So I happened to be watching some Batman: The Animated Series the other day, and I felt compelled to talk about how much I enjoy the series’ version of the Joker played by Mark Hamill.
This might seem, at first glance, a little silly to write about. “Really?” you might respond. “You mean to tell me that one of the most celebrated interpretations ever of not only the Joker, but any comic book villain, is really really good? You don’t say! Perhaps you’ll favor us next with a post about how Citizen Kane is a pretty sweet flick, and that the Beatles wrote some cool songs.”
Yes yes, okay, but the reason I thought it might be moderately interesting to talk about the show’s version of the Joker is that he is so fondly remembered by fans despite being quite different from the way he’s portrayed in current comic books.
The modern day Joker (and by “modern day,” I mean you can actually trace this interpretation back decades, but it’s especially in the air today after the success of The Dark Knight and his portrayal in Grant Morrison’s Batman comics) is described often as “a force of nature.” That’s pretty much the standard characterization these days, right? Death on two legs, a man-sized natural disaster with a body count in the, what, thousand? A malicious, twisted trickster god raining blood and death and madness.
This is fine. It makes him a really powerful conceptual opposite for Batman, and it can hardly be argued that “man vs. force of nature” doesn’t make for terrific drama.
However, a thunderstorm doesn’t really make for an interesting character. I am, the record will show, a huge supporter of Grant Morrison’s superhero comics – one of those guys who’ll point to a character’s one-off appearance in an issue of JLA as that character’s definitive portrayal, etc., and you all roll your eyes. And yet, his nigh-invincible Joker personally leaves me cold, however well-done his portrayal is, because he really is just a thunderstorm. He just sort of happens, and you never know why because he is so far above you. Even his quest against Batman seems somewhat dispassionate – like he’s holding all the cards, he knows he’s going to win, and he’s just waiting for Batman to catch up. Works very well in The Dark Knight as one story, but in the ongoing narrative of superhero comics, at some point, there’s not a whole lot to do with him other than have him show up, kill people, mess with our heroes’ heads, and repeat.
Now, the animated series’ Joker is a far more human character. One of the episodes I watched recently was “Joker’s Millions,” in which a flat-broke Joker gets a massive inheritance from a gangland rival, clears his name, and blows a bunch of money, only to find out later that most of the money was fake; with the IRS after him for inheritance tax, he can’t admit that he was fooled or he’ll be humiliated. Can you imagine the Joker, as seen in most contemporary comics, being portrayed as so down on his luck? Living in a slummy motel, unable to afford food for his pet hyenas (oh yes, there are pet hyenas)? Desperately cobbling together a crime just to keep out of something so ordinary as tax trouble? Or the Joker as seen in “Mad Love,” worked up into a jealous frenzy at the mere suggestion that Harley Quinn came a lot closer to killing Batman than he ever did.
This is a Joker with highs and lows, who feels joy and disappointment, a Joker with honest-to-God passion. This is a Joker who wants things, and can’t always have them. This is a Joker who retains the grandness of his philosophical and conceptual war against Batman, but is also petty enough offended when he’s tossed out of the Gotham City Comedy Competition.
There is a guy I’d be interested to read more about on a regular basis!
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The reason that Morrison is an editor at DC now: High Concept. Giving Morrison power is an atempt to reel back all the Alan Moore style weirdness fans and his boring, cold Joker is right up that alley.
That said, the animated Joker probably wouldn’t work anywhere near as well in a mature comic as there is nothing at stake. He’s just an angry loon.
For my money, I’d like to read about said angry loon written by Loeb and drawn by Sale. For all the stupid things Loeb has put on paper, his Joker is probably my favourite, but it might just be my raging hard on for Sale’s art.
Heh.
This is very insightful.
“You killed Captain Clown! YOU KILLED CAPTAIN CLOWN!!!” — just one of the many lines that will stick in my memory forever, the sound of Mark Hamill’s Joker about to have a blow-your-stack temper tantrum because his mannequin was destroyed.
I just want to know if he ever took up macramé.
I always thought the restriction against killing in the Animated Series actually made the Joker a better villain.
That’s not to say the Joker shouldn’t kill people. I don’t want to see a return to the late 50s and 60s comic book (or TV show) Joker, where everything was a silly riddle and robbing things that spelled out his name. But when the Joker’s bodycount gets into the hundreds over the course of his career-or into the hundreds PER CRIME-then part of his menace is blunted. Because it stops being a question of if the Joker will kill someone, just how many.
And the Animated Series didn’t make him safe. He clearly intended to kill people quite often, and sometimes for very petty reasons. The fact that he wasn’t shown as being successful in killing people didn’t change the fact that he clearly wanted to-he just didn’t HAVE to. Leaving someone gasping for air as they laughed uncontrollably was fine with him, because every “joke” shouldn’t have the same punchline.
The other great thing about that version of the Joker was that he was genuinely funny. I don’t think I’ve seen a funny Joker in the comics since “The Laughing Fish.”
“I’m crazy enough to take on Batman, but the IRS? Noooooo thank you!”
And the Animated Series didn’t make him safe.
Heck, he didn’t have to kill people to be thoroughly menancing. In “Joker’s Favor” he stalks a man for two years and while it’s all off-camera it’s made abundantly clear that the man is a wreck over it.
A friend of mine put it well: the Hamill Joker (and classic Joker in general) is go great because he has human appetites.
The more you remove a character from humanity, the more you make him an abstract, and I think villains are *far* more effective when you can see your own humanity in them, twisted or otherwise.
Morrison’s Joker is just a Bowie-based nightmare monster out of SILENT HILL. He strips all of the Joker down to exactly one note of character, and for many, it seems that one note is resounding. For me, it falls flat. It doesn’t make him scarier. It makes him boring. That Joker is just yet another grinning psychopath. That’s all.
I thought having Harley on the show helped a lot in humanizing the character. He has a girlfriend who he sometimes loves and sometimes abuses, but misses when she’s gone. It’s another dimension to the character.
I think much of the difference between these two interpretations of Joker can be traced to their origins, or “pre-origins”.
In the DC comic universe, Joker was a hapless schmuck before tumbling into the toxic waste, tricked by petty criminals who preyed off his desire to help his wife and unborn child. He effectively was taken over by the “thunderstorm” and became the avatar of madness that we’ve seen for the past couple decades.
On the other hand, we know the animated incarnation of the Joker was a criminal through and through, and was not above petty revenge on his former criminal compatriots (Mask of the Phantasm). In fact, there’s a pretty great story in one of the Batman Black and White volumes by Paul Dini, where two Arkham psychologists find an old case file proving that the Joker isn’t “crazy”, that he’s clearly the same sociopath criminal he was before, only more flamboyant so he can claim insanity. The file goes on to say that he Joker should be tried through the system, (which is when the psychologists realize that this was written by Dr. Quinn slightly before her “episode”).
Perhaps what made Hamill’s Joker somewhat relatable is the fact that really, he kills for concrete, non-abstract reasons. He kills because he’s jealous, or for money, or because he’s pissed off. Occasionally, like in the JLA episode ‘Wild Cards’, he’ll take it a step further – he’s not above doing things just to screw with people, but then, he’s a guy who goes out in a clown getup and commits crimes, not the paragon of mental stability.
Murder writers often describe the finite span of reasons why people commit crimes. Sure, Hamill’s Joker is unhinged, but this simply increases the scope of what he’s willing to murder for – he’ll still do it for revenge, say, but the revenge may be for an imagined or negligible slight. And so, the psychotic killer clown becomes an (admittedly over-the-top) relatable and understandable character, rather than some enigma who ‘just wants to see the world burn’.
Brandi,
That’s an excellent point, and with an example I wanted to include-but I was afraid of rambling too much. I think it’s also a great example of being shown that the Joker was a menace without making him kill loads of people, even in the opening scene. We’re not told that the man is afraid of the Joker for X reasons, he just is afraid, and it’s sold well.
Great points; I’ve always preferred the “human” Joker myself, if only because giving him an inner life — obsessions of his own, like his obsession with getting Batman’s attention — makes him such a unique, specific character. The force-of-nature Joker can work, but there are more villains in other franchises who fit the same description. (The Joker from The Dark Knight always reminded me of Dennis Hopper from Speed, an unstoppable mastermind always one step ahead of everybody.)
I should note that “Joker’s Millions” is Dini’s adaptation of A classic Batman comics story from 1952. (For some reason, most of his scripts for the “New Look” season of Batman were adaptations, either of his own comics stories or others.) The Joker was a great character in a lot of those old stories too, and for some of the same reasons.
For all the praise that’s been heaped upon Morrison’s Batman, has anyone ever singled out his depiction of the Joker? And did anyone (anywhere) enjoy that prose issue with the terrible 3D illustrations?
Not to jump on the point or anything, but I do think that the animated Joker is plenty threatening partially because he SEEMS safer, zanier.
One of the reasons the Joker and Batman are a good conceptual match, after all, is because Batman looks like a scary vampire-thing but is a good guy, and the Joker looks like a happy clown but is a murderer. Reversal of expectations (although this has somewhat lost its punch over the years, as nowadays almost EVERYBODY sees clowns as creepy/scary).
Morrison’s “Thin White Duke of Death” looks scary and IS scary, so you sort of know what you’re getting*, but the animated Joker (particularly when they gave him the sort of geometric redesign) is wacky and makes jokes that are actually funny, and then in the next scene he brutally knocks Harley out a window for upstaging him. Hamill’s Joker ALMOST GETS YOU TO LIKE HIM before he does something horrible.
(*-It is worth noting, of course, that part of Morrison’s interpretation of the Joker is that his personality changes all the time, and so “his” Joker does not PRECLUDE a Joker more like the animated version.)
Another big issue with the “force of nature, body count in the thousands.” Joker is that pretty quickly, any reasonable person starts thinking “Why hasn’t somebody killed this guy yet?”
Then you get into arguments about Batman’s code vs killing, and hero’s codes vs real world ethics in general, and things just go downhill from there.
Kommenczar: Despite everything I’ve said in this post, I did enjoy the prose issue, although not the art, or the design. However: I tend to read a lot of Morrison comics and say “I don’t understand how somebody could NOT love this.” The prose issue, on the other hand, I could totally see where someone would hate it.
I hope I don’t come off as too critical of Morrison here (even if I think his Joker is an overall weak link in his Batman mythos-building), but I was never very impressed with his “Joker constantly changes his personality” bit.
First off, every Batman writer has at least been acutely aware of the incongruity between the different Jokers, and placed their own depictions in a conscious relationship to previous material. As for making up canonical reasons for it, Alan Moore had the bit about the multiple-choice origin story in the Killing Joke…
Secondly, and more importantly, is that irregardless of whether the Joker could theoretically take on any persona, Morrison is also giving us a specific one in his writing, one which so far I’ve found neither innovative nor interesting (even if the stories he appeared in usually were, which makes it even more annoying).
What did his “rebirth” entail? What will it mean for how we tell future Joker stories? Anything at all?
Remember that Morrison made a very specific point in having the Joker repudiate Harley Quinn as, in my reading, a token of an obsolete past…
My big problem with the “force of nature” Joker is that I never really bought into the idea that he can defeat practically anyone in the DC Universe.
The rationale seems to go something like this:
1. According to Morrison, Batman can defeat anyone with time to prepare.
2. The Joker still manages to give Batman a hard time and does things like occasionally killing one of his supporting characters.
3. Therefor, the Joker must be almost as awesome as Batman.
I don’t care how clever or unpredictable the Joker is supposed to be. He should still last about three seconds against anybody with decent superpowers. Sure, he might have a gun or some useful gadgets, or some explosives planted somewhere. But he’s still basically just a normal human who is good at chemistry.
Black Canary should be able to take him down with her Canary Cry before he can reach for a weapon. It shouldn’t take something really extreme like the Martian Manhunter using telepathy to mess with his brain. The dude should only be a threat when he stays in his weight class.
Instead, you get junk like the Joker being able to defeat Psimon before the other guy could fry him with a mental blast. Because the Joker is just that radical, bro.
Sure. Now pull the other one.
That’s an excellent point, and with an example I wanted to include-but I was afraid of rambling too much.
I considered bringing up Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker as well– after all, he doesn’t actually *kill* Tim Drake– but Joker’s Favor was a great example of the Joker being distinctly disturbing but relatively non-bloodthirsty.
I’m going to upset everybody by saying I always thought Mark Hamill’s voice was just a little too cartoonish. But other than that, everything about his Joker was absolutely perfect.
I haven’t actually read a Joker story since the early ’80s, so I had no idea he was portrayed as this ‘force of nature’ nowadays. It does sound like a boring characterisation to me. And I too hate villains that murder thousands easily. Murders have the most impact when you get to know the victims. Stories where lots of people are killed tend to be kind of boring.
it could kinda work on Micheal Moorcock style Law vs Chaos lines, but i think Morrison wouldn’t make ‘chaos’ equal ‘evil’
Even Moorcock didn’t equate Chaos with evil…
I completely agree with what you’re saying here. In fact one of the things that can truly annoy me about some super hero films is that sometimes the villains seem to do stuff ‘Just Because”.
I like Dini’s Joker with just a tinge of the “Dark Knight” flavor dropped in.
My theory on the Joker is that he really isn’t insane. Not in the way you’d think (he’s probably massively manic depressive, but so was Sherlock Holmes). The Joker’s thing, rather, is that *he always has to be in control of the situation.*
Usually, this just mean surrounding himself with people he’s smarter than, and terrifying the rest into submission. But the best way to always come out on top is to keep a loose and ever-shifting set of goals so that even losing means you win, if you weren’t worried about winning to begin with.
Batman drives him so nuts because whenever Batman enters the room, suddenly the Joker’s not the one everyone’s afraid of anymore. He’s obsessed with just getting one over on Bats, no matter how small, over and over.
Brian T.: I actually like the idea that Joker can hold his own, to a degree, with some of the heavy-hitters, but only within the same sphere Batman can. It should be stated I think it’s BS Batman can go up against most of the people he does. I don’t care how prepared he is.
I get that people tend to love or hate Morrison’s work. I hated Arkham Asylum and Kid Eternity when I read them 20 years ago, but I think his “Hyper-sanity” Joker is a brilliant piece of work, since it incorporates everything in the character’s publishing history at once (and, just as my own personal fanwank theory it explains why the Joker can hold his own against anyone: his mind can process massive amounts of information extremely quickly and intuit a nonliner plan that you just can’t defend against. He’s sort of anti-preptime. I think in one of Morrison’s JLA issues he even makes a point of saying the Joker’s superpwer is insanity).
I also get why Morrison wants to turn the Joker into an abstraction, without human needs or feelings, since Morrison likes to deal with symbols. I doubt very much Morrison’s current joker is meant to be at all relatable or even human. He’s sort of the complete other for Batman to fight. That sort of storytelling is just naturally at odds with what BTAS was trying to do.
I much prefer the Joker who would do things like trying to trademark fish. He uses brilliant scheming in support of an aim that cannot work. You couldn’t even argue with him about it because he’d have a a brilliant scheme to overcome every problem you could suggest.
By comparison, psychopath, mass-murderer Joker just bores me. Is he any different from all the other psychopathic mass-murderers? I don’t care.
I’d be interested in B:TAS Joker meeting Morrison Joker. That could be intriguing.
Oh, another reason B:TAS Joker is scarier: The fact that he is both capable and willing to kill, and just doesn’t go out of his way to, actually shows less concern for human life than “Rack ’em Up” Joker. By tallying up such a deathtoll, the comics Joker proves he cares enough about life to want to kill… whereas the cartoon Joker just doesn’t care whether you live or die – he’ll kill you if that’s what will get him what he wants, but your death doesn’t mean much to him.
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“Brian T.: I actually like the idea that Joker can hold his own, to a degree, with some of the heavy-hitters, but only within the same sphere Batman can. It should be stated I think it’s BS Batman can go up against most of the people he does. I don’t care how prepared he is.”
30 years ago, Batman would take out someone supposedly much more powerful and people would gasp (“You took down HIM? With no super powers? Amazing!”).
Now, unfortunately, it’s “Well of course you took him down! You’re Batman!” which doesn’t work as well for me.
The Joker: I also hate the idea that he’s so totally insane he truly has no concept of right or wrong–it’s a lot less interesting than the flamboyant sociopath he started out as (quite close to the BTAS version, really), and at times it’s just an excuse for “wacky” crimes that aren’t much different from the whimsical fifties version.
Hamill also does a fantastic Spectre and Brave and Bold: Not ghostly, just hard and pitiless and cold.
I kind of like the non-canon interpretation I once heard one of the old-school guys (I want to say it was Englehart) give on a podcast. The reason the Joker doesn’t have a fixed personality (or even a consistent psychosis) and behaves more like a force of nature than a person is that he isn’t any one person. He’s several people that have picked up the mantle from each other as they die and some of them get much more invested in the role than others. That’s why the Joker(s) tends to kill his/their flunkies; he/they are covering his/their tracks.
To be honest the Joker has always been, for me, summed up in a quote from the first Batman movie:
“I am the world’s first fully-functioning homicidal artist. I make art–until someone dies.”
The Joker, a.k.a. the Clown Prince of Crime, a.k.a. the Grinning Gargoyle, a.k.a. the Thin White Duke of Death, is a narcissist. He craves the spotlight. He is vain, he is proud, he loves putting on a show and hearing the cheers (or screams) of the audience.
It shouldn’t be about killing people, it should be about “and now for my NEXT TRICK…” Whether that trick is putting Smilex in Gotham City’s water supply or hatching an elaborate scheme just to hit Batman in the face with a pie. In many ways the character is just as good a foil for Zatanna as he is for Batman because of that fact.
I’m aware that there are those who would argue that reducing the Joker to a glorified stage magician is unfair but for heaven’s sake, he’s a CLOWN.
And that lust for attention, that theatricality, is the one thing that has been consistent through all incarnations of the Joker.
The ability to be a multitalented performer, to sing, dance, tell jokes, is the hallmark of the vaudeville legend, which is in the end what the Joker is–the quintessential entertainer. He just happens to also add stealing, killing, defacing, dehumanizing, torturing, et al. as part of his repertoire.
Compare this to Batman, who is actually pretty theatrical himself, and you have the real reason why he is drawn to Batman:
Who else can match his performances so sublimely?
Brian T: Well, it’s not like the Joker just challenges someone to a fight. Black Canary could take Joker even without powers, I’d bet, but what else are henchmen for, right?
John: I should mention I do recognize how Morrison’s Joker works well in the context of his own stories – “RIP” wouldn’t have worked with the animated Joker, of course.
Austin: You know, the Joker IS actually summed up well by the first Burton movie; I think Batman ’89 is more “faithful” than people give it credit for, in the big picture if not in detail. The movie also captures Gotham City nicely in a single line: “Decent people shouldn’t live here; they’d be happier someplace else.”
Anyway, totally agree on all of your comment (never thought of the Zatanna angle, that’s brilliant). All I could add is another aspect I like about the Dini version of Joker – not only is he an artist, but he’s a FRUSTRATED artist, which makes him more dangerous, I like to think.
I’m not convinced “RIP” even needed the Joker at all in order to work. He was mostly just along for the ride…
Actually… since Morrison’s not really playing up the “Joker is the opposite half of Batman’s psyche” angle that much, and RIP was fundamentally a story all about Batman, rather than taking the usual route of externalising his inner conflict through his colourful rouges gallery (there’s a reason the Black Glove is filled with new no-name villains who can be killed off afterwards)…
Maybe RIP would’ve been even better WITHOUT the Joker? It would have reinforced the theme I think Morrison may have been going for, and it might have made it a bit clearer that RIP was never supposed to be a Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow style dog pile of classic villains, which at the time seemed like what some fans were expecting…
I came in WAAAAAy late to this but I should point out that “Joker’s Millions” is actually based on a Golden Age Dick Sprang Batman story. Which actually makes the AS version even more awesome, in that it took a story from the “prop gag, no one dies or even gets hurt” era and modified it with Hamill’s emotional outbursts.
I’m glad you wrote this because it’s a problem I’ve also has with the Joker for a WHILE. It started for me roughly around the No Man’s Land arc, when the Joker basically showed up, murdered Gordon’s wife, and then was like “huh huh, I just did that.” The Dark Knight’s version of the Joker KILLS THE CHARACTER. I suppose it’s ironic, in that Batman suffers this as well (see “Batman beats Everybody”) but the Joker becoming a character that “kills for no reason, just wants to watch the world burn” is a LAZY JUSTIFICATION FOR A CHARACTER.
This is why I love both The Riddler and Two-Face a thousand times more than the Joker and find both such better foils for Batman: one is such a better representation of being torn between two attitudes, eternally suffering over what you can do that’s right and wrong, and the other is (when used properly) the epitome of the DETECTIVE part of Batman: matching intellect against someone who deeply, deeply just wants to prove superiority.
The Riddler is a better attention whore mastermind than the Joker, and Two-Face is a better fallen angel.
August,
The NML thing doesn’t really bother me within the context of that story. He’d been off the radar for most of that year and the other characters were starting to panic about what he was up to. He had to do SOMETHING before the story ended just to justify all that tension (besides, killing Sarah wasn’t his plan A anyway).
However, it does contribute to my biggest problem with the Joker; I don’t understand how he’s still alive. I understand why Batman doesn’t kill him. I understand why the courts won’t execute him. I DON’T get why the police haven’t killed him. He’s a freaking copkiller and the GCPD has no problem bending or outright breaking the law to put lesser criminals down so it’s baffling that the Joker is still alive.
I agree 100% on Two-Face and Riddler, though. Two-Face has always made for the best Bat-villain in my mind.