There are few heroes who have gone through tragedies as terrible as Red Hood. He was brutally beaten and killed by the Joker (alongside his mother), and then spent years as a twisted villain for the closest thing he had to a family. But perhaps the biggest twist of the knife is Jason admitting that the Teen Titans could have been the team to save him.
Before his change into an antihero during the New 52, Jason Todd was a brutal villain. He proved this by breaking into the Titans tower and attacking Tim Drake, nearly beating him to death. Jason did this to try and see if Tim was really worth the mantle of Robin. Jason was on the Titans very briefly, and he believes that if he had stayed longer, things might’ve been different. At the end of Teen Titans #29 by Geoff Johns and Tony S. Daniel, Jason admits that if he had gotten to stay on the Titans team, he believes they’d have shaped him into a better person.
Jason calls out the camaraderie of heroes like Beast Boy and Cyborg, and also notes that when he worked with the Tians, Raven was intent on warning him not to let his anger make him reckless – a huge factor in his later demise, when he confronted Joker without backup. Indeed, if he’d worked with the Titans more, maybe Jason would’ve avoided being killed by the Joker.
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Jason Believes The Titans Would Have Helped Him Overcome His Rage
Teen Titans #29 (2003) by Geoff Johns, Tony S. Daniel, Marlo Alquiza, Jeromy Cox, and Phil Balsman
Jason Todd was a great Robin. While DC likes to characterize him as the angry, reckless Robin, that’s only part of the story. Jason was a bright, cheerful, sunny kid who took being Robin very seriously. The only reason he ended up being killed is that his own mother betrayed him, something he never could have expected. This resulted in both Jason and his mother being killed by the Joker, with Batman forced to be elsewhere, asking Jason to wait for him before taking action. Jason Todd’s death was a huge tragedy for the Bat-Family, but the only reason it happened is that Jason had no one in his life except Batman, which is why his relationship with the Titans is so heartbreaking.
In the issue, Jason rages against the Titans when he realizes that he wasn’t given a statue in their hall of remembrance. This oversight shows that the Titans never considered him a member, and emphasizes the missed opportunity of them becoming his found family, as they did for Nightwing. There’s a metatextual reason for this – Dick Grayson was hugely popular at the time, and working exclusively with the Titans, leading DC to replace him with Jason as Batman’s sidekick. However, Dick’s prominent place with the Titans meant that at the time, the book didn’t need ‘another Robin.’ Of course, by the time Tim Drake came along, circumstances had changed, and he also found a second home on the team.
Jason Leaves A Haunting Reminder That He Was A Titan
The Team Didn’t Include Him in Its Hall of Remembrance
The Teen Titans have had tons of members over the years and Jason was only a member very briefly, but he was a member of the team. He went on a few missions with them and if he had simply gotten the same chance that Dick, and later Tim, received, then his life would have been drastically changed. Instead of dying alone in a desert, Jason would have had a team of superheroes he could’ve called on to help support him when Batman couldn’t. However, even if he’d still died, he wouldn’t have returned with the same burning sense of rage and betrayal. That’s the true tragedy of Red Hood‘s relationship with the Titans – not that they might have saved his life, but that they might have saved his soul.
