Last week, DC finally shared the alternate ending to Batman #428, the issue in which Jason Todd was killed. As longtime fans will remember, the outcome of the issue was subject to a vote. Fans called a 900-number, which charged a fee to their phone bill, and made their voices known, voting to get rid of the second Robin. Over the years, a few panels and pages from the alternate ending had resurfaced, but it wasn’t until this month that DC released a new version of Batman #428, with colored and lettered versions of the alternate pages.
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Titled Batman: Robin Lives!, the one-shot gives fans a glimpse of what might have been (not that we lost much, since Jason Todd is back in action and has been for a decade anyway). Some may misremember it as an issue that ends abruptly when the body is found, but there’s more than that to it, and obviously every page after the moment of “discovery” is totally different if Robin is alive instead of dead.
Here’s the key page, which has circulated for years in its original, black-and-white form:
One particularly cool thing to see fully realized, as noted by The Beat, is a scene in which Dick Grayson shows up to show up. In the period during which this story took place, Batman and his original ward has a pretty rocky relationship. That was actually one of the big things of the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths era, picking up on the complicated relationship they had in the Marv Wolfman/George Perez volume of The New Teen Titans. a Deluxe Edition hardcover for A Death in the Family, editorial notes indicate that Alfred would have replaced Nightwing in the scene, had Jason survived the vote and the pages been published at the time. There is no indication that the Nightwing-less pages were ever drawn, but it’s interesting to wonder if, even now, there is still some lost media from Batman #428.
It’s interesting to see DC publish this “what if…?” style book for the A Death in the Family comic, since Warner Bros. Home Entertainment also recently released an animated movie done in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” style, so that you can tell various different stories set within that tale.
What do you think of the Robin Lives variant of Batman #428? Did you vote in the original poll? Sound off below or feel free to hit up @russ.burlingame on Threads if you are bummed Jason eventually came back!
