9 Mind Blowing "What If?" Scenarios That Almost Changed Comics Forever

3. The Public Votes To Save Jason Todd

Batman Jason Todd Robin
DC Comics

The death of Jason Todd still stands out as being one of the industry's grimmest and most remarkable stories, not that you'd ever want to read it.

While the Death of the Family itself is a fairly unremarkable story, the external process that led to the second Robin's death stands out if anything because it's so grim. Unsure how to react to a burgeoning tide of hate mail being directed at Todd, DC opened up his fate to the public with a telephone poll. Readers could call one line to vote to save Jason, while others could call the other to kill him off.

There was only ever going to be one outcome, and in Batman #428 Todd (and his mother) were no more, bludgeoned by the Joker and left to die in a warehouse in the middle of nowhere. The now iconic panel of Batman holding Jason's corpse wasn't always meant to be, however, and Jim Aparo had even drawn up pencils in the event of a vote to save Jason's life.

The difference in the vote was marginal, with a mere 72 votes deciding Todd's fate. If he had lived, then not only would we have been spared the Red Hood and the inconvenience of the Superboy Prime resurrection, the progression of the Bat-family might've changed altogether. Would the Robin line have ended with number two?

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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.