Warning! Spoilers for Batman: Urban Legends #4 ahead!
The latest issue of Batman: Urban Legends reveals that Red Hood a.k.a Jason Todd is aware of Batman’s greatest blunder as a detective and it’s a mistake that dates back to more than thirty years ago. The former Robin and Batman have a rocky history, flip-flopping between being enemies and allies ever since Jason returned from the grave as Red Hood. Batman: Urban Legends #4 sees Jason reflecting on the fateful day that Joker originally killed him with a new perspective, one that paints Batman’s inability to save him as a clear failure of the Caped Crusader’s detective skills.
Back in 1988, when Jason Todd was still the current Robin, the “Batman: A Death in the Family” arc saw the Boy Wonder reuniting with his long-lost mother, who happened to be caught up in Joker’s latest scheme. In the pivotal moment of the comic, Jason disobeys Batman’s orders to stay put and trails his mother and Joker to a warehouse by himself, where he is subsequently captured and beaten. Despite Jason and his mother’s attempts to escape, the warehouse explodes with the pair still inside. DC famously conducted a telephone ballot in which readers could vote for whether or not Jason should survive the explosion. When the results were in, Jason’s fate was decided. The Boy Wonder was dead and there was little for Batman to do but carry his corpse away from the wreckage. Following an abundance of continuity reboots, creative team changeovers and Lazarus Pits, Jason is once again amongst the living, but many fans still consider the former Robin’s original death to be Batman’s greatest failure.
Batman: Urban Legends #4 contains the fourth chapter of the story "Cheer" by Chip Zdarsky, Eddy Barrows, Eber Ferreira, Marcus To, Adriano Lucas and Becca Carey. The issue revisits this crucial moment of disconnect between Jason and Batman, only this time with narration from Red Hood himself. In a shot-for-shot recreation of the original sequence where Batman leaves to save several civilians and tells Jason to wait and not confront Joker alone, Red Hood points out how uncharacteristic of Batman it was to assume that Jason would heed his instructions. “How could he be surprised? How could the great Batman not know? I wouldn’t listen to him,” Red Hood muses.
Red Hood’s suggestion that his original death was a detective failure on Batman’s part makes sense. After all, many consider Batman as the World’s Greatest Detective and he is frequently portrayed as a character who can easily and accurately predict the actions of other people. In this case, he was aware that the emotional stakes for Jason were especially high with his mom being in danger. Not only that, but he literally acknowledges that Jason had rarely followed his orders in the past. How could Batman have reasonably expected Jason to actually listen to him and stay put when it was clear that the latter was going to make an irrational decision? This perspective reframes Jason’s death as not only a tragic chapter in Batman’s history, but also an event that was frustratingly preventable if not for a major lapse in judgement on the part of the Dark Knight.
Batman and Red Hood are much deeper into their costumed careers now and both have grown a lot as characters, but the latter’s observation still casts the Caped Crusader in a fairly unflattering light. Out of everyone, the one person that Batman somehow couldn’t predict was one of the people closest to him. There’s no denying that Batman has a formidable skillset, but perhaps calling him the World’s Greatest Detective is a bit too much of a stretch.