Speaking of throwing things in their fans' faces, DC's ultimate douche move was probably the culmination of the year-long Hush arc in the Batman line of comics. Beginning with Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's eponymous storyline, the villainous Hush's identity was a closely-guarded secret, but that didn't stop the publisher from very heavily implying that behind the bandages was the face of Jason Todd. Todd was a controversial character as it was, the second Robin who was so universally reviled that fans unanimously voted for him to be killed off in the late eighties story arc A Death In The Family. Bringing the character back from the dead was contentious enough; not bringing him back even more so. Because, despite going so far as to purposefully leak pages from the end of Hush which show a grown-up Jason Todd in the trademark trenchcoat and gloves of the new villain, it turned out that the real mysterious man behind the bandages was in fact Thomas Elliot, brilliant surgeon and childhood friend of Bruce Wayne. The pages with Jason Todd's "reveal" weren't fake, either, it's just that shapeshifting bad guy Clayface had taken on his form to mess with Batman. And to mess with the legion of fans who up until that point had been given all the evidence that Todd was Hush. In this case the double-bluff had been planned all along, which almost makes it worse. For a year DC purposefully misled to their fans, pulling the rug out from under readers who had invested a lot of time in a book whose reveal was completely unexpected. In a bad way.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
