This ad is a lie.

Okay, not exactly a lie but extremely misleading. This ad asks the question, “Will Robin die tonight?” and based on the framing of that question and the image of a bound Robin hanging upside down and the shot of the gun pointing at…something, you’d that this is will be the driving force of Batman #408.

Spoilers, it is not.

Batman #408 is the first issue of Batman after Year One wrapped up. It’s not Max Allan Collins first issue as writer. That was Batman #402, which is not the best Batman issue ever produced. Neither is Batman #403, but then you had Year One play out over the next four issues and readers at the time were probably thinking, “Okay, this is going well. Yeah, those two issues were kind of rough but this new origin for Batman is great. Can’t wait to see what comes next!”

And then you pick up #408 and you get an opening scene that runs roughly six to seven pages that consist of a flashback showing how the Batman and Robin (Dick Grayson edition) team broke up in the Post Crisis DCU.

And it’s awful.

Batman and Robin are fighting the Joker and Robin gets shot. Which is bad. I am in no way trying to downplay this. But Batman’s reaction to this is to fire Dick as Robin because it’s just too dangerous.

(For context, the pre-Crisis version of Dick going from Robin to Nightwing was much more natural. He had simply outgrown the role, and Jason Todd had entered the chat, so it was time. No hard feelings. Actually, the feelings were good.)

What makes this even more annoying is that Detective Comics #574, which was published the month before Batman #408 came out, had a story where Jason Todd was on death’s door and at the end of that issue Batman (checks notes) tries to tell Jason he doesn’t have to be Robin anymore and Jason says that they have work to do.

Now, you could make the argument that the thing with Dick was before the thing with Jason (timeline wise) and that maybe Bruce had changed his mind, but I don’t buy that. That line of thinking suggests that Batman was like, “Wow, this is really dangerous work. My nineteen-year-old partner just got shot. I need to get him out of this life,” and then, months later, he picks up this new kid and thinks, “Let me take this much younger kid and pull him into this life of danger.”

It doesn’t work for me.

I realize that part of the problem is that the post-Crisis Batman was kind of a mess at first. Denny O’Neil took over editing the books with Batman #401 and you had Mike W Barr and Alan Davis telling these New Look Sixties style Batman stories with a hard, eighties edge to them in Detective Comics and then Max Allan Collins telling very Bronze Age inspired stories with an eighties edge in Batman and tonally it just didn’t work.

The rest of Batman #408 is the new origin for Jason Todd, where he goes from circus kid whose parents were killed by Killer Croc to street kid Batman caught boosting the tires off of the Batmobile. Which, as origins go, was not an upgrade.

I realize that house ads are there to entice readers to check out other books, but in this case, I would totally understand if someone felt ripped off if they sought out Batman #408 after seeing this.

Things evened out. Eventually.

I mean Jason died but then he got better nearly twenty years later.

So…a win?

More to follow…