No, really man. You've become a mass-murdering psychotic Mr. Zsasz clone with less tally marks and more giggling. You've lost your sense of dangerous charm, and with it, your appeal as a character. Is it any wonder so many comic fans want to see your head on a pike outside Arkham Asylum's gates when your kill count has exceeded your funny moments?
Joker, consider this an intervention. You have a murder addiction, one so powerful you aren't even the same character anymore. And the most tragic part about it? It wasn't even your fault. It was the fault, entirely and wholeheartedly, of the people who wrote your more recent tales.
Anyone who doubts me on this needs to look no further than recent Batman comics, both before and after the Great Reboot of 2011 (which I take no real umbrage with and won't even begin to debate here). Multiple stories from the modern era feature the Clown killing not for the sake of pissing Batman off, or for the sake of a joke, but simply because he can. Pull out almost any recent Batman storyline featuring the Joker; they are almost all about seeing how many people he can kill in one shot (there are exceptions to this - the excellent Joker's Asylum miniseries, for example). He's a different character from what he was, and I and many other Joker fans do not like the way he's going.
Now, I've touched on this issue before in a previous blog entry, the one about Harley and the Joker's relationship being abusive and not in any way sexy. Near the end of that one, I quoted another Joker fan, Sharkie, from her Harley Quinn Manifesto entry on her own blog, Joker's Psycho Circus, on the issue of the Joker's continuing spiral into (dare I say, Madness?) complete uninteresting sociopath with a clown gimmick. I also pointed out that many authors nowadays who take on this character, one with such a rich, demented legacy behind him, tend to write him as this serial killing lunatic first and a chaotic, deranged, thoroughly insane clown with a sick sense of humor last. Also slowly ebbing away is the Joker's strange sense of charm, his deceptive and mercurial manner of getting under your skin and into your head, only to mutilate everything there and then casually stroll away as if you'd only had a discussion over tea with him. His quirkiness is leaving, his to-the-extreme gallows humor doesn't make me laugh anymore... in short, he is losing what makes him the Joker, and gaining status as a gimmick killer. Or, as Sharkie so aptly put it, "DC seems to whore out the Joker as [someone] who has a higher body count than [all] world dictators [...] and serial killers combined." And she couldn't be more apt.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is absolutely NOT what the Joker is as a character, and absolutely NOT what he should be as a character. This trend should disturb you, especially if you are a Joker fan. Yes, the Joker is a serial killer; yes, he is a complete monster; and yes, he does rack up high body counts wherever he goes because he is an incredibly dangerous villain, but that isn't what made him Batman's nemasis. The Joker being a homicidal maniac is not what allowed him to survive his first appearance in Batman #1 when he was slated to be killed (and wasn't at the last moment), and it is not what made him one of the most popular, enduring, and easily recognized supervillains ever created. It is not why I and many other Bat-fans count him my favorite villain of all time. If the Joker's appeal simply stemmed from his high body count and creative methods of offing people, then he'd be another Victor Zsasz or Calender Man. Both of those characters are good in their own ways, but they are not interesting in the same way that the Joker is. Why?
I've long felt that the Joker, to work effectively as a character, has a trifecta of traits that must all be in equal balance for him to work properly as a villain. If even one of these traits is out of balance, his character at best is poorly written (or acted) and at the very worst is just not him at all. These three traits are as follows:
- He has to be funny. It's kind of given in his title, he's not just A joker, he's THE Joker. The epitome of what a trickster or clown is, taken to its logical extreme. You cannot have a name that references comedy without making people laugh. In fact, it's a common belief amongst most Bat-fans that if you're reading a Joker tale, and he's not making you laugh at least internally, then something is terribly wrong with how the author wrote him. This can mean puns, this can mean references to classic comediens, this can mean taunting or generally acting like a goofball, this can mean Dead Baby Humor or brick jokes or even something as simple as that brilliant scene from Joker: Devil's Advocate where he claims that if he pleas insanity he'll get off easily, and then when his lawyer asks if it's really that simple, Joker slams his face into the table, looks up with a bloodied face, and responds, "That. Simple." The point is, he needs to make you laugh, even if it's just in a "WTF?" fashion.
- He has to be devious. By "devious" I do not mean mere evil planning, by "devious" I mean both that his plans are dangerous, clever, and cunning. They are plans with a calling card, plans that are often insane, plans that are almost like performance art. They have a style to them that only he could cook up, for reasons only he knows, reasons that sane minds can't fathom. For example, nobody in their right mind tries to patent fish. Nobody that is sane shoots people up with something that could literally be called Psycho Serum to create a monster army to destroy Gotham. Nobody who has their act together goes around Gotham on Christmas Eve fucking things up while reciting Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas in its entirety. The Joker is crazy, yes, but he's also very bright. Alarmingly so, at least in the realms of chemistry and forethought. He can mentally manipulate people with his words; he can twist people who are vulnerable by just telling them the right things - and most alarmingly of all, he probably knows exactly what to do and say to make YOU agree with his bizarre logic. He should be as mentally dangerous as he is physically - perhaps moreso in some incarnations than others, since he's not exactly Bane. He has to use his wit to his advantage because that and his weapons are all he has.
- He has to be frightening. Not merely scary physically or a threat to your life, but truly, completely terrifying. Even Scarecrow, the Master of Fear, doesn't mess with the Joker, for a very, VERY good reason - he scares even him. This is because the Joker is completely random - you never know what he'll do to you, and he almost never commits the same exact crime twice. He could kill you, yes, but he's just as likely to torture you, mindfuck you, or let you off with a warning, all over something as trivial as what he had for breakfast. He's not scary because he's insane or because he's a killer, he's scary because he's a wild card, a threat in multiple ways. Giving him the time of day can end with you fatally wounded or breaking down in tears over the thought of your wife dying, and cutting him off in traffic even accidentally can put you in his crosshairs. He's even gotten to Batman a few times, particularly in the case of Jason Todd (and we all know what happened there). The Joker is dangerous to just about everyone he encounters, physically, emotionally, and psychologically - and even worse yet is that absolutely any reason is a good enough excuse for him to do whatever horrible thing crosses his mind.
- Does it make sense for him to be in this story, or is he there just to up ratings due to the Wolverine Effect? (Poor tales often add the Joker in because he is a popular character just to "sell" the story, even if the tale doesn't focus on him.)
- Has the author just written what they think he should sound like, or has the author really put themselves in his shoes and looked at the character, donning the purple suit themselves and asking, "What Would Joker Do?" (Putting yourself in a character's postion is a good way to get into their mindset, their motives, and the way they behave, which can make or break a story that focuses on that character's actions.)
- Can I hear Mark Hamill? (I ask this because Hamill's iconic voice for the Joker is almost without question the most readily identifiable voice given to the character. Ask almost any Joker fan, and they will almost unanimously agree that Comic!Joker's dialogue sounds a lot like Mark Hamill in their heads, simply because that voice just fits him so well. Good Joker dialogue will sound like this iconic voice - in other words, it'll just sound right for the character.)
I honestly think a lot of this problem has to do with young authors at DC seeing The Dark Knight's success and deciding to cash in on it. I find this unfortunate because Ledger's Joker, much like Nicholson's Joker and Romero's Joker, is not the Joker from the comics. The two are very different Jokers, very different beasts - and adding Ledger Joker traits to the Comic's Joker, while excising others, ruins what Comic!Joker is. This is why we have the Joker killing more for the fun of it and doing fewer completely batshit things like taking over Arkham Asylum to manufacture a drug that will eventually bring Gotham to its knees or sneaking a puppy into Arkham just to relate a story about Harley to it and call it an ugly little mutt. Hell, you don't know what Joker's gonna do with that poor puppy. He could eat the puppy, he could throw the puppy at a wall, he could kick it, he could use it to smuggle explosives and tools to escape... or he could inevitably declare it adorable after it kills and eats a robin. The point is, the Joker is not unpredicatable when you know all he's gonna do is kill you. The Joker is not scary as a serial killer - not as much as when he is a manipulating monster.
So if this is the case, then why do authors cut out bits and pieces? Why the shift towards serial killing and not more psychological danger, when a story about the Joker stalking and psychologically tormenting someone can be so much more compelling than him stalking to kill (and which would also end the cry for his blood from so many jaded Bat-fans if stories such as these were produced in large enough quantaties)? Simple - writing the Joker is hard. He is not a tradtitional type of crazy; he's actually so hard to define from a logical, sane point of view that it's nearly impossible to paint a full picture of him. But he is understandable enough to have patterns, patterns that an adept author, such as Paul Dini, can read and work with. That's why Batman: Arkham Asylum and its sequel, Arkham City, worked - the author of those storylines understood the characters because he bothered to do the research first (that and he's worked with them before). Honestly, the whole Titan plan thing sounds insane, almost like fanfiction - but the brilliance of it is that it's something that the Joker would actually do, just because he's insane enough to say, "You know what would be the most kick-ass thing ever? Taking this new drug this random doctor created, working it a bit, and then making an army of monsters out of it to do my bidding." It works because it's crazy enough to work - remember, this is the same man who said, "You know what would be the most kick-ass thing ever? If I injected a bunch of fish with my toxin so they're grinning, then patented them so I could get a cut of the profits from their sale." This is also the man who thinks using the powers of a reality warper to reshape the world into Jokertopia, kidnapping babies so he can kill them all at midnight to destroy Gotham's sense of hope, and paralyzing the commissioner's daughter only to take him hostage in a twisted carnival and torture him are all similarly kick-ass ideas.
My point is, writing the Joker is hard, but authors continue to make it even harder by stripping out pieces of what he is to add quick drama to a story where he's the antagonist, and that stripping is like ripping out chunks of the Joker's flesh and leaving him half the character he used to be. It's like gutting the oil valves and muffler out of a car, or removing the CMOS and the hard drive from a computer. Sure, it may work somewhat and on the outside it looks fine, but in the end, it doesn't really work at all.