OFFICIAL DC COMICS THE JOKER & HARLEY QUINN A CLOCKWORK ORANGE ART WHITE T-SHIRT

DID YOU KNOW?
One of the more unique moments in all of Batman history came in 1988 with the Batman: A Death in the Family story. Dick Grayson had moved on to become Nightwing, and Batman had taken on a new boy wonder, Jason Todd. Unfortunately, fans didn’t like the way the green tights looked on Jason nearly as much, so DC let its fans make the call: should the Joker kill Jason Todd? This is the days before the internet, so they gave fans a dial in number to cast their votes. And vote the fans did, with “kill” winning by a narrow margin of less than half a percent.

The fans had spoken. When Jason Todd tries to track down his long lost mother, the Joker abducts them both, proceeding to beat Jason with a crowbar before abandoning them in a warehouse with a ticking time bomb. Jason attempts to shield his mother from the bomb, but he’s too late, and both perish in the explosion. This is a comic book, so of course he would return from the dead years later, but that doesn’t make the image of Joker swinging a crowbar any less brutal.