I tried to write stories that didn’t involve Robin the Boy Wonder.
It had always struck me that if you were fighting crime in a dark and murky costume and chose to bring along on these dangerous adventures a teenage sidekick, whom you dressed in bright primary colors: this could only be considered child endangerment. But it had been going on for more than 40 years and, so, was now tradition. Just turn off your brain and write the story, Starlin!
The four-part A Death in the Family ran from Batman #426-429 with issue 428 containing the oh so crucial moment that readers voted upon. Given the production demands of monthly comics (they’re produced incredibly close to when they’re released, particularly in comparison to other media, but still), the issue was written and drawn with two different versions of events, one where Robin lives and one where he dies. Starlin succinctly summed up what happened: “The vote comes in, Robin gets the thumbs down, and A Death in the Family sell through the roof.” As such, the published version contains the pages where Jason Todd doesn’t survive an explosion engineered by the Joker. While some of the alternate art has been published for the version of the issue where Jason won the vote, this new edition of Batman #428 is the first time that readers get the complete alternate issue. Now, you can read the first two parts of A Death in the Family and opt for a slightly happier version of events in the third part... but does that matter? Isn’t this just another gimmick?
Putting the two versions of the issue side by side, four pages have completely or partially altered art, while a fifth has slightly tweaked caption boxes. That Jason lives is the only substantial change to the comic, one whose overall structure and story remain unchanged. Instead of burying Jason and his mom at a funeral in Gotham, it’s only one coffin. Even the only scene that amounts to a truly ‘alternate’ one, after the funeral, contains most of the same dialogue. In the originally published version, Alfred asks if he should get in touch with Dick Grayson and Bruce says not to, that he wants to handle things alone from now on. In the new version, Dick is visiting Jason at the hospital and asks Bruce if he wants help tracking down the Joker. Bruce turns him down, saying that he wants to handle things alone from now on. Call it an incredibly crafted issue to allow for minimal disruption from a publicity gimmick; or call it for what it truly is: Robin’s death was immaterial to the story, even though it has grown to define it. Even the fourth part of the story barely hinges on Jason’s death: there are only four specific mentions of it in dialogue and captions, all of which are easily altered or omitted.
Putting aside the gimmick of the call-in vote, Starlin’s desire to no longer write stories involving Robin shapes A Death in the Family completely as the two alternate versions show. Whether or not Jason lives or dies does not matter. It means some art changes, some dialogue tweaks, some different scenes, but the substance does not change. If you believe Starlin’s version of events, his parting with DC came about due to the backlash to the death of Jason Todd (fans, merchandise licensing, even the theory that the vote was rigged), so, say Jason had lived and Starlin continued writing Batman well beyond this story. Do you think that Jason would have been back as Robin in issue 430? 431? 432? Or ever while Starlin was writing the title? The Joker blew him up. It’s clear that Starlin was writing a Batman that had no interest in having a sidekick from that moment on. In both versions, he makes it clear that, from now on, he’s going it alone. I don’t know how the conversation about the call-in gimmick went, but it’s clear that, one of the reasons why Starlin went along with it is that it had very little impact on the story that he was telling. The sheer violence of the act of the Joker blowing up Robin was enough. If the readers had voted for Jason to live, it most likely would have led to a future issue where Bruce tells him that his days as Robin were over and he’s being sent away to some boarding school where the character would have been ignored or become fodder for some solo stories or a possible return to Gotham eventually... Maybe Tim Drake would have still happened, maybe not. In the short-term, following A Death in the Family, Robin was dead no matter what the readers decided.
Seeing these two versions of the comic side by side, it strikes me as typical Starlin that Jason’s death doesn’t matter in the slightest. He’s always been a writer with a “it’s my way or the highway” attitude, singularly focused on seeing his vision through or walking away. There’s no way that he would leave the story that he wanted to tell up to chance, to the whims of the readers. And it’s such a Starlin move to disguise his true story under some meaningless element that everyone would focus on. His trio of Infinity events in the 1990s (none of which would have happened if not for his leaving DC after this story, by the way) are filled with meaningless subplots featuring the popular Marvel heroes while the actual story is dealt with and resolved by Adam Warlock and Thanos. Take out the filler and you get a couple of issues’ worth of actual comics, if you know where to look. Everyone else sees these big events that span the entire Marvel Universe and feature all of their favourite heroes. Not that they are used as cannon fodder, distractions, and general dismissed as not being up to the cosmic tasks at hand. Starlin likes to give people the spectacle that they want in order to tell the story that he wants. The (possible) death of Robin is such a spectacle – and everyone has been dazzled by it for three and a half decades.
A question I’ve grappled with for years is where to place his Batman run within his body of work. The majority of Starlin’s comics work is what he’s most known for: cosmic. Over the decades, he’s done a handful of ‘realistic,’ decidedly non-cosmic comics with his run on Batman being the only sustained work that no one refers to as cosmic. It deals with many of the same themes as his cosmic work, particularly the focus on the meaning of death, but it’s a fairly grounded, ‘realistic’ book comparatively. Except for the vote for Robin’s fate. That is the transcendent moment of the run, the one that approaches the cosmic. A truly unique moment in Starlin’s career, it’s one where the fate of a character was taken outside of even his hands, left up to some nebulous, unknowable power. It’s the closest that any of his work (or anyone else’s, honestly) has come to being left entirely up to chance. Just like life. Call it a readers’ vote, call it god... life and death determined by a faceless, uncaring void is pretty damn cosmic. The final kicker, of course, is that, like one of his characters facing the same sort of forces beyond their control, Starlin planned for it and made sure that any result would accomplish his goals.
Robin dies? Robin lives! Robin’s gone. It doesn’t matter.
