Who is the Joker?

First of all, I promise this is not becoming a comic book blog. It just so happens that the big movie people have been talking about right at the same moment I've begun this blog is Todd Phillips' Joker... right after I wrote a post about the X-Men. Yeah, okay, I know, I'm sorry: I do like muh superheroes. If you're either Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola, then this might not be the blog for you.

Joaquin Phoenix is the most recent actor to take on the role of
the Clown Prince of Crime.

So did you see Joker? It's a masterpiece, I'm told. I mean, I saw it as well, and it was... fine. I saw it with my friend Ted. Ted and I have been friends since high school and we are now, er, older than that, and I am one-hundred percent certain that there is nobody in the world with whom I have seen more movies in my life than Ted. After the credits rolled on Joker and the lights came up (literally; Ted always sits through all the credits for every movie, and this, too, has been a thing since high school) Ted turned to me and said, "That was one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen." To which I replied, "Really?" Silence of the Lambs, I think, is more 'disturbing' than Joker. Seven is more disturbing. Pauly Shore's Bio-Dome is, in its way, more disturbing. Joker is violent, to be sure, but I'm not even sure if it's any more 'disturbing' than Scorsese's Taxi Driver, the film it takes large swaths of inspiration from.

This is all really just a prelude to what interests me about Joker, which is the Joker. As we approached this film's release, I said to anyone who asked me if I wanted to see it: "I wouldn't want to see a Batman movie without a villain; why would I want to see a Joker movie without a Batman?" The Joker, though, is the one Batman villain who can confidently carry a film by himself. As I said to one rabid Joker fan on Twitter the other day: people wouldn't exactly be lining up in the streets to see Penguin or Clayface or Killer Moth.

The Joker, the character, is often described as the yin to Batman's yang, except when a particular writer is going about telling a story about how similar the two characters are, as writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland did in the seminal graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, and Sean Murphy did more recently in the excellent graphic novel Batman: White Knight. Ironically, both of these tomes offer new variations of what I find most fascinating about the Joker, his origin story... or more accurately, his lack thereof.

Batman's origin story is easy and universally adapted across mediums: a young Bruce Wayne was present when his parents were gunned down by a criminal. Usually the gunning down takes place in a Gotham City back alley dubbed Crime Alley, and usually the Waynes have just exited the theater, very often (but not always) after seeing a Zorro movie. Over the years the identity of the killer of the Waynes has been revised for the purposes of a particular story (in comics lore a crook named Joe Chill killed the Waynes; in Tim Burton's film Batman it was Jack Napier, the mob enforcer who would eventually become the Joker.) But the core of Batman's motivation remains the same: he saw his parents die at the hands of a criminal and determined to wage war against the Gotham City underworld.

The Red Hood.

The Joker's origin story and alter-ego are, by contrast, extremely fluid. The character first appeared, fully-formed, in 1940's Batman #1 with many of his signatures already in place: his chalk-white skin, green hair, purple suit, and tendency to kill his victims with rictus-inducing "Joker venom." The Joker's creators, writer Bill Finger and artists Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, initially declined to present an origin story for the character, deciding that some of his allure came from the mystery of his past. It wasn't until 1951 that the first telling of the Joker's origin was told in Detective Comics #168. In this tale the Joker is a laboratory worker who dons a costumed identity, the Red Hood, to rob his employer of a million dollars. Stopped by Batman, the worker falls into a vat of chemical waste and emerges with bleached skin and green hair.

The Joker and his unnamed earlier self from
Batman: The Killing Joke.

1988's The Killing Joke expands on the 1951 tale, presenting the Joker as an unnamed engineer who tries stand-up comedy and fails miserably, only to fall in with criminals, be forced into the Red Hood identity to serve as a distraction so his partners can rob the diamond exchange next door to the chemical plant. To escape an approaching Batman, the failed comic jumps into a vat of chemicals that bleaches his skin and turns his hair green which, along with the recent death in a household accident of his wife and unborn child, drives him insane. One year later, in 1989, that origin was deviated upon yet again in Burton's Batman, where mob enforcer Jack Napier, played by Jack Nicholson, is double-crossed by his boss, falls into a vat of acid, and emerges a lunatic with bleached-white skin and a permanently disfigured rigor-mortis smile on his face.

It is The Killing Joke, however, that offered the true key element of Joker's origin story. In it, the tale of his own origin is told through flashbacks by the Clown Prince himself, and in true unreliable narrator style he admits of his pre-Joker days, "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... if I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" This piece of dialogue, much like The Killing Joke in its entirety, builds upon the foundation of origin uncertainty established by the character's creators way back in 1940. 

Heath Ledger with an Oscar posthumously for his portrayal
of the Joker in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

The Joker remains the ultimate multiple choice character. Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, has played the Joker in voice-over performance for almost 30 years in various mediums, and many die-hard Batman fans consider his to be the definitive performative version of the character. Heath Ledger played the Joker to great critical acclaim in Christopher Nolan's 2008 film The Dark Knight, written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan. The Dark Knight is my personal favorite Joker story, because of all the origins the character has ever had this is arguably the most ambiguous. This version of the Joker does not have bleached skin; instead, he greases his hair and paints his face white. What he has are scars on his face, extending his smile up past its natural limits, and three times in the film he asks other characters if they want to know how he got them... but each time, the story is different. And when then-Detective Gordon captures the Joker midway through the film and the mayor of Gotham asks what the police have on him, Gordon replies, "Nothing. No matches on prints, DNA, dental. Clothing is custom, no labels. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name. No other alias."

Jared Leto also played the Joker once.

A reformed Joker, with Harley Quinn at
his side, looms over the Caped Crusader
in Sean Murphy's Batman: White Knight.

Batman: White Knight is a 2018 limited series comic book that tells the tale of a reformed Joker. In White Knight, writer/artist Sean Murphy is purposefully working from a potpourri of elements gathered from the vast history of Batman interpretations over the previous 80 years of storytelling, best exemplified in a key story moment when several of the characters in the tale each drive one of Batman's many collected Batmobiles: the one from the early comic book years, the one from 1960's Adam West series, from Burton's Batman, from Batman: The Animated Series, from the Dark Knight trilogy, etc., etc. That gathering of diverse elements is present as well in the series' depiction of the Joker, who is given a definitive backstory for this standalone, non-canon story. White Knight's Joker is Jack Napier (as in Burton's Batman), a failed stand-up comic turned minor crook (as in The Killing Joke), who puts on make-up (as does Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight) and turns to crime alongside a lover/accomplice named Harley Quinn (invented in the 90's for Batman: The Animated Series.) White Knight even contradicts Joker's origins within its own pages: although it is heavily implied that Napier put on make-up to become the Joker, later in the story Napier reverts to the chalk-faced Joker persona spontaneously and instantaneously. 

This brings us back full circle to the most recent retelling of his origin, as featured in Todd Phillips' Joker. In this version of the story, Joaquin Phoenix in an excellent performance portrays Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill man who is driven slowly but surely by an uncaring system into the psychotic clown-faced criminal identity of the Joker. In this telling, the Joker's face is not white. In this telling, the Joker wears make-up. In this telling, Arthur has a stint as a failed stand-up comic and the resulting public derision does more than any vat of chemicals does to turn him into the Joker. And in this telling, Joker is revealed halfway through to be, as he always is, the most unreliable of narrators, a notion that is reinforced in the final shots of the film which place Arthur into a ephemeral version of Arkham Asylum.

But it is the third-to-last shot of the film that, really, is the most important moment of all in both the film Joker and in the existence of the Joker as a character. Arthur-slash-Joker sits in Arkham, chuckling to himself, prompting his therapist to ask him, "What's so funny?" For no more than a second, we flash back into Crime Alley, where a young Bruce Wayne stands between the bodies of his parents, slowly looking up to face the camera.

Emperor Joker

Hold onto that thought. I'd like to reference one final story: the year 2000 saw the release of the comic-book crossover Emperor Joker, a DC Universe-spanning event that, through some very comic-booky shenanigans, saw the Joker obtain near-omnipotent Infinity Gauntlet-level powers, free to shape, create, and destroy reality as he saw fit. In the end of the story, Joker's downfall is that, while he has the power to destroy all of reality, that would mean destroying Batman, as well: and in a rare moment of clarity, he realizes that this is something he cannot do, for without the Batman, the Joker would not exist.

And that's why the only shot that matters in Joker is that one of Bruce Wayne and his fallen parents, and why the entire film arguably takes place in Arthur's head: the Joker has no true, honest, origin that "counts," because his entire purpose is to provide an equal and opposing force to the Batman. Every protagonist needs a great antagonist. It's one of the few truisms of storytelling: for drama there must be conflict, for conflict there must be a hero blocked by an opposing force. The Joker is Batman's opposition. He's a near-demonic force of nature through which any number of tales can be told. The one constant in his fictional biography is Batman, an agent of order and lawfulness. Joker truly does not need an origin, because he only exists to be the opposite of all that the Batman is. All we need to know about the Joker, honestly, is that for all the death, chaos, and destruction he gleefully leaves in his wake, Batman will always rise up in opposition to everything he stands for.

House of X, Powers of X, and Rubber Band Storytelling

I began reading Marvel comics in the early 1990's, drawn in not by the books themselves but by the series of Marvel Universe trading cards my 5th grade classmates were swapping around between classes. I gravitated immediately to Spider-Man books, and the white-hot stars of Marvel Comics of the day: the X-Men.

Anyway, I started reading weekly comics, yada yada yada, and in 2008 I stopped because they were giving me anxiety.

It wasn't the CONTENT that was stressing me out. Superhero stories have always been and remain an integral part of my own storytelling DNA. It was the NATURE of weekly comics that I no longer found appealing. In 2008, the year I began to phase out of reading comics week-to-week, Marvel published Secret Invasion, a universe-wide crossover tale that had been set up slowly over the course of several books beginning in 2005, when it was first intimated that shape-shifting aliens called Skrulls had been slowly infiltrating the Marvel Universe of superheroes for years and years, and some of the characters readers had loved forever had *gasp* actually been Skrulls all along!

A piece of Secret Invasion promotional art.

The lead-up to Secret Invasion was enthralling: hints and whispers dropped in among the many various monthly Marvel titles about which characters may or may not be Skrulls, a new line of comics introduced for no other purpose than to offer a retcon of Marvel history that included the subterfuge of the Skrulls. (Retcon is an abbreviation of the term retroactive continuity. It is the storytelling act of offering new information for the purpose or re-imagining or re-interpreting a previously established fictional history.)

The actual Secret Invasion miniseries, on the other hand, was a dud. In it, the following characters were revealed to have been Skrulls for an extended period of time: Hank Pym, Spider-Woman, Dum Dum Dugan, Edwin Jarvis, Elektra, Black Bolt, and a bunch of random S.H.I.E.L.D. agents.

In other words: nobody.

Secret Invasion had promised upheaval to the stories of the Marvel Universe. It also promised the conclusion to a years-long set-up. In the end, the promised upheaval was at best mild indigestion, and the "conclusion" was nothing more than ANOTHER cliffhanger that led into a bunch of new books that shifted characters around from one team to another. It was then that I really, really realized I was investing extensive amounts of time and money on stories that would never end about characters that could never change.

If you're a fan of comic books, you're thinking: well, duh. That's what comics are, and you know what? You're absolutely right. I suppose what I'm trying to say is: it's not you, comics. It's me.

The latest massive re-imagining and upheaval of a Marvel Comics property is happening right now in Marvel's line of X-Men books. Again, to be clear: I've been reading weekly comics only sporadically over the past decade, but the last one I read was an X-Men book, one that saw a time-displaced version of the original X-Men team brought into the "current day" Marvel Universe to interact with the older versions of themselves.

They have since been sent back from whence they came, of course.

So I'll grant you: I may not be entirely up-to-date on what's going on in the X-Men's world as the characters enter this new era, but I'm willing to bet that doesn't matter much, as all of the characters who are central to this new story are characters who were created twenty to thirty to fifty years ago.

Earlier in 2019, Marvel Comics cancelled all of their X-Men books and re-launched the line with two titles designed to set up the all-new status quo of the X-Men: House of X and Powers of X (written by Jonathan Hickman with art by Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silva, and Martin Garcia). The X-Men were created in 1963, and the long, convoluted, massive story spun out of that initial team has always been, at its core, about the plight of mutants: people born with superpowers that manifest around the time they hit puberty. The X-Men have long been trotted out as a thinly veiled metaphor for the civil rights movement, and their struggles as metaphors for the obstacles faced by most any of society's many marginalized groups. At the core of the series is the lifelong struggle between Charles "Professor X" Xavier and Erik "Magneto" Lehnsherr. Professor X, the leader of the X-Men, strives for peace between mutants and humans; he is often represented in analysis as the series stand-in for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Magneto, leader of the Brotherhood of Mutants, believes in mutant domination over humans and is supposedly a (very broadly painted) stand-in for Malcolm X.

The covers to House of X #1 and Powers of X #1, respectively.

Whether or not these comparisons were intentional on the part of series creator and Marvel impresario Stan Lee is the subject of some debate, but nevertheless: the comparisons persist.

House of X and Powers of X ran for 6 issues apiece, 12 issues total, and they concluded just this past week. They set up a new world for Professor X, Magneto, and the entire X-Men mythos. There are a lot of details involved in the story they tell that would be awfully confusing to anyone who is not a long-time fan of the franchise and familiar with dozens and dozens of supporting characters, but to sum up: the telepathic Professor X has teamed up with Magneto (not for the first time) and summoned every mutant in the world to Krakoa, a living island in the Pacific Ocean, for the purpose of forming a sovereign mutant nation from which mutants can assume their rightful place as the planet's dominant species.

That is a vast oversimplification of a fascinating and gorgeously rendered (but very convoluted) science fiction story that involves the massive retconning and super-powering of a longtime X-Men supporting character, four concurrent storylines running across four time periods spread over 1,000 years, at least 10 alternate timelines worth of history, the death of several key mutants followed by their immediate resurrection, and the burying of the hatchet among enemies and friendly rivals alike for the good of a unified mutantkind.

It also asks us to accept that the X-Men have, without pause, given up on Xavier's decades-long dream of co-existence with humanity and embraced voluntary mutant isolationism and eventual mutant dominance over humans.

Obviously, there isn't a chance in hell that any of this is going to be permanent.

Comic books run on an engine of rubber-band storytelling. Marvel Comics and DC Comics, the industry's giants, are both stuck in an endless cycle. They must allow their characters to do what characters in stories must do: grow and change. This works, in the short term. Superheroes, though, are template characters. They are broad, mythological, good vs. evil, white hat/black hat characters. The most popular ones are the most popular ones for the simple reason that they are who they are, and while the audience wants the characters they love to grow and develop and change as all characters do, there is only so far that a publisher can walk a character away from the thesis statement at the core of that character's being. Change a popular character too much for too long and the audience will rebel; superhero fans want simultaneously for the characters they love to evolve over time but also to forever remain the same. 

If Spider-Man ever stopped believing that with great power comes great responsibility, that would be a betrayal of the core tenet of who that character has been since 1962. His fans like Spider-Man largely BECAUSE of that belief. If you take it away from him, you change what the character has been fundamentally, at its core, for almost 60 years. Batman must always believe that criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot, or he is no longer Batman. Superman can die, but you'd better believe he has to come back to life and continue to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

Similarly, there is only so long that Marvel is going to be able to get away with a Professor X who does not believe in the peaceful co-existence of humans and mutants.

This is the rubber band storytelling at the core of comic book superheroes. As far away as a creative team may move a legacy character away from who they have always been, eventually the character will snap back to the baseline. These are characters, certainly, but they are also symbols of specific beliefs and philosophies. Captain America was created in 1941 to punch comic book Nazis. A recent storyline "revealed" that Captain America has actually always been a sleeper agent of the evil organization Hydra; essentially, he had been retconned into always having secretly been a Nazi. People were outraged, which would have been justifiable had that story remained the permanent status quo for Captain America. It did not, of course. The whole "Cap was always a Hydra agent" thing was revealed to be a nefarious super villain plot and Captain America has since snapped back to being the selfless patriot and soldier that he has always been.

The X-Men's new status quo as established in House of X and Powers of X opens up a world of storytelling possibilities, all of which promise to be explored in the six, count 'em SIX, new ongoing monthly titles spinning out of HoX/PoX because, you know... comic books. It's a business, man. No matter your taste, Marvel's got you covered. Among the six titles, there's a traditional X-Men superhero book, a magic book, a pirate book, a space book, a mystery book, and an action-adventure book, all starring characters X-Men fans know and love. Sometimes twice. (Wolverine will be featured in at least three Dawn of X titles.)

The covers of the #1 issues in Marvel's new Dawn of X initiative.

In the end, it honestly doesn't matter that the events of these stories aren't going to be permanent. Ongoing superhero comics use familiar characters to tell interesting new stories, and House of X, Powers of X, and Dawn of X all certainly do that. Truth told, it is the familiarity of the legacy characters that ultimately draws readers in to superhero comics. There is a comfort in knowing that, whatever meat grinder creative teams may put them through over any given story arc, Spider-Man will always be Spider-Man, Batman will always be Batman, and the X-Men will always be the X-Men.

Although one question does bear asking: no matter how far they stretch the rubber band, how difficult can any writer possibly make the lives of make-believe eternally young super-powered supermodels? No wonder comics began to stress me out in my late twenties: Batman was created in 1939 and he's somehow still just 36 years old and just keeps getting richer.

Seriously: it ISN'T you, comic books. It's definitely me.