#7 Red Hood and the Outlaws #0 (The New 52)

Oh boy, it’s another cr*ppy Scott Lobdell Comic, what I have to put up with…

So, Red Hood and the Outlaws is one of the more controversial new 52 comics. Not because of the fact that Jason Todd seems deadpan and sarcastic, not because Roy Harper is now wearing a trucker hat but everything to do with their portrayal of Starfire. In the first issue she seems like a sex object, and I never really bothered to read the rest of it.

So rather than choosing Roy Harper, who’s origin has clearly changed for the New 52, or Starfire, whose origin is a far lesser known one, we get the origin of the Red Hood. Batman sells! So you'll not be surprised to hear that despite Roy Harper and Starfire being on the cover, they're not in the book at all.

So, let’s not waste any time and get into the issue, and get it over with quickly

Everyone has to start somewhere, and I'd prefer they'd stay there rather than write/draw this

We begin with Jason being born, followed by a quarter page panel containing a black background and a useless bit of text, get used to these people, they continue through most of the issue. Lots of Jason’s deadpan, unfunny and sarcastic narration explains how his mother and father met at High School and she took him in after a hit and run incident, where he was the hit-and-runner.

Catherine had her own problems mind you. She was a drug addict and would often “check out for weeks at a time.” His father frequently had to be dragged in at night as he was a heavy drinker. But eventually started teaching Jason how to be a criminal and also showing off how’d been hit by a Batarang.

In the next panel, Jason’s dad had took a bullet, and Jason takes this well “good thing he was spineless” I know this is supposed to be in retrospect but he is really overdoing it here. So his dad eventually got arrested (I’ll talk on this point later) leaving Jason the man of the house, until Catherine OD'd and died.

 

Is there a thing these days that the best type of characters show no emotion at all, I really have nothing funny to say about it

What happened to Jason’s parents became a particular defining moment for the character (a reason for a lot of his aggressiveness) but trying to keep to Jason’s deadpan attitude, he doesn't seem to care at all about his parents, particularly his father, who died in prison. “On the bright side, I never saw him again, he died in prison” classy Lobdell.

So after another quarter of a page wasted on a pointless line with a black background (how lazy was this artist?) we see Jason resorting to robbery to survive but some people, shockingly, weren't happy about that and beat him up.

Jason wakes up in the Thompkins Clinic. Where Doctor Leslie Thompkins gives him some advice and leaves him to steal drugs from the clinic. Rather conveniently Batman is waiting to stop him, and good lord is the artwork on this page terrible. I mean the art in this half of the book isn't great, but it’s terrible here. What the f*ck happened to anyone’s faces?

 

Erm? Yeah, 4 artists is a great idea, we get fantastic (terrible) art like this

So, by… plot convenience he ends up in Wayne Manor, where Alfred starts being sarcastic, but over time respects Jason. Then Bruce TELLS JASON THAT HE’S BATMAN. There’s no detective work, no discovering that Batcave, no real motivation for Bruce to do this. Apparently he deserves the truth. Why? He was stealing medicine and did jack in sessions with Alfred (who has suddenly become a psychiatrist?) In another page of cr*ppy looking artwork, Batman offers him the opportunity to be Robin (and if you read Alfred’s line, it seems they thought of Robin as a legacy character before it ever became one!) Jason admits that he’s likely to screw it up (because having confidence would mean showing an emotion)

 

Alfred: Telling people that Robin is a job that only a kid can fill, oh dear, oh dear, how far we have fallen

So after 6 months of intensive training, he was Robin and he was decent at it but he hurt people, forgetting those were bones breaking beneath his fists. Here’s where I have problems. Apparently he’s trying to expunge the ghost of his dad. But Jason is so devoid of emotion you don’t see the anger that Jason Todd was particularly known for,

I’m not all that familiar with his original origin. I just know what I read in ‘a death in the family’ (not be confused with ‘death of the family’) and from Tim Drake’s origin in the DCAU. Jason was the son of a criminal who was working for Two-Face and eventually was murdered. His mother also 'died' in some fashion (maybe she OD'd, but I don’t know on that one) either way, he confronted his father’s killer and chose to walk away but this didn’t calm his anger issues, in fact it made them worse, Jason had never really gotten over the death and Batman had no choice but to put him on the inactive roster.

This version of Jason cared so little for his father from what we see in the introduction, it’s hard to justify his rage and rash actions, saying that it’s the ghost of his dad is all well and good but it’s not like we saw his dad being all that aggressive either. Also the way Batman met Jason before was that he was stealing the tires off the Batmobile. Scott Lobdell: Taking iconic bits of character’s origins, and throwing them in the trash.

Jason was placed on ‘Monitor Duty’ (which serves purposes of plot convenience if little else) and low and behold, he finds his mother still alive, who had never come to see him, ever! Jason arrives in the middle-east (they’re not more specific than that) and meets his mother IN HIS FULL ROBIN ATTIRE. And it’s a set up by the Joker, who’s in the middle-east for no reason and is sort of more plot convenience. Not wanting to take away another iconic moment for Jason, Lobdell has the Joker beat Robin with a crowbar and leave him and his mother with a bomb in the warehouse (unlike the original, he doesn't get up and try and leave, only to find the door locked). 

 

Well, we sort of get the iconic death of Jason Todd, missing all the back-story behind it though

Despite Batman somehow finding out Jason’s location, flying to the middle-east and going after Jason in a black vehicle with two red lights shining out of it for some reason, he’s seconds too late to save him. Jason then wakes up in a Lazarus pit and another quarter of the page is wasted with a useless quote.

So, if that were the end of the issue. I wouldn't mind too much. Sure there are gaps and plot-holes you could drive a truck through and the art has some really awful moments but given how much it’s trying to fit into one issue, I’d give it a pass but we’re only 2/3 of the way through the comic thus far and this is where it gets weird.

In what’s essentially a backup story, we start with the Joker talking to the audience, “you are going to be thrilled by the epic and classic* tale I simply had to call the man who created Red Hood”
*Classic, because the story takes place long before the Joker has his face removed in Detective #1.

Yeah, they actually give a reason why it’s a classic and it’s not a very good reason but we’re not into the problems here.

 

In case you're wondering, yes, this is the first page where a border doesn't surround the entire page

The Joker decides that “The Bat needs a bird like I need a punchline” which is odd, considering in Death of a Family he thinks that Batman having allies makes him weaker, and while I know the Joker’s motivations change, he doesn't usually do a complete 180 on himself. So he chose Jason Todd out of a hat or something and arranged to have his dad arrested. Then he arranged somehow to have Catherine take a rare African flower extract that makes her appear to be dead.  He then rescues her from the Gotham morgue and it didn't raise any attention whatsoever. He then drops off the boy after he’d been beaten up at the Thompkins clinic and before you know it, there's a Robin

WHAT THE F*CK!!! OK, this is b*llsh*t, utter, utter b*llsh*t!! I believe as far as he had the boy's dad arrested. How the hell did he arrange for the mother to smoke a rare African flower extract. (Heed the word rare, how did he get it? Not explained) then he takes her from the Morgue, for some reason (why did he need her alive again?) without any attention being brought to anyone, not even Jason. Then he drops him off at the Thompkins clinic, knowing that she'd nurse him to health, he'd try to steal drugs and run into Batman, who would then be persuaded to take him as the new Robin? THAT IS THE DUMBEST PLAN THE JOKER HAS EVER COME UP WITH! Let's start off with the fact, he’d have to know Bruce Wayne's identity, or at least that Batman has a connection with Leslie Thompkins. He'd also have to make a fair few assumptions for this to work. He'd have to know Jason would run into Batman, know Leslie would persuade him to take him in and choose him as a Robin. In any of the dozens of other ways it could've worked out, Jason wouldn't be Robin at all.

Sadly, the story continues, as he kills Robin because… haha I'm funny. So much for “Batman needs a bird like I need a punchline” and wait, did he deliberately not kill Catherine so he could use her as bait to kill the Robin he wanted at Batman's side? This really doesn't make any sense.

 

Oh, and the Joker can suddenly break the 4th wall, well I suppose he's psychotic enough

Also he says he doesn't know how Jason came back to life, so he didn't actually create the Red Hood, he created the Robin, not the Red Hood.

THIS COMIC GIVES ME RAGE ISSUES

They don't give us the full origin of the Red Hood, it sort of just goes straight from Jason died, came back to life and now he’s the Red Hood, it doesn't give him any motivation for his new identity, the tragic thing is, it would've worked better to show this, than the contrived and nonsensical Joker scene. In Death in the Family, they explained why the Joker is in the Middle East (initially to sell a weapon as he was broke) they explain why Jason was in his Robin costume and explain why Jason's mother was there and explain why she never found him and how Robin came to be at the Joker's mercy. Here it's not done well, part of the problem, Lobdell is trying to compress way too much back-story into this 1 issue. Again, a reason why it might've been better looking at the origins of someone else.

The artwork is mixed, 3 different artists worked on this one issue. Brett Booth is a decent artist, I'm guessing he was the one who did the Joker section and it was decent, some of the art of the previous sections is lazy at times, atrocious at others.

Alfred and Bruce Wayne are poorly characterised but it's not as noticeable this time, as they don't share a lot of pages. There's also the problem that the "Outlaws" don’t appear anywhere in the book, aside from the front cover.

The best of these #0 added something new that would be brought up later on, now I'm just guessing here but that doesn't seem to be the case here, sure there's that nonsense with the Joker, which to it's credit is brought up subtly in 'Death of the Family' but it's still nonsense.

I’ve heard another writer has taken over Red Hood and the Outlaws, I might just give it another shot if that’s the case but I’ll be steering clear of Lobdell penned stories for a while to come

Rage Rating: 54%

Next week: We look at my least favourite run on Teen Titans from before Scott Lobdell took over

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Images used in this review are from Red Hood and the Outlaws #0 and belong to their respective owners. All images in this review are subject to fair use.