WI: Jason Todd Lives

Mort the Reaper

We all know what happened to Jason Todd. During the famed 1988 "A Death in the Family" storyline, readers could vote on whether he survived being beaten senseless and left to die in an explosion by the Joker. Since he was widely hated by the readers, they overwhelmingly voted to kill him off.

Except that's not what happened. While certainly contentious, Jason Todd was never as hated as is frequently claimed, and the choice to kill him won by a mere 72 votes out of over 10,000 cast. Moreover, according to Dennis O'Neil, it was later revealed that one caller had programmed a computer to submit a lot of votes to kill Todd. The computer cast over 300 votes.

You see where I'm going with this, right? My question is simple: what if the cheating with the votes hadn't happened, and Todd had survived?
 

UCB79

But I think I remember reading somewhere
that TPTB @ DC had determined that Jason
was going to go even if the telephone poll
went for him.
 

Georgie Washington

The DCEU has Jason Todd dead as well. You see his Robin costume in the background with HA!HA!HA! written all over it. Most likely the Joker in the DCEU is in fact Jason Todd, as many stories in different media have Todd as a new Joker.
 

cpip

Well, it becomes a question: does it still get discarded as a one-off gimmick, or does DC or Marvel try that same routine again?

Further, without Jason Todd to open the door, so to speak, does DC decide not to kill off major characters later?
 

Mort the Reaper

UCB79 said:
But I think I remember reading somewhere
that TPTB @ DC had determined that Jason
was going to go even if the telephone poll
went for him.
Click to expand...

IIRC, the plan was to put him in a coma if the readers voted to spare his life. Not sure there was any idea on when - or if - he'd wake up.
 

CountDVB

Well, while Jason would be alive, he would still be extensively damaged and the experience would still have changed Bruce.

If the coma thing is true, they could still use this to being Tim Drake into the picture and he’d be Robin for a while. Within several years or so, someone will remember about Jason or decide to do something with him, especially if they wanna deconstruct teenage sidekicks or so on.

It all depends on what the writer wants to do.

Though, let's look at Jason for a bit. His biological mother betrays him and despite that, he still tries to do the right thing and save her. She's likely still dead.

When Jason wakes up, he's going to wrestle with the emotions of his biological mother betraying him and him almost dying along with examining his familial relationship with Bruce and the rest of the Robins. I don't think he'd be pissed at Tim, least not as much in OTL, since he was in a coma after all.

Granted, they could take the opportunity to further reinvent the character. Perhaps he'd want to follow his biological mother's example and go into abroad aid?

Maybe he would double down on his familial blood ties with the Batman family, them being his real family and bond more with them?

Alternately, he does recover, but he ends up leaving on a journey to find out who he is, feeling plenty of complicated feelings from his near-death experience.

It would leave the door open to bring him back with character development and to become his own man.
 
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Amadeus

If Jason lives, it's possible that the writers use his near death experience to make him more mature and relatable as a character.

Alternatively, Jason could be developed into a villain earlier than OTL. Either way, at some point Jason will stop being Robin in order to make way for new additions to the Bat Family.
 
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