Just like Batman himself, the Joker didn't arrive fully formed.
Here's how we got from a one-shot gimmick villain to the embodiment of madness and mayhem
and how he was almost completely forgotten along the way.
It might be hard to believe these days, but when he first hit the pages in 1939, Batman
wasn't exactly an original concept.
Bill Finger and Bob Kane were heavily influenced by the Shadow, a pulp vigilante who eventually
found himself replaced in the pop culture pantheon by Batman.
In fact, the story that introduced Batman, "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," was,
to put it charitably, "inspired by" a Shadow novel called Partners of Peril that had been
released a few years earlier.
If you don't want to be charitable, you might even say it was lifted wholesale.
Before long, of course, Batman emerged as his own character.
Six months after his debut, he got the origin story that remains unchanged to this day,
and five months after that, Finger and Jerry Robinson introduced Robin, who redefined the
idea of a sidekick and inspired a thousand knockoffs himself.
Still, those stories were never exactly subtle about where they were digging up their ideas.
Enter German actor Conrad Veidt.
In 1928, he'd starred in a silent film called The Man Who Laughs, about a 17th-Century noble
named Gwynplaine.
His father had been killed in an iron maiden by political rivals, and as for Gwynplaine
himself, they disfigured him by cutting his mouth into a smile, quote, "so that he might
laugh forever at his fool of a father."
Gwynplaine grows up, gets revenge, and actually gets a much happier ending than he gets in
the Victor Hugo novel on which the film was based.
The important part for the then-new Batman comics, however, was the striking image of
a man whose face was permanently twisted into a grin, forced to smile no matter what emotion
he was actually feeling something that Veidt did very well in the film.
Finger was inspired by that incredible visual, and brought the idea to Jerry Robinson, thinking
up a new villain for their comic.
"Let me tell you about this guy I know, Jack.
Mean kid.
Bad seed.
Hurt people."
"I like him already."
Batman #1 hit the shelves in 1940, and kicked off with one of the Golden Age's most memorable
images: the Joker, smiling at the reader while plotting a string of murders.
Right from that first panel, the Joker was unsettling, for the same reason that Veidt's
performance was memorable in the film: a total disconnect between emotion and expression.
From page one, in a very literal sense, there's something off about him.
And the story, of course, bears that out.
The Joker racks up a dozen kills in his first appearance, and when he comes back for his
second story later in that same issue, there's a visceral quality to his particular brand
of violence at odds with the stiff art that's so common in the Golden Age.
Clearly, the creators were onto something, even if they didn't realize it.
The Joker was originally intended to die at the end of that first story, like most of
Batman's early foes did, but editor Whitney Ellsworth decided to keep him around, and
the last panel of the Joker's body being hauled away was changed to have the doctors surprised
that he'd survived instead.
It wasn't long until the Joker, as a character, ran up against a problem.
With the arrival of Robin, the Batman titles had started to skew towards a younger audience,
following the example of extremely profitable heroes like Superman.
The Joker was already popular enough to stick around, but he changed to keep up with the
times, leaning hard into the goofy clown aesthetic of his personality rather than the serial
killer stuff that had been a huge part of his debut.
A crucial element that the Joker kept even through the sillier years was that he was
never given a real name or a definitive origin story, which is pretty remarkable.
Comics back then were dedicated to explaining every single piece of their mythology, to
the point where they'd eventually have Batman encounter the guy who killed his parents,
and then later encounter the guy who really killed his parents by hiring the first guy.
That story also explains where Batman really got the idea for his costume his dad had a
bat costume that he wore to a costume party which had already been explained back in 1939.
The closest anyone came to "explaining" the Joker was in "The Man Behind the Red Hood"
in 1951.
The thing is, that story doesn't actually tell us anything new.
"Do you want to know how I got these scars?"
We never learn the Red Hood's real name, we never see his face.
All we find out is that he's had multiple identities, and that there are things in his
past that even Batman, the World's Greatest Detective, doesn't know.
Even better, we find out that he was willing to leap into a vat of toxic chemicals rather
than be apprehended by the police.
Even before he's the Joker, he's got a disregard for human life, even his own.
As an origin story, "The Man Behind the Red Hood" only served to make the Joker more mysterious.
If he wasn't always the Joker, was he even really the Joker now?
Were there more identities in his past?
Those questions would remain a part of the character for the next 70 years.
Believe it or not, there was a time when the Joker just wasn't around in the pages of Batman
or Detective Comics, but it wasn't because of a lack of popularity, at least not on a
large scale.
There was one audience for whom the Joker was decidedly unpopular, and while it was
an audience of exactly one person, it turned out to be the one that mattered the most:
Julius Schwartz, who took over editing Batman and Detective in 1964, was said by coworkers
to have absolutely hated the character.
As a result, the Joker's role in the core Batman titles dropped off dramatically, and
after the Batman TV show ended in 1969, Schwartz apparently didn't see any reason to keep him
around at all.
For the next four years June 1969 to September 1973, to be precise there weren't any new
Joker stories in those two comics, and just two in books Schwartz wasn't editing.
In 1973, though, Schwartz apparently had a change of heart, or was convinced that four
years was long enough to go without a villain that readers still liked.
The result was one of the most memorable Batman comics ever: "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge,"
by Denny O'Neill and Neal Adams.
"Wait'll they get a load of me."
That team would wind up contributing some pretty huge elements to the Batman mythos
they co-created Ra's al-Ghul, among others, and O'Neil would himself spend about 15 years
as the editor of the Batman comics, bringing over writer/artist Frank Miller from Marvel
for an ambitious project about Batman's later years.
Even with all that, though, this might be their most important work.
It wasn't just a reintroduction of the Joker, both in-universe and for the readers, it was
arguably the single story that "created" the modern Joker.
As the title suggests, he's out for revenge not against Batman, but against his own henchmen.
The story established that Joker had been imprisoned in and escaped from a hospital
for the criminally insane rather than a prison, which would eventually lead O'Neil and Irv
Novick to create Arkham Asylum eight months later.
It also brought back the poison that had left his victims as smiling corpses back in his
first appearance, and, crucially, established that his plans weren't necessarily driven
by logic.
Only one of the five henchmen targeted in the story had actually betrayed him to the
police, but Joker didn't know which one.
The solution: kill them all, by poison, bombing, and even feeding one to a shark.
This was the story that truly ramped up the Joker's insanity, and was the foundation on
which everything else was built.
If the Joker wasn't Batman's true arch-nemesis before then, he certainly was after.
It's worth noting that the revitalization of the Joker and his increasingly unpredictable
madness wasn't just a product of O'Neil and Adams.
A few years later, in 1978, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, another creative team
hired away from Marvel, knocked another definitive Joker story out of the park: "The Laughing
Fish."
For his part, Rogers' work here is considered some of the all-time best Batman art, with
good reason.
Unlike a few other artists, he plays the smile as a permanent fixture on the Joker's face
rather than just an expression, hearkening back to Veidt and The Man Who Laughs.
At heart, it was an updated retelling of the first Joker story from Batman #1 the Joker
sets off on a string of murders, announcing his targets well in advance to terrorize the
city before leaving them with their poisoned smiles but there was one big twist.
Rather than being random death and destruction, the Joker's reason for the murders, or at
least the excuse he was using, was that his victims were keeping him from getting a patent
on fish poisoned with his signature smile.
It is a bizarre motive, but that's exactly why it works.
The other villains might have fixations and obsessions, but the Joker was completely beyond
reason.
Demanding something so ridiculous from bureaucrats was a challenge to the very concept of an
ordered world.
He quite simply could not be reasoned with, because in his view, reason didn't even exist.
Throughout the '70s and '80s, the Batman comics were on a sort of pendulum, swinging to one
extreme, gritty, violent street-level crime dramas to the other: the pop-art camp of the
'60s.
He was still a superhero, but stories like "There is No Hope In Crime Alley" and "To
Kill a Legend" had pulled the focus onto the idea of how people deal with tragedies.
That same lens was applied to the villains, too.
Batman's gallery of foes went from a solid roster of baddies with great gimmicks and
interesting hooks to a group of villains who were reworked into being specific psychological
foils for the hero.
Two-Face, for instance, became explicitly cast as a tragic figure who was struggling
with his own two extremes of good and evil, and what it was like to look into the mirror
and see something that was more like a mask looking back at you.
The Riddler had always had a superiority complex, but now it was about proving that Batman,
and everything he stood for, could fail.
Bane explored the idea of someone with Bruce Wayne's keen mind and gifted athleticism being
born into crime, corruption, and poverty instead of a life of privilege.
The Joker was ahead of the curve, but the same change was happening with him.
He stopped being merely unpredictable, becoming an embodiment of madness and nihilism who
represented a moral threat that went far beyond just punching him out and dragging him back
to Arkham Asylum.
And the thing is, he kind of had to evolve that way, because Batman was undergoing the
same change himself.
"As a man, l'm flesh and blood.
l can be ignored, destroyed.
But as a symbol…
As a symbol, l can be incorruptible."
Say what you will about the "Shark-Repellent Bat-Spray" scene in the '66 movie, but if
you get right down to it, it actually is a pretty accurate portrayal of how Batman works
as a character.
He's entirely built around the idea of determination, this unbeatable will to win.
He evolved from just having the tagline of "The World's Greatest Detective" into embodying
the phrase, becoming the character who thought of everything and was always one step ahead
because he had to be.
Because if he wasn't, people died.
And that became the consequence: death.
It had always been there, going all the way back to the origin story, but in the '80s,
it was codified into the core of the character, and as Batman's definitive arch-nemesis, the
Joker evolved to embody it.
He is the consequence.
That's why the Joker was the one who killed Robin, which stood for years as Batman's greatest
failure.
that’s why he was the central character in The Killing Joke, where Alan Moore and
Brian Bolland go back to that Red Hood story from 1951 and rework it into its own kind
of tragedy.
And it's why every time he showed up after, those consequences had to keep getting more
dire, more destructive, more of an assault on the very concepts that Batman was built
on.
That's how the Joker became the twisted, amoral character that we have today.
The only real question is how much more twisted he can get.
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