Welcome to the five hundred and thirty-ninth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the first five hundred (I actually haven't been able to update it in a while). This week, was DC Comics going to kill Jason Todd regardless of the 1-900 results? If Jason Todd WASN'T killed, what was his destiny in the Bat-books? Plus, learn which X-Men figure was used to make the very first Lara Croft action figure!

Let's begin!

NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).

COMIC LEGEND: DC was planning on killing Jason Todd regardless of what the result was of the 1-900 poll.

STATUS: False

DC Comics made history with 1988's Batman #427 (by Jim Starlin, Jim Aparo and Mike DeCarlo). In the issue, Jason Todd is betrayed by his own mother to the Joker, who savagely beats the young hero with a crowbar...





The villain then locks Jason and his mother up in a warehouse with a bomb...











At the end of the issue, there was an ad for a pair of 1-900 numbers where people could vote as to whether Jason survived the explosion or not...



Amusingly enough, they were not allowed to specifically use the word "call this number for his death," notice how they used a roundabout way to say death.

The next issue, sadly, Jason was shown to have died (the vote was very narrow, less than a hundred votes separated him from life and death)...







Anyhow, when I featured this story in our countdown of the 75 Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told, commenter M-Wolverine wrote in to note:

I think the biggest think Death had going against it was the whole “vote” thing, but I truly believe that they would have fixed the vote no matter what, because they wanted Robin dead as an event. I mean, have the pages where he’s been beaten but lived ever leaked? Hard to believe they never game up with an Elseworld’s book with those later so they could basically sell the same story again with an expensive treatment….unless they didn’t exist.

His comment inspired this legend, but it's a common belief. After all, writer Jim Starlin was famously anti-Robin. He wanted to kill off Robin for quite a while. I mean, for crying out loud, he wanted to give Robin AIDS!!!

So it is reasonable to believe that DC was intent on killing Jason no matter what.

Denny O'Neil insists otherwise and he does have the page to prove it, as there would only be a single page difference between the two Batman #428s (the timing of the release of the issue did not give them a whole lot of time to make changes) and the original Aparo/DeCarlo page went unused for years until Batman Annual #25 (where Superboy Prime punched reality to bring Jason back to life), a year AFTER Aparo died...



Les Daniels also posted the panel in his last book about DC Comics history...



Paul Levitz also noted in the behind-the-scenes feature on the DVD Batman: Under the Red Hood:

We didn’t have a bias as to whether Jason would live or die, but I think a lot of the creative people weren’t disappointed that he got to get killed.

So no, Jason was not always going to die. However, that doesn't mean that things would have worked out for him had he not died, which we'll detail in a legend on the next page...

Thanks to M-Wolverine for the inadvertent suggestion!

Check out some entertainment and sports legends from this week at Legends Revealed:

Did Steven Spielberg Want to Direct the First Superman Movie as a Musical?

Did a Mute Man Speak for the First Time in Five Years After Riding the Coney Island Cyclone?

Did Major League and Minor League Baseball Ban a Female Player From Playing in the Minors?

Did a TV Writer Once Get a Parking Spot for His Pseudonym?

COMIC LEGEND: Jason Todd was finished as Robin whether he lived or died.

STATUS: I'm Going With True

As noted in the earlier legend, Jim Starlin did not want Jason Todd as Robin (or Robin period) in Batman. Denny O'Neil, for his part, noted that Jason Todd was getting more and more unlikeable and fans were not, well, fans of him. O'Neil noted on the Under the Red Hood DVD:

Robin was suddenly not this virtuous guy, but he was difficult. If you’re doing difficult characters who are fulfilling the role of hero, it’s a tricky line to walk. You can’t make them so disagreeable that the audience doesn’t like them or doesn’t admire them on some level. And that, I don’t know if anybody planned for that to happen with Jason Todd, but it did.

My impression is that he was not a very popular character. … And I thought he would become a snot.

O'Neil famously did a storyline where Batman was replaced by Azrael to show how we NEED a Batman. Thus, O'Neil was well known for laying his tracks for his future decisions, and in the issues leading up to A Death in the Family, O'Neil furthered the descent of Jason Todd, famously in Batman #425...







In Les Daniels' last book of DC History, O'Neil recalled:

Jason had drifted in a direction that is probably my fault as much as anybody's. We didn't set out to make him an arrogant little snot, but somehow or other in tiny increments he ended up that way. We reached the point where were going to have to a drastic character revision on him or write him out of the series.

In the trade paperback of A Death in the Family, O'Neil said:

Letters and conversations with fans indicated that few admired him, many were indifferent to him, and a substantial number hated him. The editor considered writing him out of one or both of the monthly titles that he appeared in. Then the ditor (who, I may as well confess, was me) had an idea. Let the readers decide Jason's fate.

Ultimately, as O'Neill noted, they let the fans decide, but if you look at how Jason would have "survived" in Batman #428 coupled with Jason's destructive behavior leading up to A Death in the Family and I think it is most likely that Jason was going to be done as Robin whether he lived or not.

I don't know that for a certainty, of course, as things obviously have a tendency to change, but I think the writing was on the wall for Jason, it was just whether he left the series in a bodybag or not.

Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online: What famous actor was ACTUALLY deemed too rough to play James Bond?

COMIC LEGEND: Lara Croft's first action figure was a repurposed Jubilee action figure.

STATUS: True

The original Tomb Raider video game was a bit of an overnight sensation in 1996.

The game became so big that ToyBiz decided to cash in with a Lara Croft action figure in 1997. However, the toy was so rushed that they just did it as a standalone figure (in 1999, Playmate did a whole Tomb Raider line).

So the figure they ended up doing...



was just a reworked Jubilee action figure from the previous year (I BELIEVE this is the one)...



In an article at io9, toy expert John Kent explained:

People were excited to have a Lara Croft—any Lara Croft. What they got from Toy Biz was a quick cash grab using a previous X-Men Jubilee figure as a sculpting guide (an easy old-school way to cut down development time also used by Kenner for their Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves line). Collectors put that figure away hoping it would increase in value, but superior efforts from Playmates and NECA have reduced this once-hot figure to the five dollar bin at shows.

Jubilee, Lara Croft, what's the difference, right?

Thanks to commenter Ferb Morgendorffer for the suggestion! And thanks to Charlie Jane Anders and John Kent for the info!

Okay, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

Here's my newest book, Why Does Batman Carry Shark Repellent? The cover is by Kevin Hopgood (the fellow who designed War Machine's armor).



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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends - half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...(click to enlarge)...



If you'd like to order it, you can use the following code if you'd like to send me a bit of a referral fee...

Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you all next week!