10 Things DC Comics Wants You To Forget About Robin

7. A Death In The Family

Still, that's nothing compared to what Jason Todd had to go through. We've danced around it a little but the second Robin was the most divisive, and ultimately, the most tragic. When Dick Grayson graduated from the role of sidekick to Nightwing, masked vigilante in his own right, somebody else needed to step up to the plate. When he was first introduced young Jason wasn't much more than an off-brand Dick Grayson, with the same cheerful demeanour and slavish devotion to Batman's arbitrary rules for crime fighting...except with ginger hair. Which he soon dyed black, cementing his place as the second Robin in the eyes of the readers. Then Crisis Of Infinite Earths happened and, like so many of DC's company-wide events since, it completely messed things up. After the multiverse had been destroyed and put back together Jason Todd was reintroduced as an entirely different kind of character: cocky, annoying, mouthy, insubordinate. Yeah, he wasn't very popular compared to his predecessor. So unpopular, in fact, that when DC put together a call-in poll for fans to decide whether or not he got murdered by The Joker in an upcoming storyline called A Death In The Family. A title which rather precluded the point of having a vote, but readers nonetheless chose to have the second Robin killed off ASAFP. For a long while he remained one of the few comic book characters not to rise from the dead...right up until some more universal mumbo jumbo happened in Infinite Crisis and he was brought back as the annoyed adult anti-hero the Red Hood, a violent vigilante at odds with his former mentor once more. Thanks to the New 52 time compression thing his time as Robin was shortened and rarely referred to in favour of him just being a crazy anti-hero.