#one person who replied to the reddit ask said they voted kill and felt guilty lmao

[goodoldfashionedengineer]

It's somehow ironic that this happened in comics. A comic about superheroes. You know, the people that save people? Especially a superhero that is all about "Everyone can/deserves to be saved"

And they just went "Screw that! I'm no hero! *dials the Kill number*"

A small reminder that he was voted to die.

[hereforrants]

Oh wow, I see this post the same day I learned how insane the whole Jason death poll scenario was. What a coincidence!

If y'all don't know how the poll came to be and was executed, read under the cut, but I'll tell you right now, it's because of SNL:

Okay so, almost nobody liked Jason when he was introduced as a carbon copy to Dick Grayson, and they still didn't like him when his personality was retconned to be a bit more rough and rebellious God forbid Dick Grayson doesn't stay Robin forever ig. One of these people was Batman's new writer Jim Starlin.

Starlin has literally admitted that when DC wanted to write a character dying from AIDS to spread awareness during the epidemic, he crammed several votes for it to be teenaged Jason into the suggestion box. He really disliked Jason. He was itching to kill him off, it's almost funny reading about it. Everyone else was thinking of killing Jason off as well, but just because the fans hated him it wasn't like personal. Batman's editor, Dennis O'Neil, was actually the one who came up with the idea to do a fan poll on whether Jason lived or died, because he had seen the pole before.

On Saturday Night Live.

Apparently in the 80s, there was an Eddie Murphy skit where he had a live lobster with him, and on the screen SNL put two phone numbers on there: If you called one phone number, that was a vote to let the lobster be. If you called the other, that was a vote to boil the lobster on live television. It cost 50 cents to call either number, but a shit ton of people called, like, you could've bought a house with how much money was spent on those two 1 -900 lines (The end result was letting Larry the Lobster live if you wanted to know)

So the Batman team decided to do just that: Buy a house Set up two 1-900 phone numbers (Also deciding to charge $0.50 to call), one that decided Jason lived, one that decided he died, and advertised that readers decided his fate on the back of the most recent comic issue.

Surprisingly, it was a close call; a little over 10,000 called, and Jason Dies beat Jason Lives by only 72 votes. I found this Reddit ask page that asked about who voted what and why, and I linked it but I'll tell you right now, a few people voted to kill Jason just because they didn't think DC would go through with it.

Like, I'm sorry but that's wild to me, imagine spending at least 50 cents on one phone call (Which is $1.30 nowadays I checked), maybe making more than one call because some people did, to kill off a character, and then expecting the publisher that charged you 50 cents a call to just, not do that, to just go like "actually the kid lives anyways fuck you."

So that's that, but one of the funniest aspects of this story to me is that there was some discourse about the poll results and subsequent Canon death of Jason Todd, the Batman staff received a lot of angry letters and phone calls but that's not nearly as funny as the fact that supposedly, a lawyer set up his Dial-up internet to make his phone call the Kill Jason line 85 times. A fucking lawyer

No one's ever found out if that's fully true, or even if one person did make that many calls, but I like to believe my friend's conspiracy theory that it was actually Jim Starlin himself rigging the polls. It probably wasn't him but wouldn't that be so funny?

A small reminder that he was voted to die.