Titans: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Jason Todd
7. His Death May Have Been The Work Of A Single Voter
When DC Comics decided to leave Jason’s fate in the hands of the public, it was no surprise that the majority ultimately voted to kill him. Within the 36-hour voting window, the poll received 10, 614 votes, with those in favour of his death winning out by a mere 72 votes. As a result, that fateful decision saw the unpopular character killed off in the infamous Death in The Family arc, in which he was violently beaten by the Joker and left to die in an explosion.
However, according to Dennis O’Neil, things may not have been as clear cut as that. Years later, he revealed that one person may have actually been responsible for Jason Todd’s death and, surprisingly, it wasn’t the Joker. In a featurette on the blu-ray of animated film Batman: Under The Red Hood, he commented:
“I heard it was a lawyer who was using a MacIntosh and lived in California - I obviously don't have hard information on this, but I heard someone out there programmed his computer to dial it every couple of minutes, and since there was only about 65 votes that made the difference, if that story is true, that guy, that guy killed Jason Todd!”
If this was indeed the case, it’s mind-boggling to think how much that single person changed the course of comic book history. Without him, Jason Todd may never have been killed off in the infamous storyline, and we likely wouldn't have gotten his eventual repackaging as Red Hood either.