Originally Posted by
Jay Kay
Yeah, honestly, I think the New 52 has really helped Jason as a character. I mean, his appearances before it were really...varying in quality, to say the least.
First you had his reintroduction in Under the Hood. The Infinite Crisis tie-in at the end nearly ruins it, but the core concept of it was solid and executed perfectly. Then for a few years he was either play-acting in other people's costumes, or was in Countdown. His appearance in Morrison's Batman & Robin was solid, even if he was more a symbol for a 90s anti-hero version of Batman. You had Winick's Lost Days, which was very formulaic and dull (Jason trains with amoral mercs, is somehow shocked when amoral mercs does something amoral, beats them up, and somewhere we get a moment where he sees something with the Batfamily and starts to cry), and then his brief arc on Batman & Robin, which I think cemented that while Winick laid out a great foundation for a resurrected Jason, that's basically all he had in his holster.
Now, while I'm surprised that right now Jason will probably be closer to the Bat-Family than Dick, he's doing pretty well. Red Hood has not only kept the foundation that Winick set up that worked so well, but also gave Jason his own little world that makes him work as his own characters, and thrown him with some characters, Roy and Kory, which makes for some interesting character moments.
So yeah, while I would say that some characters didn't fare very well in the New 52, I think Jason, along with Roy and Starfire, most definitely have and it's the best that any of those characters have been written in years.