to how it was before he was killed. And that's really it.
That's the story of how he came back to life in the comics. After he was restored in the
Lazarus Pit, he would train for awhile before returning to Gotham, where he would work with
Hush to Batman's mind and as well as take on the moniker of Red Hood, which was a former
alias of the Joker from back in the day. As the Red Hood he would use lethal force while
hunting down criminals and doing what Batman wouldn't. Most notably he attempted to kill
the Joker, who took his life from him in the first place. He has since gone on to have
many adventures as the Red Hood, which is all stuff that I'm not going to get into.
But there you go, that's the story of his creation, death, and resurrection with a lot
of fun, behind the scenes stuff in there as well. Hopefully you learned something new
today. Thank you for the suggestion Charlie. But what do you guys think? Do you like Jason's
return as the Red Hood? Would you have voted for Robin to die in the first place? And what
character today would you vote to kill off? Let's talk about it in the comments and probably
start some heated debates, I just realized. Obviously I didn't go over a ton of Jason's
history as a character, as I said before, that's not really what we do here on this
show. But I do have links in the description to a few other videos by other people here
on YouTube that dive into more of the origins and history of Jason Todd if you want to learn
even more about the character. If this is your first time hanging out with us here at
NerdSync, we do weekly comic book videos that expand your understanding and enrich your
comic book reading experience so hit that big, sexy subscribe button so you don't miss
out on anything. Once again, I'm Scott, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram and we'll
see you right here on Friday for a Tie-In video and more things you thought you knew
about comics. See ya! Also I'm sorry for missing last week.