Global InformationRed Hood information
| Red Hood | |
|---|---|
 Jason Todd as Red Hood on the cover of Red Hood/Arsenal #10 (May 2016). Art by Dexter Soy. | |
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | DC Comics |
| First comic appearance | As Joker: Detective Comics #168 (February 1951) As Jason Todd: Batman #635 (February 2005) Red Hood Gang: Batman Vol 2 #0 (November 2012) |
| Created by | Bill Finger (writer) Lew Sayre Schwartz (artist) Win Mortimer (artist) |
The Red Hood is an alias used by multiple characters appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics.[1] The identity was first used in the 1951 story line "The Man Behind the Red Hood!", which provides the earliest origin story for the Joker. The storyline depicts an unnamed criminal wearing a red dome-shaped hood who, after a chance encounter with Batman, is disfigured by chemicals and becomes insane, giving birth to his future Joker persona.
Five decades later, the identity was used again in the 2005–2006 story arc, Batman: Under the Hood, in which Jason Todd, Batman's second crime-fighting partner who had been killed by the Joker, comes back to life as a violent vigilante, using his killer's former alias. Since his return, Jason operates as the Red Hood in the main DC Comics continuity. In The New 52, a 2011 reboot of the DC Comics universe, one storyline introduces a criminal organization called the Red Hood Gang, and retroactively establishes the Joker (prior to his transformation) as its former leader, and Jason as a former member.
Both the Joker and Jason Todd incarnations of the Red Hood, as well as the Red Hood Gang, have been adapted into several forms of media outside of comics, such as films, television series, and video games.
- ^ Greenberger, Robert (2008). The Essential Batman Encyclopedia. Del Rey. pp. 309–310. ISBN 9780345501066.