This comic isn't quite like most of the ones we cover here at Batman-News, so this "review" is going to be a bit different as well. Batman #438 is arguably one of the most influential Batman comics of all time, if not for DC Comics as a whole. It may seem strange to think of now when everyone dies about once a month, but killing off Robin was almost unthinkable at the time. It was in the news! Of course it would be eclipsed about five years later with the death of Superman (even though that only lasted a few month) but still, this was a big deal.

By 1988, Editor Denny O'Neil and the rest of the creators at DC felt that something had to be done about Jason Todd. As Denny put it:

We knew we had a problem with Robin. It was a case of something you hear about and seldom encounter: a character taking on a life of his own.

Maybe I should have been a more hands-on editor but it just kind of slipped past us and all of a sudden we had this disagreeable little snot and I thought we either had to give him a massive personality change or write him out of the series.

Jim Starlin, the writer for Batman at the time, said he didn't like writing Jason and avoided it as much as he could. However, his was less a problem with Jason himself and more a trend of being against the concept of a Robin altogether. He even went so far as to stuff a box with Jason's name when DC was deciding whether to give a character AIDS as a PSA issue, similar to when Speedy got addicted to heroin in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #85-86. There were camps at the DC offices who believed that a "kid sidekick" didn't fit with the new, grittier version of Batman that existed in the 80s. Whether it was with Jason specifically or Robin entirely, fans and creators were unhappy.

It was Denny who suggested using a 900 number (for those too young to remember, that was a pay-per-call system that charged you for every dial) to decide whether Jason lived or died. He got the idea from an Eddie Murphy bit on SNL where viewers could call in to determine whether or not he killed a lobster. Famously, or rather infamously, Jason's fate was decided by a margin of only 72 votes, with 5,271 calls for him to live and 5,343 for death. There is a longstanding rumor that one fan used an auto-dialer to make over 200 calls to kill Jason (thereby becoming the one responsible for his death) but that's never been confirmed.

Regardless, the votes were in and it was time for Robin to die. However, they didn't want it getting out what the results of vote were before it was actually time for customers to buy the comics. Production director Bob Rozakis had artist Jim Aparo pencil two different versions of the climax to Batman #428: one where Jason lived and one where he died. Processing was done in such a way that no one outside of the inner circle knew what the final result would be until it was time to print. Eventually, that time came and the world learned what became of Jason Todd. The rest is history.

But what if it were different? It'd be such a small change. After all, when Aparo drew two versions of the climax there were very few panels that needed to actually differ. Whether Jason were dead or hospitalized, everything else in the comic could still play out mostly the same, even if everything after would be forever changed. Now, 35 years later, we can finally catch a glimpse into what that reality might look like.

As I said before, it's almost shocking how similar this is to the original Batman #428. Of the 23 pages in the comic, only about two differ in any meaningful way (plus the inclusion of 13 issue-accurate ads and letters to the editor that are a lot of fun to see today). There's the famous Pietà death scene, and the funeral is changed to Bruce visiting Jason in the hospital. Other than that, the only alterations are a couple of small panels when Batman discovers the body that show him in surprise instead of dismay, and a minor text change at the end that now only mentions Jason's mother's body instead of both of them.

The story is otherwise totally unchanged. There's still a very long expositional recap of Jason's origin and the story so far leading up to Batman finding the body. Joker still meets up with Ayatollah Khomeini in order to become the Iranian ambassador to the UN. Batman and Superman are still helpless to do anything due to his diplomatic immunity.

It's worth taking a moment to talk about the fact that A Death in the Family is a very strange comic. Everyone obviously remembers his actual death and how it changed the course of Batman forever, but how often do you actually hear people talk about the rest of it? When it inevitably winds up on a plethora of "must read" Batman lists, do they talk about Joker's plot to sell missiles to Iran in order to fund his crime, or even Jason's gender-swapped Mamma Mia! adventure where he finds a bunch of women who might be his mom? Even in modern adaptations like the animated Batman: Under the Red Hood, all of that gets either changed or dropped entirely.

The primary reason for this is because A Death in the Family isn't actually that great of a story. Sure, Jason's death itself is a very powerful moment, due in no small part to Jim Aparo's striking artwork. The rest of it, though, is sort of clunky at best and just nonsensical at worst. For a good chunk of the storyline, Jason's plot and Bruce's plot are not even connected. It's only through total coincidence that Batman's plan to find the Joker and Jason's quest to find his real mom cause them both to wind up in Beirut. Joker and Jason's mom are even conveniently working together through sheer happenstance. Until that point, it's a lot of location hopping that feels overly dragged out.

Everything leading up to Jason's death has elements of a good political thriller (and oh boy does Jim Starlin love injecting politics into his Batman stories in very unsubtle ways), but there's so much fluff that it can feel like a drag. Ultimately I think this is because the whole story was built around coming up with a way for Jason to possibly die, and working backwards from there. There's no need to stretch it out with two unrelated storylines running in parallel and diversions like the fight with Shiva. The first half of the story isn't terrible, it's just a middling comic that isn't up to the standards of the rest of Jim Starlin's run.

The part that everyone loathes to remember is the final chapter in Batman #429. That's where we get the absurdity of Batman and Superman having to defeat diplomat Joker at the UN. It's an utterly bizarre premise that might work in a much sillier and light-hearted story, but is completely tonally inappropriate for immediately after Robin just died. The notion that the UN and everyone else is just cool with having known serial killer Joker be an ambassador to the point of preventing Batman from stopping him is nothing short of ridiculous. Keep in mind that this revelation comes less than an issue after we see Batman cradling a teenage boy's brutalized corpse.

Remember when I said that Starlin liked to use his comics for political commentary? He really wanted to make sure you knew how much he hates Iran. Between this, the Central American drug cartels, murderous gangs of homeless people, and KGBeast, it's not hard at all to figure out that his run came out during the Reagan era and all the American political anxieties that entailed. He's so focused on delivering his diatribes that it tramples all over the actual central premise of the story. You can have a story airing your grievances about the Ayatollah, or you can have a story focusing on the tragic death of Jason Todd. You can't really do both.

Recommended if…

• You want to see Jason live
• It makes a nice companion piece to Death in the Family
• You want to see all the old ads from 1988

Overall

For better or worse, A Death in the Family is unquestionably a very "important" Batman story that's worth reading for any fans of the character. Similarly, this special alternate version of Batman #428 is a fascinating look at what could have been, and how little needed to change in order for Batman's history to be irrevocably different. While arguably a curiosity more than anything else, I hope it's at the very least included in future collections of the story as historical record.

Score: 5,271/10,614 votes

DISCLAIMER: DC Comics provided Batman News with a copy of this comic for the purposes of this review.