The Joker and his problems

I have a confession.

Like everyone who has ever read a comic book, I have liked the Batman from time to time. I mean, the concept's golden. A brilliant, wealthy man orphaned by a senseless, random killing who dedicates himself to preventing the very type of crime that made him, living in a vast cave stocked with dinosaurs and giant coins, there's a lot to like there. I enjoy the detective aspect of the character, that he doesn't just drop down from rooftops and beat information out of thugs but that he can also sift through clues to find a criminal. Decades before the American public found CSI, Batman was tracking down criminals by determining that a specific kind of mud on their shoes came from a quarry outside of town or remembering a pirate captain whose name sounded like the prefix Bi. To be honest, since the Batman is just a normal human who has trained and studied to be where he is, my biggest problem with him is when he's too omniscient and omnipotent - I like stories where the Batman might actually take a shot to the noggin or be held at gunpoint once in a while. I know that he'll get out of whatever predicament he's put into, mind you, but I like it better when I have to wonder how instead of knowing he'll just dodge the bullet and beat the guy up. Not that I mind it when Batman brings the punching, but it shouldn't be all he does. The best Batman stories are ones where he outwits his enemies as much as outfights them.

That's why Bane was such a lackluster villain, to my mind. Sure, he broke Batman's back, but he didn't do so by any brilliant scheme aimed at the man, he did it through attrition. On the one hand, it's an interesting idea to release all the crazies from Arkham and force Batman to track them all down, but should the big master villain be counting on fighting an exhausted, weakened Batman? It kind of makes a lie of the whole idea that Bane wants to fight Batman to prove anything, since it doesn't prove anything other than the fact that Batman does in fact need to eat, sleep and rest from time to time.

And this is why, in theory, I like the Joker so much as a villain and therefore dislike how he's been used in the years since The Killing Joke. It's even possible to blame The Joker's Five Way Revenge to some degree, since it was the first reappearance of the Joker after he'd been watered down in the 50's and 60's to the kind of guy who talked about boners all the time, and it was a brilliant re-invention and return to the roots of the character as a dangerous and lethal criminal mind. It hearkened back to his first appearance, when he managed to kill a man in a room full of police by poisoning the man's dog, which attacked the intended victim and not the disguised Batman. However, as brilliant as it was, and as welcome as the Englehart and Rogers appearances of the character which deepened his insanity (who can forget the Joker Fish?) the problem is what happened when the homicidal clown ended up appearing again and again, killing and maiming as he went.

One of the reasons the Joker went from a maniac to a capering jester, in fact, was due to the fact that the DC Editorial offices didn't want reoccuring characters who went around murdering folks because it made Batman look ineffectual. And many, many fans have pointed out over the years that the Batman's refusal to kill the Joker has in fact cost countless lives. At this point, Jim Gordon alone has lost a wife and seen his daughter crippled by the Joker, and both of those events could be laid at the Batman's boots. He's had plenty of opportunity to toss the Joker off a roof by now, and he never does it. Indeed, he's probably not capable of killing someone, due to the traumatic event that formed his persona so many years ago. Bruce Wayne is a man who was broken forever as a child, broken by a murder to the degree that he can't ever put paid to the experience. Therefore, he can never kill the Joker.

Therefore, the Joker has to stop randomly killing people.

The Joker as a homicidal madman is a good idea and one that should be retained, but quite honestly we could use a few years of a less psychotic criminal. Personally, I don't know why, when we're dealing with a character who takes his central motif from a playing card and who traces back his origin to having fallen into a vat of chemicals that permanently deformed him, that no one's ever decided to throttle back the murder aspect of the character and throttle up the random aspect.

Both Batman and the Joker are creations of chaos intruding into a life, formed by a random moment that is at once pivotal and unimaginable in the context of their previous lives. The Batman is a boy forever prevented from becoming a normal man by the sudden shock of a muzzle flash, his childhood forever broken by a graveside vow and his own inability to accept what had happened: his world changed, but he could not accept it, could not accomodate it, and spent his entire life dedicating himself to the idea that he could somehow make it right, bring order to the chaos of crime infesting his city, the real city that was suddenly and brutally shown to him in one veil-rending instant. And the Joker? The Joker is a man who dressed up in a Red Hood either to commit crimes or because he was forced to (depending on if you like the more classic origin or the Alan Moore version) who lost everything when he was driven into a vat of caustic chemicals by Batman. Made a freak, he embraced his freakishness, and became in fact the thing he resembled, a chalk white loon.

Batman's reaction is to try and impose order on chaos. The Joker's reaction is to bring chaos everywhere he goes, but chaos can be portrayed in other ways than random murder. I was disappointed that when Grant Morrison took on the Joker recently, he chose to simply deform him even more and have him poison his own henchmen... again. Why not have the Joker come out of his recent trauma with a newfound interest in the small butterfly wingbeats that beget typhoons? Imagine a story where the Joker is playing dominos with the people of Gotham... robbing this person, kidnapping that one, diverting a pension fund into yet another person's private account... in an attempt to manipulate the city of Gotham into mass instability. And Batman has to try and work out how the chaos is going to bloom. Why did the Joker steal the costume from a local college team's mascot and wear it while robbing the Gotham Stock Exchange, and for that matter, why did the Joker break into the Gotham Stock Exchange just to steal three stockbroker's wallets at gunpoint? Why is he paying street gangs to slash the tires of every Audi 5000 in the city? Imagine a Joker storyline where nobody dies at all, because the Joker spends the entire time manipualting people to careen off of each other in unexpected ways so that a young woman who would have died is delayed getting home? The Joker's insanity is played up more often than his genius is, but it's telling to remember that he invented that Joker Venom of his. Imagine his twisted genius turning itself to the study of Chaos Theory as the Joker plays ever more elaborate simulation games... except with real people, in the actual city, the best test bed a madman could ask for.

A Joker who wants to study chaos could be a nice change of pace. Gotham is a complex system - a Joker who understands how to properly knock over the right piece could make millions without even committing a crime, and then spend millions on a series of crimes that serve no purpose other than to help increase his understanding. And in the end, once he's achieved enough he could go back to killing people again, but this time killing with an eye towards creating that perfect storm of chaos - killing one man, if it's the right man, can bring down the whole system. And it's not the Commissioner, or the Batman, it's someone else... someone who can have the proper effect, a domino who in toppling starts the whole chain reaction going. How does Batman prevent the Joker from killing one man out of millions, and if he can't, can he prevent that one act from toppling Gotham?

A Joker story where there's tension again, where it matters, where the Joker's not just a giggling homicide factory. I think it could be interesting. And more, it makes the Batman/Joker dynamic worth pursuing again.

Comments

[Greg Morrow]

Technically, in Batman #1, the Joker poisoned the man's cat, not dog.

Also, I usually like to point out that Bane's shtick of releasing everyone from Arkham/Blackgate was a rip-off, because Ra's al-Ghul did the same thing back in Batman #400.

[Dave Van Domelen]

Peter David tried to do that sort of thing with Major Disaster during Underworld Unleashed, giving him the ability to see how the little things could snowball into big things via chaos. Really interesting power, but totally ignored by almost everyone afterwards, who preferred the old "I can make a volcano!" powers. It'd take someone with the clout to enforce Joker's behavior in other books to make such a plan last long enough to pay off.

[Andrew Hickey]

See, this kind of thing is why they should just put you in charge of every comic DC are putting out...

[Jason]

I thought Bane's plan was brilliant, in that it was so simple. He wanted to beat the Batman, by whatever means at his disposal. He used Batman's past, and his knowledge and correct reading of how Batman would deal with the released inmates, as a blunt, but effective, weapon to beat him down, and then sweep in and finish him.

[Rob Rogers]

The "Joker problem" is one that has bothered me for a long time, and I think you've come up with a terrific solution to it.

Of course, I'm also bothered by the idea that in order to defeat the Joker once and for all, Batman -- or another hero -- has to kill him. Since the Joker's highest goal is to be feared and renowned as the world's most brilliant, dangerous master criminal, the worst thing one could do to him would be to erase him from the public eye -- remove every mention of the Joker's existence from the newspapers, magazines, radio, television and the Internet. He'd be a performer without an audience.

And I'd love to see Oracle be the one to do it.