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In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover whether DC Comics actually rigged the vote to make sure that Robin, Jason Todd, died.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and twenty-second installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I’ll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
DC Comics rigged the fan vote to make sure that Jason Todd would be killed.
STATUS:
False
DC Comics made history with 1988’s Batman #427 (by Jim Starlin, Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo). In the issue, Jason Todd is betrayed by his own mother to the Joker, who savagely beats the young hero with a crowbar…
The villain then locks Jason and his mother (who was the latest person to learn that you really ought not to trust a psychopath to not just turn on you next) up in a warehouse with a bomb, but Jason summons all of his strength after the beating to free his mother and she, chagrined over her betrayal, decides to help Jason escape, as well…
They don’t make it…
Batman arrives and is naturally quite freaked out…
At the end of the issue, there was an ad for a pair of 1-900 numbers where people could vote as to whether Jason survived the explosion or not…
Amusingly enough, they were not allowed to specifically use the word “call this number for his death,” notice how they used a roundabout way to say death.
Anyhow, in the next issue, Batman discovered that Jason did not make it…
A little over six years ago, I did a Comic Book Legends Revealed on a (false) legend that DC planned on ignoring the results of the vote and just killing Robin off whatever the results of the poll was. However, the legends surrounding the death of Jason Todd are some of the most persisting legends around and I now see rumors that while yes, there were more votes for Jason Todd to die than there were votes for Jason Tod to live, that was specifically because DC staffers monitored the votes and made sure to vote enough times to make sure that Robin died. In other words, the contention is that DC specifically rigged the vote (which I think is a distinct legend from the earlier one about how DC just planned to ignore the results if they weren’t the ones that DC wanted).
I had seen Mark Waid, who was an editor at DC at the time, speak about this before, but I couldn’t for the life of me find out WHERE I saw him talk about it, so I dropped him a line and just asked if he could just tell me why the story was bogus and he gracefully complied.
Here’s Mark on why the rumors about DC rigging the vote are not true…
Not only was I on staff at the time of the stunt, I spent most of my time that afternoon and evening in assistant Batman editor Dan Raspler’s office as he closely monitored the results. Dan more than anyone was genuinely spellbound by the tickertape of it all and gobsmacked by the fact that the results were, in his own words, “statistically a tie.” I can tell you from first-hand knowledge, boots on the ground–and I have absolutely no reason to lie about this–that DC did nothing to falsify data or rig the results. If anything, on the whole, the company actually had enough misplaced faith in the goodness of human nature to assume that most readers would vote for life rather than death.
The late Denny O’Neil echoed that same story to Joe Grunenwald at The Beat back in 2018, “My assistant, Dan Raspler, checked the progress of the vote every 90 minutes, beginning Thursday morning, September 15th. He’d punch in a code and a computer voice would recite the most up-to-the-minute count. Either Dan or I continued checking throughout the day on Thursday and then again on Friday, September 16th. For most of the voting, it was very close.17 Dick Giordano and I had different opinions about [it]. He thought they would not kill the kid. I thought the readers would do it just to see if we would actually go through with it. My wife, Marifran, came up to the office at 6PM to keep Dan and me company. At 8:30PM, after even Dan had left, I got the final tally: 5,271 for Robin, but 5,343 against. I was disappointed but not terribly surprised. I’d originally planned to throw a party that Friday night. But, as it became clear that we had such a Big Deal here—that people were truly interested in Robin’s fate—we decided that revealing the outcome before shipping the book would lessen the dramatic impact. We became like the CIA. Everything was on a ‘need-to-know’ basis.”
So yeah, I’m going with it was not being rigged by DC.
Thanks so much to Mark Waid for the information (and thanks to Joe Grunenwald and the late, great Denny O’Neil for their side of the information, as well).
SOME OTHER BATMAN ENTERTAINMENT LEGENDS!
Check out some Batman-related entertainment legends from Legends Revealed:
1. Was Robin Almost In Tim Burton’s Batman?
2. Did Batman Actually Kill Anyone in The Dark Knight Returns?
3. Was Vicki Vale Going to Die Originally at the End of Tim Burton’ Batman?
4. Was the Villain Max Schreck in Batman Returns Originally Going to be Harvey Dent?
PART TWO SOON!
Check back soon for part 2 of this installment’s legends!
Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com
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