Here I am, continuing my somewhat in-depth look at a character who's promised to blow us away on the big screen this weekend...
The Joker...
As I said in the first post about the Harlequin of Hate, he started out as an insane, vicious killer. With the advent of the Comics Code Authority in 1956, the Joker almost blinked into obscurity...
Prior to the inception of the Comics Code, the Joker appeared almost monthly in the various Batman books in circulation at the time. When the Code came down, he almost disappeared...
Despite what you might think, this actually helped The Joker to become what he is today... Writers who wrote the Joker had to resort to having him pull silly pranks and tame hijinks to comply with the code. Perhaps they didn't want this... His appearances waned due to this stricture...
When things started to ease up with the Code, he started coming back around... Of all the things that I've read lately, there is a noticeable turning point in the Joker's behavior in a 1973 story called The Joker's Five-Way Revenge, written by Denny O'Neil... The Joker returns to his homicidal self, giving an exploding cigar (I mean a BIG explosion) to one of his former thugs, hanging another, and throwing an elderly man (and Batman) to the sharks...
Subsequent stories on through the 1980s see the Joker doing a combination of pranks and murder... Use of Joker Venom (a drug that kills its victims, leaving a deadly scowl on their mugs), deadly laughing gas, and things like a gun with the flag saying "BANG! You're Dead!" and then shooting from the gun like a spear were things that the Joker used for killing... He even forces some of his victims to a birthday party for himself and then straps them to the candles of a giant birthday cake, attempting to burn them alive... With things such as shootings and outright murder mixed with deadly pranks, the Joker's step at this point of his evolution seemed to mix both incarnations of his former self...
And that's where I'm at at this point in my study of the Clown Prince of Crime... All of my readings thus far have been comprised of a softcover graphic novel called The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told (Original Version). A new version has been released lately (we all know why) and should be available at your local bookstore or comic shop... I'll try and include pictures of the covers below...
I'll be back hopefully at least a couple more times before The Dark Knight hits the screen this weekend...
"If I were sane, I might not be so BRILLIANT!" - The Joker
Above art by Brian Bolland
Above art by Alex Ross
7 comments:
I think one of the creepiest and coolest quality of the Joker, is the fact that he gets so much joy, out of being so hanus. I think back to Alex DeLarge's rendition of singing in the rain as he brutally beats an old man, and think how "Joker-like" that is.
Hey Andy,
Wow!
Awesome insight...
You are SO right...
I really can't wait to see what Heath Ledger did with the character...
I've really been diving into my Joker research lately...
I think the first cover you posted was the PD (the one friend of mine from high school) showed me in Borders. He works there and just opened the book from the plastic to show me the stabbing I was writing about. He was calling the little henchmen "torture midgets" and then I had a smart remark and a short burst of hilarity ensued. I had to ask him, how to do apply to be a torture midget? And how does that job appear on a resume? :)
I guess one of the things that I'm most happy about regarding the newest Batman movies is that they have returned to being dark. The two done by Joel Schumaker were so glitzy and overdone. When I think of the Batman comics, that same darkness is something that gets me. I don't necessarily mean "dark" as in heavy subject matter, but actual darkness - dark colors, lots of night scenes, etc. The Joker, in my opinion, was a big part of that initial darkness.
The Joker always seems to make a demented "joke" about the circumstances surrounding his own deformation. He seems to consistently turn that concept on his victims.
I definitely agree with the last post. The Batman movies do need to be dark to harbor such dark characters. The first two Tim Burton renditions, were dark, but also had such a jovial characteristic about them. But really what do you expect from big budget 80's and early 90's productions. And as for Schumacher, he's a Hollywood whore and any darkness and depth is lost there. Kudos to Nolan for bringing the Dark Knight back into a world of dreariness.
Hey guys,
Love the posts... Let's keep up the discussion!!!
Yeah, some the Batman movies got a little ridiculous... You guys remember the "Holy Rusted Metal" comment from Robin in one of those... Someone should've stabbed that little punk...
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Robin's huge, ummm, "region" in the third/fourth movies....okay, there's my frat house humor for the evening!
The Burton movies had the element of gray (or blue-ish gray) with splashes of color that all of Tim's movies have. That just felt out of place to me. The darkness keeps everything shrouded - as a viewer (or reader), you really have to concentrate to catch everything. That being said, it's not at all surprising the characters have so many layers.
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