brain-food:

I read a story arc that as much traumatized me as it did open my eyes. I was either 10 or 11 when I got to read it, and at that age like most kids the heroes you looked up to were immortal. They never died, they always prevailed, and they always rode off into the sunset. Batman back then and still is one of my all time favorite characters and it was in the Jim Starlin penned pages of a ‘Death in the Family’ that my father kept in his trunk of comics, my hero worship and my very beliefs were shook to the core.

Robin was on the trail of the mother he had lost touch with years before. Not listening to Batmans advice, Robin, with an overwhelming sense of duty to his mother, ran straight into the lions den. His mother had betrayed him, through no fault of her own, to the most twisted of Bat-villains, The Joker. Alone, with no back up coming, Robin was at the mercy of a madman. There are a series of panels of The Joker beating Robin with a crowbar, and I don’t mean once or twice either. A relentless beating that leaves the boy wonder in a bloody mess, The Joker laughing all the way, leaves Robin to spend his final moments with his mother, both of them trapped in a room rigged with explosives. Before Robin can drag his broken body to the door in an attempt to free himself the place blows skyhigh.

So after all this goes down, you the reader are then forced to watch Batman arrive too late and carry Robin’s lifeless body from the burning rubble. Even thinking back on the first time I read that still leaves me in awe. Batman, a hero, protector of those who cannot protect themselves, had failed. The Joker, the personification of evil, had won. That moment, at the tender of age 10 is when I understood death.