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Hello everyone!
And welcome to another episode of MajestiComic.
Today's video is about a very polarizing character who shook up the Batman universe
in a way that no one could have expected.
He was created as a simple sidekick, but eventually became symbolic of the power that fans can
have over the comic books they love.
When most people think of Batman's sidekick, Robin, they think of Dick Greyson, his original
teen ward with great acrobatic skills and those skimpy shorts.
This Robin, though, eventually grew to have an even bigger role in the DC Comic's universe.
He became the leader of DC's Teen Titans team, and as he began to spend more and more
of his time with them, Batman's writers began to think that the Dark Knight was getting
lonely without him.
They thought that Batman worked best with a sidekick, someone to bounce ideas off of
and to instruct in the art of crime fighting, so they created a second Robin to replace
the first.
This Robin's name was Jason Todd, and when he first appeared in 1983, he was pretty much
an exact replica of the original Robin, except for the fact that his hair was strawberry
blonde instead of brown.
He, too, came from a family of acrobats, who died at the hands of a villain – this time
Killer Croc, who fed poor Joseph and Trina Todd to crocodiles.
Just as he had taken in Dick Greyson, Bruce Wayne took in Jason as his ward.
Like Dick, Jason was consumed by an urge to get revenge for his parents' deaths, and
to eradicate crime in Gotham City, and he began to fight villains in various homemade
costumes until Batman eventually agreed to train him, and to take him on as his new sidekick,
with Dick Greyson's approval.
When he was first introduced, fans liked Jason Todd, perhaps because he was so much like
Dick Greyson's version of Robin.
However, after DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985 and 86, his character, like most of
the others in the DC universe, was reinvented.
Writer and editor Dennis O'Neil led a team that completely reimagined Jason Todd's
backstory and personality, making it the polar opposite of the story that was originally
given to him by his creators, Gerry Conway and Don Newton.
This Jason was no longer a squeaky clean, "aw, shucks" type of teen like Dick Greyson
was – he was mean and ruthless and morally ambiguous.
His father was sent to jail when Jason was young, and he had grown up in the slums of
Gotham City with a drug addict named Catherine, who he didn't know was actually his real
mother.
She eventually died of a drug overdose, but by that time, Jason was already leading a
life of crime.
He was particularly focused on stealing car parts and selling them for money, which is
how he came to meet Batman.
One night, while Jason was trying to steal the tires off the Batmobile, he was caught
by Batman, a.k.a. Bruce Wayne.
Having a soft spot for troubled teens, Wayne tried to take Jason to a school for troubled
youths, but Jason soon found that the school was just a front for even more criminal activity.
Eventually, Wayne realized that the only way to prevent having to bring Jason in as a criminal,
was to take him into his home as his ward, and train him to replace his sidekick, Robin.
This Robin, though, was much angrier than his counterpart Dick Greyson.
He was dark and cynical, and would be much rougher on the criminals than the other Robin
ever was.
For example, there was one incident in which Jason beat Batman to the discovery of a serial
rapist who had led one of his victims to kill herself, and when Batman arrived on the scene,
the rapist was falling from the top of a building to his death, and Jason was standing on the
roof, watching.
Jason claimed that he had only startled the rapist, and he had slipped and fallen before
he could catch him, but Batman could never really be sure.
He knew all about Jason's dark nature, and didn't doubt that he was capable of using
deadly force, even though this went against everything Batman believed in.
By this point, it was becoming clear that fans of the Batman comics hated this new Robin.
He was nothing like Dick Greyson, and he was not the heroic, geeky sidekick he had once
been before the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
So, in 1988, DC Comics did something largely unheard of: they asked the audience what they
should do to fix it.
Fans were given a phone number they could call to cast their votes for whether or not
Jason Todd, the second Robin, should live or die.
They were taking a character's life in their own hands… and in the end, they decided
to snuff it out.
The decision to kill off Jason Todd won out by a margin of just 72 votes (and later it
was discovered that many of these votes could have been cast by one person who used a computer
to hack the system, an act that might sound familiar to my fellow Americans this year),
but the die had been cast.
In a1988 miniseries titled Batman: Death in the Family, Jason Todd was brutally killed
by The Joker, an act which we will describe in detail in next week's video.
In spite of the fact that they voted for it, fans did not like this turn of events either,
perhaps due to some kind of guilt that the death had been their fault.
Regardless of the fact that no one seemed to care much for his character before his
death, though, in true comic book fashion, Jason Todd was resurrected in 2005 as the
Red Hood, a villain/anti-hero who had once been embodied by the Joker himself.
Jason was as mean as ever, and he was now an antagonist to his former mentor, Batman.
He was the complete opposite of Dick Greyson, whose shoes he could never fill, and he carried
a chip on his shoulder that would make it hard for him to ever feel at home in the Batman
universe.
Eventually, he was taken back into the quote "Batman family," but he was nonetheless
the black sheep.
After the latest reboot of the DC universe in 2011, Jason Todd is a bit less angry toward
Batman and his team, but for the most part, he was unchanged by this reboot.
Perhaps this is because the writers finally found a way to please their fans with this
character… or perhaps they just don't want to risk angering them again.
Next week, we will be discussing Jason Todd's tragic death in the first video in our Comic
Book Deaths series, so stay tuned to learn more about him then!
Before we wrap up this particular video, though we want to know what you think about Jason
Todd, and we want to do it in the style of that original vote back in 1988.
So, we ask you, if it was up to you, back before the final decision was made, would
you have wanted Jason Todd to live?
Or would you have wanted him to die?
Cast your vote on the poll on the screen now, and we will let you know how it comes out
at the end of next week's video.
In the meantime, you can come and discuss it with us over on our forum at www.majesticomic.com.
Don't forget to subscribe to our channel and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+
for more comic book info and entertainment.
Thanks for watching!
Until next time.
Bye!
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