There are a lot of things from my childhood and teen years that I wish I still had. My Mego figures of Superman, Batman, Robin, and the Hulk, even though the first three would be far from mint or complete. My Hall of Justice playset from the Super Powers line. The pack of Marvel Comics I got for the Christmas of 1985.

And the article I cut out of The Morning Call that announced the death of Jason Todd.

That last one has bugged me for years because I kept that article in a file folder and managed to hang on to it through the several moves that happened in Pennsylvania and then the several moves that happened after I moved to Georgia. Back in 2008 I went to look for it and it was not in the file folder I have full of such articles.

It was just gone.

That article wasn’t anything special. It wasn’t very long and the only image was a panel from Batman #428 showing Batman holding Jason’s dead body. It was special though because, at the risk of once again sounding like an old man, things that happened in comics rarely (and I mean RARELY) made the mainstream press. Jason’s death was an exception, mainly because it was Robin. As in “Batman and Robin”. I have no concrete evidence to support the claim I’m about to make, but I’m fairly sure that most of the non-comic book reading people (or people that hadn’t read a comic since they were kids) weren’t even aware that there was a second Robin. They saw the headline and probably assumed that DC just killed Burt Ward.

Such was the culture of October 1988.

That article was the first time I had heard that Jason was dead, and it was a bit of a shock. I was still early in my comics collecting career and while the Superman books had become “must buys” every month I wasn’t reading much else. I have a dim memory of leafing through a comic in the waiting room of the orthodontist’s office and seeing the house ad at the top of this post, but it didn’t really register.

But here it was…the announcement that Robin was dead.

I had to read that issue.

It’s a weird feeling. Robin is dead, so that should be said. But I wanted to read how it happened, because I was into comics and that seemed like the thing to do.

I would have to wait, however. I was twelve years old at the time and my usual source of comics, the Trexlertown Mall, was not within biking distance. I can’t tell you how long it was after reading that article that I was going through the spinner rack at Waldenbooks, but I do remember spinning that rack and finding a copy of Batman #428.

Finally.

Issues 426 and 427 were nowhere to be found, which wasn’t surprising. Back issues weren’t a thing in newsstand distribution. Books came in, books went out. This was before the comic shop was a thing for me, but, to be fair, even if I had discovered Beachead Comics (which was still a month or so off) before A Death in the Family happened I am reasonably sure that the those issues would have either been sold out or on the wall behind the counter at a steep markup.

(For the next few decades those issues were always $30 no matter what shop I would see them in. It was, for the longest time, an unmovable number.)

I didn’t have to worry about being lost when it came to the story. The exposition at the beginning of issue 428 did a great job of letting me know the story so far. Then I saw the page that had the art I had seen in the article and remember thinking, “Oh, so that’s where that came from.” Then Superman showed up, Batman punched him in the face (breaking a couple of knuckles) and things ended with the Joker dramatically announcing that he was the new ambassador to Iran.

I remember enjoying the issue, which, again, is a weird thing to write because it contained the death of a child.

But I was a child, so that didn’t occur to me.

It was all just so…odd.

Sometime later I would pick up the trade paperback that DC rushed out. According to Mike’s Amazing World of Comics, it came out on February 28, 1989, which means it came out on the day I turned thirteen. Or sort of turned thirteen. I mean, I was thirteen on that day, but my birthday is February 29^th, so I technically didn’t have a birthday that year. That doesn’t really matter because I wouldn’t have gotten it on that day. If release dates for trades worked like release dates for single issues at the time I wouldn’t have gotten it at the Waldenbooks until a month or two later.

I was really happy to find it though.

$3.95.

For all four issues.

I could finally read the whole story.

And what a bargain! Four bucks for four issues, two of which were double-sized, so really it was four bucks for eight issues. At the time comics were seventy-five cents and even with issues 426 and 427 costing $1.50 because of the larger page count. If you bought the single issues the entire story would have set you back $4.50. The trade was cheaper, even with the faux introduction by Dr. Socrates S. Rodor (Professor Emeritus of Twentieth Century History, Gotham University) and the Postscript by Denny O’Neil.

The introduction by Dr. Rodor was slightly bewildering at the time. I knew on some level that this wasn’t a real professor because there was no Gotham University, so I understood that this wasn’t a “real” introduction. Also, it was written as if it was from the future, which made it even weirder. Years later I would not only twig that it was a meta commentary on the events of the story and the characters but also that Dr. Socrates S. Rodor was probably related to Aristotle “Tot” Rodor, a character from The Question series that Denny O’Neil was writing at the time. So, a meta commentary on Batman and Robin “written” by a professor that was a reference to another comic.

I’m surprised that a pop culture black hole wasn’t formed by all of that coming together.

If you happen to find an original copy, you’ll note that the newsprint the trades were printed on was cheap. I mean really cheap. You could practically read the next page without having to turn the one you were currently reading. Thirteen-year-old me just didn’t care. Trades were a rare thing at the time and finding one at Waldenbooks was even rarer until later that year.

I took the book home and devoured it. I read it again and again, which wasn’t uncommon at the time, but this was different. It was a big story. Even though I was very green as a reader I recognized that this book was special. What I didn’t know (or couldn’t know) at the time was how important that story would be to me as a Batman fan. I had no idea that by the end of the year I’d be regularly buying the Batman books for the first time or that a character named Tim Drake was about to be introduced or that he would be, by the end of 1990, the new Robin.

All I knew was that Jason was dead, I finally had the story, and that I really liked it.

Years later I would have a more nuanced opinion about the story.

But that’s for the next installment.

More to follow…