Wait, Did DC Just Restore the Pre-Crisis Origin of Jason Todd?

DC K.O. has been knocking readers socks off. DC Comics did an amazing job of building up the story, spending the last year moving all of the pieces into place. Some fans haven’t loved the tournament itself (a lot of people had a problem with the Joker using the Atom’s size-changing belt to kill their favorites), but so far that’s the main complaint. December is Fight Month, and so far, the creators have used these battles to push the story forward and do some interesting character work. There have been a lot of cool moments in these chapters of the story, and DC K.O.: Red Hood vs. The Joker #1 supplies plenty of those, including one that is kind of shocking.

DC continuity has always been wonky, partly because of the way the publisher has changed over the decades. Once upon a time, DC was much more childish, because its readers were younger and this meant that even when things changed, they didn’t change too much. Jason Todd is a perfect example of this. Nowadays, we see him as the angry street urchin who Batman found and recruited because of his moxie. However, that wasn’t always the case. His origin was completely changed after the continuity altering classic Crisis on Infinite Earths, but DC K.O.: Red Hood vs. The Joker #1 reveals that change might not be canon anymore.

Jason Todd’s Pre-Crisis Origin Was a Modification on Dick Grayson’s

Dick Grayson started growing up in the ’70s (I’ve always believed a part of this was the reintroduction of the Earth-Two Robin as an adult; however, I wasn’t around back then, so I don’t know if that version was actually popular), and eventually left Batman’s side to be with the New Teen Titans. This led DC to creating Jason Todd. This original Jason was actually very different from the one that we’ve known in the post-Crisis years. His parents were acrobats, Joe and Tina Todd, who were inspired by the Flying Graysons.

The two of them ended up dead, much like the Graysons before them, and Bruce took in their son Jason to train him to avenge his parents’ deaths. Now, I think the reason for this was simple; fans had lived with Dick Grayson as Robin since 1940. Everyone knew the origin of Robin, so while DC was changing who wore the leotard and the pixie boots, they kept the origin as close to the one that everyone had known for 43 years at that point. This way, the character would be familiar to what readers knew about Robin, despite there being a different person wearing the domino mask.

In a lot of ways, this made sense, especially back in 1983. Go back and read those old Jason Todd stories; he’s basically Dick. DC wanted to shake things up, but didn’t shake them up so much that people wouldn’t know what was going on. However, this changed in the post-Crisis DC Universe, mostly because the publisher was trying to do what Marvel often did, bringing maturity and variety to the heroes. We got the Jason Todd stealing the wheels of the Batmobile origin and we’d soon get Todd’s death. Since then, he’s come back as the Red Hood, but his original pre-Crisis origin stayed dead. Until now.

One of the cool things about DC K.O.‘s fights is that they allow the characters to choose the form they want to take in the different rounds. One page in DC K.O.: Red Hood vs. The Joker #1 shows Jason trying to figure out what form to take, with images from the character’s history surrounding him. One of those images of is a performance with the Todds in their acrobatic leotards. This begs the question of what all of this means and there’s several options, each of them playing off the realities of current DC.

Everything Old Is New Again

Since 2005’s Infinite Crisis, DC has been bringing back numerous ideas from pre-Crisis books. In the last 20 years, this has been abandoned and picked up several times as the publisher did their level best to entice readrs back to their books. The current DC Multiverse has made everything canon, using ideas like Hypertime to explain how the whole thing works. This latest change almost certainly plays into that; Jason’s past as an acrobat happened somewhere in the multiverse, so he would have access to it because of the nature of the Heart of Apokolips, the sentient being controlling the tournament. More than likely, this is just an example of Hypertime in action and DC isn’t actually changing his origin back.

However, there’s definitely a good chance that perhaps they are. Maybe when the universe is re-made at the end of the story, this will become canon again. That would be a very interesting change, honestly. You could use both ideas — the Todds as acrobats who were killed, forcing Jason onto the streets, where Batman finds him — and would be a cool modification on the character. While I’m betting that it’s just going to be a Hypertime thing that doesn’t count, I think bringing it back to canon and incorporating it with what we have now is a cool idea that could pay off in the long run.

DC K.O.: Red Hood vs. The Joker #1 is on sale now.

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