#NOT WHATEVER THAT WAS N52 OR REBIRTH

[abisalli]

I‘m currently working my way through some old comics and taking a lot of notes, so I’m gonna start being very annoying sorry

(and also make some panel redraws)

[little-flame-prince]

I think I need a second corkboard

[mamawasatesttube]

been wanting to share new comic stuff i've learned with you but not wanting to spoil anything is torture so uh. the things that have happened in new 52/rebirth... the 'i was experimented on and all i got was ptsd and this shirt' consumes my mind. also superboy 94 got me feeling like someone banging on one side of the glass. dubbilex please do sosmthing!!!!!

oh i don't care about spoilers generally! also n52 and rebirth aren't real and they can't hurt me. but i'm sorry for whatever it might have been that you discovered 😔 also YEAH early sb94 is a horror story to me. and i mean i am an enjoyer of horror media so this is not a bad thing! but ohhh my god. DUBBILEX... HE CANT HEAR ME HE HAS AIRPODS IN...

(honestly i think sometimes about how dubbilex, for as much as he does love kon, also has literally no life experience outside of cadmus. he was not equipped to be a good guardian to a child; the reason they sent him with kon was to get the telepath out of the way so he wouldn't sense any nefarious schemes. he might be an adult, but he's also very naive in a lot of ways because this is also his first time really long-term spending time outside of cadmus - he's left before, but never stayed and lived away from there before.)

[spiritsglade]

omg cathy and willis for the character asks. pretty please.

[character breakdown]

hi hai :] oh boy sure let's talk about them

willis todd:

How I feel about this character

i love completely disregarding everything that happens with him post-n52. to me willis is the 0.2 things we learn about him between batman #408-411. batman #426 you can also stay, i guess. maybe i'd feel different if i actually sat down and tried to figure out exactly what lobdell was trying to do to rehabilitate willis's image in rebirth, but i just kind of do not care to do that.

i'd call willis todd a tragedy but i do not think that's quite right because it's not some internal fatal flaw that made him fail, but the oppressive cudgel of poverty. he tried his best. it wasn't enough.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

catherine very obviously... anything else i only appreciate in a shitposty sort of way.

willis lives au where he seduces bruce... the headcanon that he had some sort of dalliance with harvey... they are funny. i am willing to admit that.

with sheila it's hmmmmmmm. it could be interesting i guess. i haven't thought very much about their dynamic.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

i am thinking of the willis & jason all the time, especially in contrast to bruce & jason. as i'm sure you know. it is so important to me that willis would have done anything within his capability for his son. jason on the other hand... i think jason holding some resentment for willis is interesting to play around with. going back to the whole 'not enough' thing.

My unpopular opinion about this character

i don't think i'd necessarily say to never write willis as abusive. it's not an interpretation that i ever run with personally, but it's one you can do. i just... it's not very interesting usually? the way people do it?

fics making jason fully traumatized and outright hateful of willis feels like it removes a lot of the potential depth there, to me. many abusive parents are not hitting their kids 100% of the time! especially if there's substance use involved. there will be good times. parents can both love their kids and abuse them. and that's a complicated sort of trauma for the kid to navigate.

but willis tends to be slotted into this extreme caricature of a raging alcoholic. it's not compelling.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

i need to see. on panel. how the fuck he met lady shiva. i need to learn about all the other women in his phonebook. i know he got up to the most bizarre adventures in his youth let me SEE them.

catherine todd:

How I feel about this character

ugh. catherine. cathy. catherine todd. her drug addiction is such an indelible part of her nowadays but i think it's honestly... like you can absolutely interpret post-crisis cathy without involving that at all. (#408 + #426 maybe she did just get sick and die from a 'disease'.) maybe i will do that one day.

it feels like we know even less about her than we do with willis. and that leaves things so incredibly open with her that i don't even know how to start? off the top of my head i don't even know if what she's addicted to is ever specified.

i also generally like applying the 'tried her best, wasn't enough' approach to catherine. but she's a bit of a pandora's box of possibility. she could be so many things. which is to say. guys guys guys guys can we please please please please stop just writing her passed out on a mattress for jason to be sad over all the time please. make her more interesting i am begging you.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

with willis is the big obvious one.

i know rarepairs with her exist. with talia or selina or nocturna or whatever i'm aware that they exist. i have not quite seen the vision myself but i'm sure i can be enlightened.

My non-romantic OTP for this character

cathy & sheila. look look look. okay. they've never interacted in canon. but i need to know more about what they think of each other. i need to know how much of sheila's exposition dump in #427 was actually true. did they know each other before? or did they just miss each other - nothing more than a name and vague impressions filtered through willis's perspective?

does cathy look at jason and try to piece together his features, figure out how much of him is from sheila? or does she ignore it, because this kid is hers more than he'll ever belong to the woman that left him behind. does sheila even think about catherine at all?

trap them in the same room together i wanna see what happens. wait honestly you could probably make this toxic yuri if you tried.

My unpopular opinion about this character

absolutely, jason would put catherine on a pedestal in his mind, but i do not think she would have been like that in reality. having a parent with a drug addiction will negatively affect the kid. i don't think it's controversial to say catherine's parenting of jason wasn't good. idk. a lot of my thoughts on this ties back into the whole 'abusive!willis can be written in a much more nuanced way than people are doing' thing.

cathy is oft treated more sympathetically than him, but it's in a way that also flattens all nuance. let jason's parents be complicated.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

catherine todd lives elseworld and/or mainline continuity miraculous resurrection that ISN'T the bullshit we got in rhato #0 please <3 come on willis got to come back oughh dc you wanna do this with cathy soooo bad i know you do. i don't even care if it's dogshit. i'm sure there will be at least a sprinkling of interesting concepts in there and that's good enough for me.

[misspickman]

mossy could you provide a ranking of Timothy costumes

i mean i CAN but why would you ask me this. yes i will

1. red robin

1.5 this is a joke but i do think the artist for batman blackest night making a little mistake with the rr suit and giving it the underwear over pants thing is fun. its a classic

2. unternet suit bc its a cute homage to nightwing.. i do miss the cowl. britta said this suit cant be real bc it makes tim look too cool for who he is and i agree. sick tho. i think we should bring the insane halberd/morning star/(?) back

3. one year later/kon mourning suit

4. his original robin one :) this feels too low but its hard to rank.. i think its a perfect costume for tim at that point in his life i wouldnt change a thing

4.5 winter fit

5. mr sarcastic ok people use this as an example of tim having a bad sense of fashion or whatever and thats missing the point bc the point is this was a bit. and its a great bit. he killed it. rule number one u have Got to commit to the bit. i dont know what the fuck is going on here but its funny as hell

6. the current robin suit. its whatever to me like its very similar to the original one i guess they tried to upgrade it a little bit. as a costume on its own its fine its nice but i cannot divorce it from the fact that they made tim robin again so i do always go :/ when i see it. you are never going to be her (original robin suit)

7. that red robin suit from rebirth thats just the robin suit with two Rs on it? what is that. thats just sad. on one hand i appreciate that he wasnt just straight up robin but like design wise thats the saddest attempt i have ever seen 0 effort whatsoever

8. drake costume. i just think the brown color is ugly and they shouldve let him keep the cape. i do think the whole concept of tim going by drake is kinda goofy but i dont have as much hate for it as i know most people do.. the execution was simply not good tho

9. arkham knight tim.. i feel like people mostly hate this bc of the buzzcut and his build but its like. whatever. i dont like tim with a hood thats a damian thing and feels off

10. the n52 costume? i just dont like it its too busy and ugly and i dont care about that man who is he

11. whatever the fuck was happening in gotham knights

[cannibalisticcorpse]

do you have any recommendations for dick and jason (together or separate, both is fine) comics for someone who’s just starting to read them? i have some knowledge of the characters and batfam and i’ve read several batman comics, but i never really got into the robins-after-they-were-robins comis so i’d like to start with dick and jason…thank you so much :)

so firstly, i deffo reason waaay more jason than i do dick. most of my dick recs will be things i haven't finished reading or haven't read more than like 3 random back issues of XD

dick:

any nightwing solo is a good place to start (okay, not any, but you can find comics on readcomiconline and with an adblocker the site is useable. peruse the different nightwing runs, if it sucks drop it)

i've heard spyral is good, i think the comic might just be called "grayson"

pretty much any titans comic pre-2003 would be dick grayson (typically as robin, but not always)

there are some post 2003 titans comics with dick too

i like "the titans" (1999) the most, personally (my tip for finding the right titans run, because there are so many, is to look at the font of the title. then look at the author)

honestly if you're fine just jumping in and figuring it out as you go (which you kinda need to be), i'd sooo heavily rec that run to start you with

and, of course, there's the outsiders run from 2009 with dick and roy <3

jason:

i dont really have any robin-era jason recs, but he wasn't robin for too long, so if you're interested it's not too hard to read some!

death in the family (comic where he dies. it's weird and also islamophobic iirc, buut it's important to his backstory. not too long. im a slow slow slow heavily dyslexic reader and it only took me 2 days)

under the red hood (comic where he comes back. a longer read, but VERY fun. villain jason and competent jason. you understand the framework for all of his post-robin/post-resurrection drive)

lost days (also pretty long. i go back and forth on if i personally liked it. but it covers the time between him coming back to life and him returning to gotham- because he stayed gone even after he came back)

red hood and the outlaws n52 (i think it came out in 2011)- this comic sucks, but it's kinda fun! i really enjoy it. if you're fanfic-inclined you might like it (because it prompts a lot of fun ideas without ever presenting very many on its own and never doing anything with them). it's the origin of the jason/roy thing which i am so obsessed with

red hood/arsenal (continuation of the last comic, now without The Girl.. buut kori was written really misogynistically so, congrats kori on getting free

then there's red hood and the outlaws rebirth (which is a different team and some ppl like this comic more), then there's red hood: outlaw, i forget if there's more or whatever the order is. there's also a webtoon with the same naming scheme. im collecting the physical comic, you'd think i'd know this. but these runs are LONG.

for current comics, there's "task force z" which came out like a year or two ago, and then "joker: the man who stopped laughing" which is mostly abt the joker but also about jason hunting him and trying to kill him

jason & dick, together:

honestly i dont read too much stuff with the both of them in it? idk. jason doesn't team up with many batfam ppl on the reg, i guess. like they're never really On A Team together. most of their comics together are from Events. but dick appears in task force z, a little red hood and the outlaws too, and jason is in a little bit of outsiders. like they have cameos, i mean.

there was a nightwing annual (i think 2021) about jason & dick teaming up.

they were both in robin war (but that's the conclusion of "we are robin") (not too long, i think it took me about a week to read all 3 paperbacks)

other ppl feel free to add on!

[sporkberries]

Saw someone shitting on comics canon saying anyone who likes it can have fun with their n52 bs and whatever and its like… dc rebirth happened 7 years ago. It varies from character to character but a lot of the pre n52 canon is back in place. What are you talking about.

[cuephrase]

Thank you so much for the comic recs!! I'm just getting started on my Batfam reading journey so this is super helpful, and I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on your current reads once you're further along. On a related (but opposite) note, anything you'd say to steer well clear of, like run for the hills, hazard sign attached, avoid if at all possible? (for example, I know All-Star Batman & Robin is something I shouldn't read outside of morbid fascination)

yeah ofc! getting into comics, in my experience, was super fun and sort of overwhelming because there's so much content lol, so i hope you're enjoying it and i'm happy to help however i can :)

OMG all-star batman and robin, i still need to read that to satisfy my own curiosity, but perfect example.

so okay, i have three runs + one arcs, but i'm going to preface this by saying, read whatever you want. all three runs and one arc, i read going into it knowing they were absolute messes, but i wanted to experience it for myself. i would say to not read these first, if possible, if you choose to read them because they're just not great intros to the characters and they're not great stories, imo. lose-lose

Red Hood and the Outlaws 2011 (New 52). if you like kory and/or roy, this will be torture. if you don't know who they are, please god do not meet this iteration of them first. but if you're interested in jason, maybe you want to read it because he's there! i get that. but. there's very little, if anything, in rhato 2011 that you'll learn about jason that isn't reiterated in rhato 2016/doesn't get flat out retconned in rebirth. for example, in rhato 2011, his origin story is him stealing from leslie's clinic. that wasn't his preboot origin, and his origin gets retconned back to his preboot origin of stealing the tires off the batmobile. most of rhato 2011 just had me like ???? so bad. just so bad.

Teen Titans 2011 (New 52). full transparency- i did not even finish this run. at some point, i will probably drag myself back to it and force myself through it, but oh god. no one felt like themself. everything was wrong. i like tim's n52 red robin costume, and that's about it. i'm also not sure how much if any of this run is currently relevant in canon so like, even less reason to put yourself through it.

Tim Drake: Robin 2022. i have nothing nice to say. wait. no i do. it got some really cool variant covers. i don't want to bash the art, because i have enjoyed this artist's style in other comics, so i'm just going to be diplomatic and say it was a horrible match/fit. . as far as the writing...no, just no. this is one of 2 pieces of fitzmartin's writing that i've read and so i don't want to speak too harshly, but i really didn't like it. this whole run makes me so sad ngl. dc canonized tim's bisexuality and then supported it with this? bro. c'mon. there's already so many homophobic comic readers, they didn't need to give them "it's bad writing" ammo. genuinely would love to know the though process behind the production of this comic

the infamous Ric Grayson era, Nightwing 2016 #50-74. i just read this. i've legit been putting it off since august. it is so mind-numbingly boring for 85% of the run, first off. this is literally how most of the issues go: "i was shot in the head. i don't remember anything after the night my parents died. they told me i used to a hero. nightwing. i don't remember that. or them. they act like they love me, but it feels fake. i don't want to remember them. i'm happier this way." and then he starts running around, superheroing with a slash of black greasepaint across his face because that is just a+ identity protection and regular clothes because superhero costumes totally only serve visual purposes. and it does all get resolved in the STUPIDEST WAY, but not before the joker takes control of him and has him referring to/responding to “dickie-boy”- reading this i was either bored out of my mind or dying from the cringe. all that’s relevant is a) he lost his memories, b) he gets them back, and c) he had a girlfriend, bea. i knew all of this before i subjected myself to this run. but now i can say i’ve read every nightwing run woooooo. my LCS (local comic store) guy has been trying to get me to read it as a “rite of passage” and he was so entertained when i came in and was like “i read ric” 😐🧍suffice it to say, i do not envy the nightwing fans who had to go through that in real time. i love travis moore’s art but it was not enough to save this arc

as for my thoughts on my current readings, i post those under the tag #cue first read reactions! they’re usually not all that in-depth tbh, just me freaking out haha. if you’re comfortable, my dms are open!

tysm for your ask + i hope you have as much fun reading batfam comics as i do!!

[mothemotics]

People in this fandom are very defensive of their favorite characters so I'm going to preface this by saying that while I'm not particularly a Damian fan I have no desire to see him humbled or punished or removed from canon or whatever. That being said I've been thinking about what draws me to certain characters I read actively and would say are among my favorites and what distinguishes them from others.

It's very common to see arguments on this website along these lines: Person A says "Damian tried to maim/kill Tim, he's evil." Person B says "Damian is a 10 year old from an assassin cult and can't be expected to uphold moral conduct."

The thing is, if Damian was a real kid, Person B would be right. A child soldier can't reasonably be held accountable for the actions they commit as a brainwashed 10 year old, at least in the same way an adult does. But on a narrative level this leads to the problem that by applying this sort of logic to a character you are effectively robbing them of the agency to do wrong. And without agency, especially the agency to actually fail, it's very hard for a character's behavior to have stakes, or tension, or intrigue. Obviously it isn't impossible, but it means they have to be written with a level of complex interiority that is a) frankly rare in comic books as a whole and b) even more difficult to pull off with a 10 year old.

For Damian and his arc to function in B&R he needs to be given the agency for his mistakes to have real weight and not just be rationally explained by his upbringing, or else there's no tension as to whether he chooses to be better. But for him to function as a character among many in a big cast you need to understand him through that background, or else his behavior is unacceptable to the point that it's hard for him to actually coexist with a lot of the cast (e.g. Tim). So for those characters Damian often has to function less like an independent person and more like a source of broad conflict (responsibility for Dick, familial isolation for Tim, etc). Which is a weird catch 22!

This often leads to me feeling like there's a version of Damian that's older and more mature and has probably unlearned a lot of his time in the League, but is more self-aware, who's a really interesting and dynamic character. How does he feel about his upbringing, his prior actions, the wrongs he's committed? How does this complicate his relationships Dick and Tim? Unfortunately post-crisis was rebooted before this could ever really take off, and while I don't read much N52 or Rebirth my impression is that while these themes might be touched upon by individual arcs or comics editorial has not really had the cohesive vision needed to pull something like this off. So as it stands Damian feels to me like the backstory to a really good character trapped in stasis by an editorial team that's not very interested in using his full potential.

[mamawasatesttube]

That art by cowboysorceror got me to read sotm. I’ve never read a comic in my life. I knew like.. batfam + whatever characters were in cw shows. I didn’t even know Superboy existed. I binged 100k fic with no prior knowledge of the character. Fell in love. Reread it immediately. I’ve been in dc hell for two months but if anything happens to Kon I’ll kill everyone in dc hq and then myself

omg... thank you!!! glad you liked it. (ooo you wanna read kon comics ooooo you wanna read kon comics so bad--)

unfortunately a lot of things have happened to kon at dc lately (by which i mean. since 2011) and very few of them have been good. superboy: man of tomorrow is a decent series for him, though i DEFINITELY have nitpicks about it - as iffy as i find the plot, it gets his character voice down a lot better than a lot of other rebirth comics. if you haven't heard about everything with magdalene visaggio... better that way, save yourself, plus it probably will never matter again anyway. also if anyone tells you that "kon-el" is a slur/means "abomination" they are lying to you, that's only true in the n52 continuity and was an edgy retcon. he's initially named after another member of the house of el from way back when on krypton. this is me just dumping a bunch of kon facts at you i'm so sorry but also i'm so glad you love him. he's important he's sooo good and so many fans do him so dirty. cradles him gently in my hands

[thesummerstorms]

So I didn't start reading comics as a kid.

(lots of rambling beneath the cut, though having just finished after writing, maybe the take away is 'N52 was not actually inviting as someone trying to get into comics for the first time'.)

At one point in high school I had some Green Arrow/Black Canary back issues my former step dad bought me when we went into a comic book store at complete random (he bought my then 9 year old brother Simpsons comics and then we never went back) but I was broke teen with no job who did not live in that area and did not pursue much further.

I didn't consider picking up comics until I was in college, and then I mostly started with Marvel because it was early days of the MCU and I saw a lot of the movies with friends. Other than Winter Soldier, I wouldn't say most of them stuck with me or were the best movies ever, but it did get me interested.

The DC movies on the other hand did not get me interested. The DC live action movies mostly sucked.

DC got my money, however, due to my childhood obsession with Dinah, specifically, from Justice League/Justice League Unlimited. (And her relationship with Ollie, I guess, but I wasn't super interested in him without Dinah.) PLUS my preteen fascination with the 2003 Teen Titans.

(That one was harder to carry over because as fun as the 2003 series was the characters were very different lol. They do NOT go into "Robin" and "Starfire's" full traumatic back stories or more adult characteristics in the 2003 stuff.)

So I just looked to see what my first DC purchases on Amazon + Comixology even ended up being and...

I clearly made my first attempts pretty soon after New 52? There is a New52 Batgirl book in the list right above Birds of Prey.... And then nothing DC for literal years.

So much Marvel and Star Wars, even a few non Big 2 things. No DC except rentals for the animated movies and shows.

I bought one digital issue of Green Arrow/Black Canary in 2014, and then DCdoesn't show up on my Comixology account until 2016 with Wonder Woman Rebirth.

Even though that whole time from 2014 on I was still buying the main SW comic, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Wicked + Divine. I was buying anything I could with Black Widow (the Rucka book was a favorite, and I also read whatever the series was called with Bucky as Cap, dating Natasha. I kept that trade for a while, too.)

Apparently I didn't even pick up RHATO (which I mainly read bc a) sale and b) bulk purchase until then c) what the fuck is happening to Starfire morbid curiosity means I need to see it end) until 2018.

But you could not like at any point call me serious about the actual DC comics (again, I watched ALL the animation) until I apparently bought every single volume or issue of the 2016-2019 Green Arrow run (I cannot REMEMBER any of the plot, but I definitely READ all of it) , which finally lead somehow to the 2009 Batman and Robin run (which I bought and read all of in the span of a few days in 2020), then DCeased and Justice League Odyssey.

And now I'm actively trying to go back to some of the older stuff + looking for current publications to read. (I want to like Titans but it's very very hit and miss for me. I read one volume of TT's Nightwing and gave up.)

But like, I just feel like I could have very easily been an "easy" new fan for DC to grab since I had literally never heard of Marvel before the MCU but grew up with all the DC characters. My Uncle is STILL Superman's number one fan, my ex-uncle (? Aunt's ex husband) would throw any DC with Batman at us that he could when we were kids.

But I bounced SO HARD off on New 52 that they literally could not get me actually hooked until 2020, even though I started buying comic stuff in 2014.

[tawked]

Ah okay, that makes sense.

It's not your fault, I made assumptions about what you meant based on a single sentence and wrote an essay lol. This is firmly my bad, not yours.

For what it's worth, it was the use of the phrase "victim-blaming" that caught me, like... that felt to me like a response to something I didn't say and lacked context for, so I filled in the blank when pausing to ask would've been the move.

With that said, I just don't really agree with that framing. The conclusion that it leads to makes sense to me, but I kinda reject the idea that Jason's increasing instability during that arc is a clear statement about his unfitness to be a hero. Characters, especially male characters in street-level superhero comics*, fly in and out of mental health crises all the time.

From Batman: The Cult. To be absolutely clear, this is Bruce having a murder revenge dream, not actively fantasizing or actually killing the Joker with an axe lol.

I think it's a fandom response to later writers attempting to retroactively establish Jason as hyperaggressive or whatever that kinda prompted the conversation here. I wasn't aware of that when I made the first post and frankly it just seems just as boring a characterization as innocent darling baby angel Jason Bartholomew Toddsley who has never thought a violent thought lol.

I personally reject the idea that even if Jason is hyperaggressive, it makes him unfit to be a hero, because that means Spider-Man is unfit to be a hero, that means The Hulk is unfit to be a hero, that means almost all of the X-Men are unfit to be heroes, and that means Batman is unfit to be a hero - all of these characters have likewise had hyperaggressive mental health spirals, or have been possessed by violence aliens, or they're just fucking Wolverine, or they're fucking Wolverine. It's an extremely standard trope.

Is Helena Bertinelli unfit to be a hero? She's written as very similar to Jason, after all. Superhero texts actively engage with and challenge the concept of heroism through contrasts, and I don't think accepting as objective Doylist truth that Jason being hyperaggressive makes him unfit to be a hero is the only real framing one must engage with. I think it's a little reductive.

The fault here imo is that Wolfman, Dixon and O'Neil* all attempt later in-text vilification of Jason but tbh I ignore that because it's fake and lame.

As for the Bruce child endangerment point -- nah, that's "why doesn't Harry Potter just tell the muggle authorities about Voldemort" criticism and neither of us need to engage with it tbh.

The way Bruce fucks up here is starting his conversation with Jason in a way that was inevitably going to read, to Jason, as a punishment, that is stripping him of the rank of Robin, before attempting to start a real conversation about Jason's mental health.

That's not a framing that implies the concept of Robin is the problem (although Jim Starlin believed it was a problem lol), it's a framing that implies Bruce's mishandling of Jason's mental health crisis is the catalyst that leads to his attempting to investigate his mom on his own. The relevant genre conceits remain intact, imo.

Unless the problem is characterizing Bruce as severely flawed in which case, I'd just circle back to the point about superheroes fucking up and having poor judgment all the time. I mean again Spider-Man ran around wearing sentient alien slime which seems like a show of poor judgment, and no one's saying he's unfit to be a hero, y'know? We don't need to fuck with Jamesons.

*not that Starlin's Batman is always that, he has a fetish for Bruce as some kind of James Bond world traveller who skiis a lot.

*others have pointed out it happens a lot in the N52 and Rebirth but I only read bad comics if they come from the 80s / if they have werewolves in them, so heh wouldn't know couldn't be me 😎

If I'm being honest, I actually prefer the version of Jason Todd who had a whole arc where the trauma of being Robin during one of Batman's dumb and edgy eras drove him a lil nuts and made him violent, reckless, whatever.

It is a central plot point in A Death in the Family, a comic that while I actively believe no one should read because it is cartoonishly racist, some (me) consider pretty important to understanding the circumstances surrounding Jason Todd's death.

This is consistent with his appearances in earlier stories, forming a character arc wherein he becomes increasingly violent and reckless due to the trauma of his early childhood in poverty and the increasing exposure to violence inherent in being Robin, filtered through the strictly anti-Robin lens of writer Jim Starlin.

Batman #411, he has what is obviously a violent trauma response after finding out Two-Face single parentified his mother.

Batman #422, Batman needs to pull him off a pimp after said pimp threatened his bottom bitch.

Batman #424. I posted this once and someone told me with their whole chest they actually for real believed this dude slipped and Todd didn't kill him which is how I realized that there's a whole generation of Batman fans who do not recognize 1970s-80s action movie tropes. An extremely humbling moment for me lol.

Anyway, notice the sequential nature of the issue numbers.

Now, I sincerely do not want to be a bitch here, but I don't know how else to say this.

The reason Jason Todd is not a violent loose cannon in his earliest appearances, even post-Crisis, is that characters later in their arc are not the same as characters at the beginning of their arc.

These two dudes, who yes are the same dude, have very different relationships with the concept of violent revenge. One of them even cut his own head off in a spooky metaphor cave that taught him about how violent revenge means destroying a part of yourself. The other dude just saw his parents gettin weenie roasted and is mad about that. To reiterate my point, they are the same dude.

But in fandom we have this weird thing where we flat reject this concept of Jason by insisting that no, this characterization was just later writers like Marv Wolfman being haters and retroactively character assassinating him through Tim Drake or something.

We insist on who he was at the beginning of his arc as if he should not, could not, would not on a boat, could not, would not, should not with a goat, develop into anything but who he was at that moment. I have never seen anything else like it in comics or in other fandom. Character development that is just so flat rejected and avoided, in a medium where we usually celebrate development because characters are usually set more or less in stone until the next big reboot event.

And look, if I'm being absolutely honest with you, the smooth clean safe not a wildcard roundhouse kick freak version of Todd that fandom has created is so fucking boring to me.

He is, to me, by far the worst version of the character.

To me, Jason Todd was this Robin specifically:

Batman: The Cult.

That's not Dick Grayson. That's not TIm Drake. That's not Damian Wayne, Stephanie Brown, Carrie Kelley, or whatever other version of Robin.

Jason Todd is the "alright you sorry clowns, let's party" Robin. He was written in line with a bunch of action movie and buddy cop tropes. A Death in the Family was straight up a "hand in your badge McKlinsky, you're a loose cannon" arc. And I just feel like the fandom desire to smooth that out of him, whatever the motivation behind it might be, is ultimately in service for a far more boring, more "in line with Dick Grayson and Tim Drake" version of a character who should never have been in line with Dick Grayson or Tim Drake.

[wrdn-tabris]

anyways everyone watch batman beyond and then read the comics im no longer asking

[hood-ex]

What do you think the league and league adjacent team’s reaction would be to Jason dying and coming back? What would their attitude be towards him?

I think they’d be pretty wary and mistrustful of him based on what info Bruce shared with them. Clark and Diana would probably be quite shocked that the little Robin they met was now calling himself Red Hood and killing people. 

I think Clark would especially take note of the change in Bruce’s demeanor about it through the years. He was there when Bruce was happy to have Robin Jason in his life. He was there when Bruce tried to murder the Joker for killing Jason. And then he would’ve seen the weird shift in Bruce’s demeanor once Jason was identified as Red Hood. 

But yeah, in general, the Titans, Outsiders, and (I guess?) the Teen Titans didn’t trust him because they knew Jason was a murderer. If the bats didn’t trust him then they wouldn’t either. 

[batwngs-archive]

kinda hate that when I see a post with roy in it/mentioned, it ends up being the bastardized version of roy that’s just jason’s lackey and not the complex and developed character ik and love :/