October 18, 1988: "Batman: A Death in the Family"

The graphic novel, collecting all 4 issues

October 18, 1988: DC Comics publishes Batman: A Death in the Family, a sharp turn in the story of the Caped Crusader.

Batman had been introduced in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Robin had been introduced in Detective Comics #38 in 1940, to give Batman a sidekick and to increase his appeal to children, as "the Boy Wonder."

The original Robin was Dick Grayson. His origin story has remained the same: A child acrobat, he and his parents were a circus act, The Flying Graysons. When the owner of the circus wouldn't pay protection money to Anthony Zucco, a Gotham City mobster, Zucco had his boys sabotage the act, so that his parents, who performed without a safety net, fell to their deaths. (The 1995 film Batman Forever matched this story, but made Two-Face the mobster who did it, made Dick considerably older, and added an older brother to the doomed family act.)

Gotham millionaire (eventually, adjusted to be a billionaire) Bruce Wayne saw the fatal fall, and found Dick, whose age at the time has varied, depending on who's telling the story. Usually, he's 12, although sometimes as young as 8, about the age that Bruce was when his parents were shot and killed in front of him. (Chris O'Donnell was 24 when he played Dick in Batman Forever.)

Bruce seeks Dick out, and learns that Dick wants to go to the police. Bruce tells him that he can't do that, since Zucco has some cops on his payroll, and tells him there's another way. Bruce reveals his identity as Batman, and trains Dick to use his acrobatic abilities in fighting crime, teaching him everything he knows. Soon, Dick is ready to go out fighting crime with Batman, as Robin, and, together, they take Zucco down.

Robin became a key part of the Batman mythos, with Burt Ward playing him alongside Adam West in the 1966-68 Batman TV series. (Ward was 20 when the show began, not very convincing as a 15-year-old. We know he was 15 because, during the course of the show, he turned 16 and got his driver's license.) By the 1970s, though, Dick began to be drawn as fully grown, and was being called not the Boy Wonder, but the Teen Wonder.

He went off to college, and founded the Teen Titans, with other heroes' sidekicks: Wonder Girl (Donna Troy), Kid Flash (Wally West), Aqualad (Prince Garth of Shayeris) and Green Arrow's Speedy (Roy Harper), before some original, never-sidekick characters were added, including Cyborg (Victor Stone), Raven (Rachel Roth), Beast Boy (Garfield Logan) and Starfire (Princess Koriand'r of Tamaran, who uses the identity of Kory Anders on Earth, and, along with Batgirl, has been a love interest of Grayson's).

Leading the Titans made Dick unavailable to Batman, so the decision was made to create a new Robin. In 1983, Dick put aside the Robin name and costume, and became Nightwing; while Jason Todd was introduced as the 2nd Robin. His origin was the same as Dick's: The son of murdered circus acrobats, taken in by Bruce and trained as Robin.

After Crisis On Infinite Earths in 1985-86, among the changes were why Dick left Bruce and formed the Titans, and Jason's origin. In this new version, Dick had been shot by the Joker, Batman's arch-enemy, leading the Joker to think he'd killed Robin, delighting him. Dick survived, but the incident created a rift between him and Bruce, and so Dick left Gotham City behind: He formed the Titans as Nightwing, and was never Robin with them.

Every year, on June 26, the anniversary of his parents' murder, Batman lays flowers at the location, known before as Park Row, and ever since as Crime Alley. In Batman #408, in 1987, he returns from this ritual to find the Batmobile's tires stolen. Somebody's got guts.

That somebody turns out to be 12-year-old Jason. His mother is out of the picture, and his father is missing, believed murdered by the supervillain for whom he was a henchman: Harvey Dent, the former District Attorney who got half his face burned by acid, becoming Two-Face. Bruce trains Jason to become the new Robin, and they capture Dent. (Of course, none of Batman's villains stay in Blackgate Prison, or Arkham Asylum, for long.)

Comic readers didn't like Jason, possibly out of loyalty to Dick. So, in 1988, the writers came up with the story "A Death in the Family," a 4-issue series. In Batman #426, after his rebellious nature results in a mistake, Bruce suspends Jason from costumed duty. After this, Jason finds his birth certificate, and discovers his mother's identity. She's Dr. Sheila Haywood, working with a Doctors Without Borders-like organization in the Middle East, and Jason goes there.

In Batman #427, Bruce tracks him down, and, too late, discovers that Sheila is mixed up with the Joker. The Joker finds Jason, in his Robin costume. (At the time, it was presumed that the Joker did not know Batman's true identity. He has since found out.) He savagely beats Jason with a crowbar, and leaves him and his mother to die in a building he has set to blow up. Batman gets there too late: The explosion occurs.

The last page read, "Robin will die because the Joker wants revenge. But you can prevent it with a phone call." Two 1-900 numbers were shown, one to vote that Jason lives, one to vote that Jason dies. That's right: DC was willing to let its readers decide, with both versions of the story ready to go to print. For 35 hours, on September 15 and 16, 1988, voters could call 1-900-720-2660 to let Jason live, or 1-900-720-2666 to let Jason die. Presumably, if they had voted to let Jason live, the "death in the family" would have been his mother.

The vote was incredibly close, a margin of 72 votes: 5,343 to 5,271. But there was a majority, 50.3 percent, voting to let Jason die. And so, early in Batman #428, Batman found Sheila, heard her implicate the Joker with her dying words, and then found Jason: "I'm too late. He's already cold to the touch. He's gone."

It got worse. When Batman returned to America, he was met by Superman, who told him that Iran had appointed a new Ambassador to the United Nations. It was the Joker, who now had diplomatic immunity, and thus couldn't be prosecuted for Jason's murder.

And this led to the climax, in Batman #429: The Joker addressed the United Nations General Assembly, with Bruce in attendance, the Batsuit under his suit, and Superman watching to act in case he tried something. He did, releasing a gas containing his "Joker venom" (called "Smilex" in the next year's Batman film) into the hall. Superman, invulnerable as always, used his super-breath to inhale all the gas, and Batman used the confusion to change into his costume without anyone seeing.

The Joker tried to escape in a helicopter, but Batman jumped onto it as well. One of the henchmen opened fire, missing Batman, but shooting the Joker and the pilot. Batman jumped into the East River, and the copter crashed into it. As Superman fished him out, Batman yelled, "Find his body!" And the text closed with him saying, "But I know they won't. That's how things always end with the Joker and me: Unresolved." (Sure enough, while it took him a while to recover from the shooting, the Joker did come back.)

Noteworthy in the story is the scene of Jason's funeral: The only guests were Bruce, his butler Alfred Pennyworth, Gotham City Police Commissioner Jim Gordon -- whether he knows that Bruce is Batman is often debated, but not confirmed in canon -- and Gordon's daughter Barbara. Barbara had been Batgirl, and knew the secret identities of Bruce, Dick and Jason, and had even dated Dick.

But in March 1988, DC had published a graphic novel, Batman: The Killing Joke, written by Alan Moore, creator of the landmark graphic novels V for Vendetta and Watchmen. Not only does it provide a detailed origin story for the Joker, an expansion of one that had been told before, but it shows the Joker shooting Barbara, paralyzing her -- not because he knows she's Batgirl and that's his way of getting to Batman (he doesn't know), but because that's his way of getting to the Commissioner, Batman's best-known public ally, and that's his way of getting to Batman. And Barbara is in a wheelchair at Jason's funeral.

Over the next year, the next multi-part Batman adventure was A Lonely Place of Dying, which shows teenager Tim Drake, who saw the deaths of the Flying Graysons when he was a boy, deduced everybody's secret identities, turned to Dick to help him intervene with Bruce, and convince him that Batman needs a Robin, to temper his rages and make him a better crimefighter. Reluctantly, Bruce sees the light, and Tim becomes the 3rd Robin. Also that year, Barbara became Oracle, a computer wizard who aided the Bat-Family, and sometimes also the Justice League.

As time went on, and the DC Universe was re-written, readers saw a 4th Robin, Stephanie Brown, formerly a vigilante named Spoiler, who became Tim's girlfriend, then was fired by Bruce, then was presumed dead, but turned out not to be. And there was a 5th Robin, Damian Wayne: Bruce's previously-unknown son with Talia al-Ghul, daughter of supervillain Ra's al-Ghul.

Then came Jason's resurrection as a result of the Infinite Crisis story, and his adoption of the Joker's former identity of the Red Hood, becoming first the kind of crime boss he used to fight, then a vigilante; and the restoration of Barbara's ability to walk, and the resumption of her career as Batgirl, even though there was already another Batgirl, Cassandra Cain, daughter of mercenary and occasional Batman adversary Lady Shiva; and a Batwoman, Kate Kane, Bruce's cousin. And Stephanie also became a Batgirl.

Confused? Well, this kind of confusion is one of the reasons I stopped reading comic books: Not that I had grown up (though I was in my late 20s when I gave it up), but too many changes to the continuity I thought I knew. It was just too hard for me to keep track of it anymore.

*

October 18, 1988 was a Tuesday. This was also the day the sitcom Roseanne premiered. I have a separate entry for that event.

Game 3 of the World Series was played at the Oakland Coliseum, and the Oakland Athletics beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2-1. Mark McGwire won it with a home run in the bottom of the 9th.

Three nights earlier, Kirk Gibson of the Dodgers had won Game 1 with a bottom-of-the-9th home run off Dennis Eckersley, who then coined the term "walkoff home run." McGwire's blast made the 1988 World Series the 1st, and it remains the only World Series to have 2 games end with a walkoff home run. But Game 3 would be the only game the A's would win: The next night, the Dodgers won Game 4; and the night after that, they won Game 5 to take the Series.

Football was in midweek. The NBA season started 17 days later. There were 3 games played in the NHL:

* The New York Islanders beat the Vancouver Canucks, 3-2 at the Nassau Coliseum.

* The Pittsburgh Penguins beat their arch-rivals, the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-2 at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh.

* And, in an "Original Six" matchup, the Detroit Red Wings beat their arch-rivals, the Chicago Blackhawks, 4-3 at the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit. Steve Yzerman scored the winning goal with 1 second left in overtime. Had he been just 1 second later with his shot, the game would have gone into the books as a tie, as the NHL did not institute the shootout until 2005.