The Maybe File: Jason Todd's Resurrection

Posts on this site are not always cut-and-dried (or on time; sorry it's late this week!). I wish they were. And there are definitely a lot of entries that should either clearly be on the site or should clearly not be, but there are also a lot of maybes, and including them comes down to a judgment call. This one is by far the maybe-est. In fact, I'm creating a new category just for it, because it's close enough that I wouldn't feel right not including it, but still hazy enough that I feel like including it is cheating a bit. So I'm including it with a big caveat.

This week in The Maybe File: Jason Todd's resurrection.

The quick and dirty backstory on Jason Todd is that he was the second Robin, who Batman met when he tried to steal the Batmobile's hubcaps. Jason was more violent and reckless, and fans voted for the Joker to kill him. He stayed dead for almost twenty years when he came back as the Red Hood (Joker's original identity).

Here's where it gets weird: to explain how he came back, along with other incongruities in the DC Universe, the event Infinite Crisis (2006) said that Superboy-Prime punched the walls of reality and the reverberations caused events and details to change throughout time and space.

I know.

That's not a story that's very conducive to adaptations, so when it came time to turn the Red Hood storyline into Batman: Under the Red Hood (June 2010), they said Ra's al-Ghul brought Jason back to life with one of his Lazarus Pits. He felt responsible for Jason's death since the only reason Joker was around to kill him was because al-Ghul had hired him.

That same month, a miniseries called Red Hood: The Lost Days came out that filled in the gaps between his death and return. It doesn't explain how Jason was returned to life, but Talia al-Ghul did use the Lazarus Pits to restore his health and memories.

And in the New 52, he was specifically brought back to life by the Lazarus Pits, which was first mentioned in Red Hood and the Outlaws #0 (September 2012).

This evidence is in no way conclusive. On one hand, the Lazarus Pits are a pretty effective, already existent, on-franchise method of replacing the Superboy punches; I'm a little surprised they didn't go with that to begin with. On the other hand, the timing of Red Hood: The Lost Days is such that it pretty much has to be some planned synergy. But on the first hand again, that miniseries didn't replace the Superboy punches so much as add to them. And to add to the confusion, the same person wrote the original Red Hood story and the movie, and although he didn't write Red Hood and the Outlaws, he did write several Batman books in the New 52 so he may have had some influence.