Short Box: Batman, Vol. 1 #428F

Batman, Vol. 1

#428F

Facsimile Foil Variant

Release: Dec 12, 2023

Creators

Writer	Jim Starlin
Artist	Mike DeCarlo, Jim Aparo
Cover Artist	Mike Mignola

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Many people remember the infamous 1-900 number call-in vote to determine the fate of Jason Todd, the second young man to carry the red, yellow, and green mantle of Robin, the Boy Wonder, and those who do remember likely know how things turned out: Jason died. Thanks, in no small part, to readers like this:

Ultimately, people who had been outvoted got their way and Jason got better and is alive and…not entirely well these days, but this facsimile edition answers the question of how things would have happened differently if the, er, pro-life, so to speak, crowd had gotten their way back then.

Honestly? It would not have turned out very differently. We get a little bit of different art, with Batman holding Jason’s body and declaring that he’s alive and one bit showing Jason in a coma in the hospital, but beyond that, the story unfolds much the same way as it did when Jason died, including the fever dream of a cameo by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the designation of the Joker as Iran’s ambassador to the UN.

Yeah…even setting aside the bloodthirsty readers paying money to vote for a kid to die, the whole storyline was a lot.

Supposedly, the alternative art is “never before seen,” but others have said it’s turned up in other books prior to this. I guess it’s just never previously been incorporated into the original story.

For the record, I didn’t vote. I wasn’t really reading any Bat-books regularly at that time, and while I wasn’t that keen on Jason, I certainly wasn’t going to spend money to vote for him to die. (Nor would my parents have allowed it. Mostly for the spending money part.) Sometime after it all unfolded I picked up a trade paperback collecting the whole storyline that I randomly found at a grocery store.

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