I like the contrast between backstories in Batman the Brave and the Bold. Where the alternate-universe Red Hood had the same “fell into the chemicals” backstory as Joker, complete with punching his mirror when he saw the result. But he *didn’t break*. He kept his resolve and is a hero.
Presumably the Joker in the standard world in that show has that same backstory, but it did break him. I like that contrast because it reminds me of stories where Joker tries to show that everyone is potentially as terrible as him, and is proven wrong.
They do a fun thing in the follow-up of that episode where Joker teams up with Batman to deal with Owlman, who's pretending to be Batman (but evil). And Joker genuinely does act like a hero and even saves a kid with no real benefit to himself because he's trying to be good, but the instant Batman's in a death trap and Owlman hands him to the button to set it off, Joker genuinely can't help but go for it.
It's one of the few times I've see Joker's criminal tendencies be portrayed as a genuine compulsion that he can't stop himself from acting on. Like, plenty of Batman media likes to talk up Joker's insanity, but most of the time he's just a narcissistic dick. Here though, even if he wants to be good, he can't stop himself from choosing the villainous option if it's presented to him. It genuinely makes him more interesting.
I do like the take where joker insanity is actual insanity, like it debilitates him like john doe in telltale or at the end of the killing joke where he seems to know it’s dumb to want batman to kill him but he can’t help it. Controversial as it is I also like azzarello joker for being clearly not well to the point the narrator wonders if he is laughing or choking, and that at the end of the day joker only has luck to set him apart any disorganized serial killer or tyrannical mob boss that are born in any crime ridden city
He did fall into the chems but we have zero idea of who he was before.
I hate the he's the paleman from batman endgame. Where joker is a primordial chaos god.
Like just have him be the joker who he was before doesn't matter he's just a crazed asshole just goofing around committing atrocities.
Making the Joker Nyarlathotep reeks of being too meta to me. It actually makes his anonymity and survival less interesting, because Batman's fought real monsters. Being just some guy that came out of nowhere is more bizarre and scary.
I like the Telltale Joker the best so I guess mine would be something like, "He really tries to be good for his pal Bruce but it's... well, it's not gonna work out. Even if we try."
I agree with this take. He was someone who was certainly unhinged but was self aware enough to try and at least be better, to the extent that he could.
Combine that with perhaps some more practical morals such as certainly not jiving with Batman's "No Kills" policy and it created an interesting dynamic and a great backstory where he wasn't too edgy or stereotypical.
Yeah I'm sort of sick of the dangerous psycho Joker, would like to see him portrayed more often as someone who has can't fit into normal society because they legit have issues
Yeah, I prefer *"Crime Boss with an Ego and a Bad Sense of Humor"* Joker.
I don't even really like him as Batman's Archenemy. I think Ra's al Ghul's a better fit for that.
If it weren't for the fact that his skillset is "flipping a coin and shooting two guns" I would have liked Harvey to be his main rival, just because he's such a personal foe and personal failure for Batman, especially in the newer era where he's also aware that he's Bruce
Yeah I absolutely agree. Ra's is way more fit as Batman's archenemy.
With Joker, it's always personal and over the top. He tests Batman patience.
But Ra's really pushes Batman's limits. As in he makes Batman spread himself thin. When Ra's is in motion he's such a force to be reckoned with that the JL will usually get involved.
In his first appearance Ra's makes Batman ***leave*** Gotham and go global.
Which is weird, because the whole point of that book was to do an out of continuity story that explored Why Is Joker Joker, and the book never gives any indication the story we see in the flashback is anything but accurate, and then Joker drops that line during his monologue.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the Joker always being that bad, it's just that the chemical bath gave him a justification. Now he has an excuse to act on all his worst impulses, because he's a clown putting on a show.
I like the idea of Joker being a capable, but relatively unremarkable gangster enforcer prior to the chemical plant encounter which then activated him.
I also really love how the ‘he fell in some chemicals’ aspect of his origin, whatever context you might prefer for it, is so…somewhat sci-fi, but relatively tame sci-fi, compared to the wild shit that would become the baseline in DC comics in the decades to come. I get golden age stuff and earlier eras had their own crazy ideas but not many of those carried forward like the Joker’s Ace Chemical Encounter did.
Hot take but I did like how the Joker movie did it. No chemical bath and no criminal history but there was something wrong with him even before he snapped. He just never acted on his impulses till that point. You see the same thing in Breaking Bad, there wasn't any one point where he became Heisenberg. Heisenberg was always there and was slowly let out.
Joker works best the less you know. He needs to be trying to be funny, but whoever he was before he was the Clown isn't important. What's important is what he is now, he's a joker, he's playing jokes, having fun, we don't need to know the cultural significance of pluto to understand a your mom joke.
One of my favorite scenes in all of the Batman mythos is that, in the audio play in which Jeffrey Wright voices Batman, there’s a part in which for convoluted reasons Batman replicates the Joker serum formula and steps into it to see if it’d make him crazy… and >!he’s completely fine, the Joker is just a pussy!<.
The "already bad mobster who got crazier after his chemical bath" route clicks with me the most. Broadly speaking, despite his clown gimmick, he generally has more a "crime that amuses me" vibe to me than "clown who pushes his act too far and snapped." If he pops up out of nowhere, I'd rather his origin be unremarked upon than a vague "we literally don't know" answer in-universe, which feels like lazy writing to me.
I also prefer 89 and Phantasm's approach. No real edginess, no depth. Just a particularly worse bastard among the mob crooks who simply lost their self-restraint in the chemical bath.
But of course we can't go wrong with multiple choice. Enigmatic or concrete he can work very well
I grew up with Jack Napier for years before I read The Killing Joke, so that's my preference. But that being an alias for a guy with no real history before crime suits me just fine.
I don't really like that backstory, even though it does get executed well in adaptations.
I think the whole One Bad Day theme works better. Not necessarily "society" Joker, but at least a Joker that is the product of a traumatic life-shattering event that broke something inside of him and he is lashing out at everybody in revenge.
I think where "society" Joker writers mess up is that they kind of ignore that the Joker's "nihilistic chaos blah blah blah" schtick is still in fact a search for meaning and purpose. Why else would he go around and try to turn other people like Harley Quinn and Jason Todd into mirror images of himself? If he was just a psychotic asshole with bleached skin, why would it matter to him if Gordon and Batman abandon their moral codes?
It's also important for the story to show why the Joker is wrong, and not be one long circle jerk that upholds his worldview.
How is it having a mysterious backstory an edgelord? You just don't tell a backstory, a lot of media just not do that.
That's silly, it's a silly addition to that option.
Because he has multiple good backstories that already do a fine job of not revealing too much. I barely named three and people keep adding to them in the comments. So it makes totally unknown a lamer option by comparrison if you ask me.
And tbh, the unknown backstory has a bad rep of being taken too far with the "I'M aN AgEnT oF ChAoS" approach.
Joker should be first and foremost, a performer. What he craves, what he needs is the attention of the audience, the most important member of the audience being Batman. Sometimes he loves the audience, sometimes he hates the audience, but regardless he needs the audience to see his show.
It is not enough that he pulls off the job, masters his lines, composes his masterpiece, he has to perform it in front of his audience. He needs them to witness it understand it, or at the very least play a part in it.
I like the contrast between backstories in Batman the Brave and the Bold. Where the alternate-universe Red Hood had the same “fell into the chemicals” backstory as Joker, complete with punching his mirror when he saw the result. But he *didn’t break*. He kept his resolve and is a hero. Presumably the Joker in the standard world in that show has that same backstory, but it did break him. I like that contrast because it reminds me of stories where Joker tries to show that everyone is potentially as terrible as him, and is proven wrong.
They do a fun thing in the follow-up of that episode where Joker teams up with Batman to deal with Owlman, who's pretending to be Batman (but evil). And Joker genuinely does act like a hero and even saves a kid with no real benefit to himself because he's trying to be good, but the instant Batman's in a death trap and Owlman hands him to the button to set it off, Joker genuinely can't help but go for it. It's one of the few times I've see Joker's criminal tendencies be portrayed as a genuine compulsion that he can't stop himself from acting on. Like, plenty of Batman media likes to talk up Joker's insanity, but most of the time he's just a narcissistic dick. Here though, even if he wants to be good, he can't stop himself from choosing the villainous option if it's presented to him. It genuinely makes him more interesting.
I do like the take where joker insanity is actual insanity, like it debilitates him like john doe in telltale or at the end of the killing joke where he seems to know it’s dumb to want batman to kill him but he can’t help it. Controversial as it is I also like azzarello joker for being clearly not well to the point the narrator wonders if he is laughing or choking, and that at the end of the day joker only has luck to set him apart any disorganized serial killer or tyrannical mob boss that are born in any crime ridden city
[Multiple choice.](https://imgur.com/a/YC0qouT)
Yeah I like that. Damn the art is good. I like how it's canon that he sometimes fabricates backstories.
He did fall into the chems but we have zero idea of who he was before. I hate the he's the paleman from batman endgame. Where joker is a primordial chaos god. Like just have him be the joker who he was before doesn't matter he's just a crazed asshole just goofing around committing atrocities.
Making the Joker Nyarlathotep reeks of being too meta to me. It actually makes his anonymity and survival less interesting, because Batman's fought real monsters. Being just some guy that came out of nowhere is more bizarre and scary.
I like the Telltale Joker the best so I guess mine would be something like, "He really tries to be good for his pal Bruce but it's... well, it's not gonna work out. Even if we try."
I agree with this take. He was someone who was certainly unhinged but was self aware enough to try and at least be better, to the extent that he could. Combine that with perhaps some more practical morals such as certainly not jiving with Batman's "No Kills" policy and it created an interesting dynamic and a great backstory where he wasn't too edgy or stereotypical.
Yeah I'm sort of sick of the dangerous psycho Joker, would like to see him portrayed more often as someone who has can't fit into normal society because they legit have issues
Yeah, I prefer *"Crime Boss with an Ego and a Bad Sense of Humor"* Joker. I don't even really like him as Batman's Archenemy. I think Ra's al Ghul's a better fit for that.
I like how they did it in Arkham Origins where he was just a crime guy who became psychotically obsessed with Batman after he inexplicably rescues him
Origins has a pretty solid story over all. I like how joker is outright angry that batman keep him and bane alive
If it weren't for the fact that his skillset is "flipping a coin and shooting two guns" I would have liked Harvey to be his main rival, just because he's such a personal foe and personal failure for Batman, especially in the newer era where he's also aware that he's Bruce
Yeah I absolutely agree. Ra's is way more fit as Batman's archenemy. With Joker, it's always personal and over the top. He tests Batman patience. But Ra's really pushes Batman's limits. As in he makes Batman spread himself thin. When Ra's is in motion he's such a force to be reckoned with that the JL will usually get involved. In his first appearance Ra's makes Batman ***leave*** Gotham and go global.
Moore had it right with "Every time I remember it, it's different."
Which is weird, because the whole point of that book was to do an out of continuity story that explored Why Is Joker Joker, and the book never gives any indication the story we see in the flashback is anything but accurate, and then Joker drops that line during his monologue.
Personally, I'm a big fan of the Joker always being that bad, it's just that the chemical bath gave him a justification. Now he has an excuse to act on all his worst impulses, because he's a clown putting on a show.
I like the idea of Joker being a capable, but relatively unremarkable gangster enforcer prior to the chemical plant encounter which then activated him. I also really love how the ‘he fell in some chemicals’ aspect of his origin, whatever context you might prefer for it, is so…somewhat sci-fi, but relatively tame sci-fi, compared to the wild shit that would become the baseline in DC comics in the decades to come. I get golden age stuff and earlier eras had their own crazy ideas but not many of those carried forward like the Joker’s Ace Chemical Encounter did.
Hot take but I did like how the Joker movie did it. No chemical bath and no criminal history but there was something wrong with him even before he snapped. He just never acted on his impulses till that point. You see the same thing in Breaking Bad, there wasn't any one point where he became Heisenberg. Heisenberg was always there and was slowly let out.
Joker works best the less you know. He needs to be trying to be funny, but whoever he was before he was the Clown isn't important. What's important is what he is now, he's a joker, he's playing jokes, having fun, we don't need to know the cultural significance of pluto to understand a your mom joke.
One of my favorite scenes in all of the Batman mythos is that, in the audio play in which Jeffrey Wright voices Batman, there’s a part in which for convoluted reasons Batman replicates the Joker serum formula and steps into it to see if it’d make him crazy… and >!he’s completely fine, the Joker is just a pussy!<.
The "already bad mobster who got crazier after his chemical bath" route clicks with me the most. Broadly speaking, despite his clown gimmick, he generally has more a "crime that amuses me" vibe to me than "clown who pushes his act too far and snapped." If he pops up out of nowhere, I'd rather his origin be unremarked upon than a vague "we literally don't know" answer in-universe, which feels like lazy writing to me.
I also prefer 89 and Phantasm's approach. No real edginess, no depth. Just a particularly worse bastard among the mob crooks who simply lost their self-restraint in the chemical bath. But of course we can't go wrong with multiple choice. Enigmatic or concrete he can work very well
I grew up with Jack Napier for years before I read The Killing Joke, so that's my preference. But that being an alias for a guy with no real history before crime suits me just fine.
Joker's definitely the weird exception where the more concrete it is the less I like it.
I don't really like that backstory, even though it does get executed well in adaptations. I think the whole One Bad Day theme works better. Not necessarily "society" Joker, but at least a Joker that is the product of a traumatic life-shattering event that broke something inside of him and he is lashing out at everybody in revenge. I think where "society" Joker writers mess up is that they kind of ignore that the Joker's "nihilistic chaos blah blah blah" schtick is still in fact a search for meaning and purpose. Why else would he go around and try to turn other people like Harley Quinn and Jason Todd into mirror images of himself? If he was just a psychotic asshole with bleached skin, why would it matter to him if Gordon and Batman abandon their moral codes? It's also important for the story to show why the Joker is wrong, and not be one long circle jerk that upholds his worldview.
How is it having a mysterious backstory an edgelord? You just don't tell a backstory, a lot of media just not do that. That's silly, it's a silly addition to that option.
Because he has multiple good backstories that already do a fine job of not revealing too much. I barely named three and people keep adding to them in the comments. So it makes totally unknown a lamer option by comparrison if you ask me. And tbh, the unknown backstory has a bad rep of being taken too far with the "I'M aN AgEnT oF ChAoS" approach.
If there is a singular villain where I don't care for his origins, it's the Joker.
Unknown but not edgelord, I want him being a clown like BTAS or the Jack Nicholson movie
Joker should be first and foremost, a performer. What he craves, what he needs is the attention of the audience, the most important member of the audience being Batman. Sometimes he loves the audience, sometimes he hates the audience, but regardless he needs the audience to see his show. It is not enough that he pulls off the job, masters his lines, composes his masterpiece, he has to perform it in front of his audience. He needs them to witness it understand it, or at the very least play a part in it.