Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for the first three episodes of Titans season 3.
The second episode of Titans season 3, “Red Hood,” introduced a new villain, who shared the alias first used by the Joker when he started his criminal career. While the Clown Prince of Crime’s early days as the Red Hood have been explored in a number of stories over the years, the most famous version was detailed in the flashbacks of the Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke.
The idea behind the Red Hood was first introduced in Detective Comics #168 in 1951, in the story “The Man Behind the Red Hood,” by Bill Finger and Lew Sayre Schwartz. The story introduced the Red Hood, though not Jason Todd’s version, as the one criminal Batman had never managed to capture, having disappeared after diving into a vat of chemicals while robbing the Ace Playing Card Company. By the end of the story, it was revealed that Joker was the Red Hood and that while the mask that gave him his name allowed him to breathe as he swam downstream and out of the factory, the exposure to the chemicals bleached his skin and dyed his hair green, leaving him looking like a nightmarish clown. Horrified by the change in his appearance, the Red Hood realized he could use his disfigurement to terrify other people as well, and he rebranded himself as the Joker.
Writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland expanded upon this origin in their 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke. This story established the man who would become Joker as a failed comedian who was desperate to provide for his pregnant wife. He agreed to help a group of criminals known as the Red Hood Gang break into the chemical factory that once employed him. The gang provided the comedian with the costume that inspired their name, explaining that they had a different gang member wear the costume at each job. In truth, they used the costume as a distraction, sending the police and Batman chasing after a costumed mastermind that didn’t truly exist. This added a tragic element to the Joker’s origins, as everything that could have gone wrong with the robbery did, culminating in his disfigurement and madness upon seeing how he had been transformed into the clown he felt like.
Titans season 3 establishes that something similar happened in its history, with Dick Grayson’s Nightwing noting that Joker started his criminal career wearing a red hood. This fact was explained after Police Commissioner Barbara Gordon told him about a bombing committed by a woman wearing a red hood, who turned herself into the police afterward and gave them a note reading “I NEED TO TALK TO NIGHTWING.” This was the first of many crimes committed by seemingly ordinary people wearing red hoods, all orchestrated by a new criminal mastermind who used the Red Hood name but did not act like a Joker copycat.
The final scene of “Red Hood” revealed him to be the former Robin, Jason Todd. This was something of a shock to Nightwing and the other Titans given that Jason Todd had been beaten to death by the Joker two days earlier. Of course, comic readers were well aware that Jason Todd adopted the Red Hood alias after being resurrected following his death at Joker’s hands. It remains to be seen, however, how Titans‘ version of Jason Todd came back from the dead.
