Batman: Under the Hood (comic) VS Under the Red Hood (movie)

By Mark Rodriguez

Under the Red Hood is one of my favorite all time Batman animated movies. I still remember being in high school when they announced the vote to kill off Jason Todd and I was still confused in discovering that the Robin I saw in the comics was not the Robin from the Adam West show, since Dick Grayson had moved on to become Nightwing. Then the vote came, and the fans wanted him dead, or were at least curious to see if DC would actually pull it off. They did...

Under the Red Hood featured the tale of Jason Todd coming back with his new persona, and seeking revenge on the Joker. The animated movie was awesome and I watched it countless times. I dragged Peter into watching it. I dragged Moore into watching it. And I even dragged Paige into watching it. I do admit the chases scenes were a little long, but it was all worth it for the final scenes between Batman, Jason and the Joker.

I got back into the Batman comics around this time and after a while I asked myself, how did the comics handle this? How true was the animated adaptation to the comics? So I seeked out Batman Under the Hood, the trade paperback, and here are the major changes I discovered. Though I do want to say, the biggest change is that there were a lot of things happening outside the general DC universe that affected the comic version, while the animated version was a self contained Batman story and is much more streamlined.

The animated movie's plot goes as follows. The movie  opens with Joker beating Jason Todd and Batman arriving in time to see the area he was trapped in explode. Years later, a new guy named the Red Hood is messing with the crime boss Black Mask’s drug shipments. Batman and Nightwing run into him and soon see how highly skilled the Red Hood is at fighting and escaping. Hints here and there hint to Batman that this guys might actually be Jason Todd, somehow back from the dead. He visits Rah’s Al Ghul and finds out that he hired the Joker back then to distract Batman away from his plans. However he never counted on Robin dying, so he took the body and revived in the Lazarus Pit. However, this drove him insane and he escaped.

Meanwhile, the Black Mask grows so desperate that he helps Joker escape Gotham so that he can take out the Red Hood. However, the Joker ties the Black Mask and his men and plans to burn them alive to get the Hood’s attention. As the Red Hood and Batman arrive, the Hood captured the Joker and gets away. In the final showdown, Jason reveals himself to Bruce and tells him he forgives him for what happened, but it outraged that the Joker is still alive. In the end he gives Bruce a choice, either shoot him or watch him shoot the Joker. In the end Batman manages to disarm Jason and the building they’re in blows up. Batman and the Joker are alright, but the Red Hood is missing.

The comics version follows up some time after a story called War Games, in which The Black Mask was the main crime boss of Gotham and had tortured and killed the current Robin of the time, Stephanie Brown. Bruce is still grieving over her death and has shoved aside help from his other partners at the time, such as Oracle and the Cassandra Cain Batgirl.

In the movie, the Red Hood manages to mess up one of Black Mask’s shipments, which was a killer android that copies the abilities of other superheroes named Amazo. In the movie it was only said ‘he has the abilities of superhumans’ and doesn’t speak. In the comic he was able to talk and Batman directly mentioned members of the Justice League like the Flash and Plasticman. However, besides Amazo, other shipment crates had supervillain weapons that belonged to Mr. Freeze and Captain Boomerang, as well as a huge crate full of Kryptonite.

In the movie the Black Mask would eventually be forced to hire the Joker. In the comic, he hired Mr. Freeze and had his men build him a new powerful and lightweight sub-zero suit. Never admitting himself to be working for the Black Mask, he would constantly kill his henchmen. He was sent to recover a stolen crate of Kryptonite from the Red Hood, but after a brief battle with the Hood and Batman, Freeze took the chance to get away for his own plans.

 In the comic, Batman totally freaks out when he has suspicions that the Red Hood could have been Jason Todd and is determined to find out how someone can return from the dead. He visits Zatanna and wants to be sure the very last Lazarus Pit was really dried up, and even if it did work, it only heals people that are dying, but not people that are already dead. He also goes to the Green Arrow and Superman and ask them about the times they were dead and how they came back to life. Neither of them have any real memory of how they were brought back to life, and Batman doesn’t like that.

In the movie, the Black Mask hires ‘The Fearsome Hand of Four’ to kill the Red Hood, which were 4 armored fighters using light saber-ish weapons. However in the comic, Deathstroke overhears Black Mask’s problems and offers his services. He sends out Captain Nazi, the Hyena and Count Vertigo after Jason, but sadly Deathstroke himself never enters the fray. In the movie Jason kills one of The Four, and in the comic he kills Captain Nazi. Gee, I have honestly no idea why the animated movie left out Captain Nazi.

The comic has a flashback of Batman and Robin, during the good ol' days, taking down Captain Boomerang. The movie went with the Riddler instead. 

Then we have Onyx, this former member of the League of Assassins turned crimefighter that also operates in Gotham. Um… never heard of her. In this story she beats up a few of the Black Mask’s men and has a run-in with the Red Hood.

There’s also a scene that looks like the Red Hood and the Black Mask actually meet face to face and throw down. It seems the Black Mask managed to kill Jason with his own knife giving Batman the feeling he arrived too late to save him a second time.. only to see it was an impostor. Where Jason found some random guy that could last a few rounds against the Black Mask is beyond me.

And finally, the Joker has a smaller role in the comic. While in the movie he kinda takes over the final act, in the comic we see brief scenes of him having already been captured and beaten up by Jason Todd. Eventually, Jason sends some samples of Joker’s hair so Batman knows he has him. The ending basically played out just like the movie, almost word for word, including Jason’s epic ‘why didn’t you kill the Joker since he killed me’ speech, and Joker’s ‘take a pic with me and the crowbar’ line. Two things kinda ruin it for me.

 First the art is horrible… Batman looks alright, and Jason does sometimes, but the Joker is just drawn like crap. You think for the epic showdown they would use one of the better artists for this issue. Even some of my favorite lines that made it in the movie are ruined by the art.

Art is subjective, but this look for the Joker just isn't working for me.

Second… during the fight Chemo, this giant radioactive blob was dropped into Bludhaven, and apparently you can see the explosion from Gotham. This led to some other comic event related to the Teen Titans  called for Battle for Bludhaven. Seeing the light caused by the explosion freaks Batman out since he’s afraid Nightwing might have been in the city when it happened. This distracts him from the fight against the Red Hood. I’m thinking to myself ‘oh c’mon.. let’s just keep the story in Gotham’. It disrupted the flow of the story and was quickly ignored and went back on track with the whole ‘will Batman kill Jason before he kills the Joker’ thing. It was as random as if you had Catwoman fighting someone in her own comic and suddenly Superman falls out of the sky as he was fighting Darkseid. Just no.

Anyways after the story ended, we get two extra chapters. The first one explains better just HOW Jason came back to life. Because Superman Prime punched reality. No really. Superman Prime is an alternate Superman from a reality that was destroyed and he’s angry as all hell. Sometime during the story he PUNCHES THE FABRIC OF REALITY and somehow the ripples of that seem effect Jason’s death, bringing him back to life, since apparently in some other reality he did survive that explosion. Jason escapes his coffin and eventually gets taken by Talia Al Ghul. to the League of Assassins. Against her father’s wishes, she tosses him into the Lazarus Pit, healing him and bringing back his memories. He then set out to train, angry when he discovers that the Joker was still alive due to Batman being too nice to finish him off.

Yeah... the movie skipped the NotSuperman stuff and just kept the part with the Lazarus Pit.

Finally this book also included a chapter from the Hush storyline, in which Batman, Catwoman and the Tim Drake Robin ran found out that Hush was really Jason Todd. However, during the fight we find out that it was really Clayface in disguises. Even though he was a fake, Batman did find out that Jason’s original coffin was empty… and that was what opened up the whole possibility that Jason Todd was out there somewhere, which would bring us the whole ‘Under the Hood’ storyline.

So to wrap things up, which version did I like better? It’s very hard to say. The movie is awesome and I still love to watch it, and I now have more appreciation for all the scenes and lines they got right out of the book. I mean wow.. I found myself reading the scenes with the voice of Jensen Ackles (voice of Jason in the movie) every time I read his lines. The comic itself, despite having all sorts of different art styles clashing issue to issue, was still a very fun read, and I like seeing all the extra details added here and there. I would have wished to have seen Mr. Freeze and Deathstroke in the movie. I do find the Hand of Four was more bad-ass than Count Vertigo and the bunch, who even the Black Mask called Deathstroke out on for being lame… but it woulda been cool if the movie had Deathstroke be their leader or something.

 I do ,however, love the Joker’s performance in the movie. He had a larger role, I loved the scene where he killed Black Mask’s men, and the little flashback at Axis Chemicals when the original Red Hood accidently fell into the chemicals that turned him into the Joker ala The Killing Joke. Overall, both are good, and I’m glad I got to read the book. I really recommend it, especially in this collected format. I found it very entertaining and enjoyed reading it cover to cover. But man, am I glad they kept the Superman Prime Reality Punch crap out of the movie.

I’m ending this article by saying that instead of some random geek guy being Black Mask’s personal yes-man… the movie added this hot office babe voiced by Kelly Hu instead. Nice. She also seemed to be the only underling the Black Mask didn’t punch in the movie. Even Black Mask knows when to hold back.

Though I would laughed like an idiot if surprisingly she socked her out too in that one scene where he was basically punching all his henchmen.