Something that struck me while reading the original Batman comics was the first introduction of the Joker. I was mostly interested in his first appearance on page 142. Our first real introduction is a dark image of him sitting solemnly in a black throne in the center of the page. Having been exposed to the Joker through movies and cartoons, I know him as hysterical villain who cannot stop smiling. I thought that this introduction to him in the comics was very out of character. For a villain who uses games and tricks to commit crimes, it seems odd to first introduce him as this solemn figure. He is described as having "hate-filled eyes".
While this one panel seems particularly out of character for the Joker, he does fall into the role we are used to seeing on the next page.We talked in class about how he is one of the first introductions to "super-villains", or costumed villains that are superhuman in some way. I thought maybe because the readers at the time were not used to a villain like the Joker, the cartoonist had to draw him in a light that readers probably were used to at the time. This way the reader could be eased into this eccentric character.
I too was surprised by the Joker's characterization. Maybe this is just the Ledger effect, but I was surprised to see a version of the Joker that was motivated by monetary gain. Both Christopher Nolan and Frank Miller present Batman's nemesis as shockingly motiveless. As Michael Caine's Alfred notes, "[he] just wants to watch the world burn." I assume that readers in 1940 would have found such a character far too shocking, or perhaps too unbelievable. That being said, this is yet another example of my cinema-borne biases leading to disappointment.
ReplyDeleteI had similar thoughts, or as Bennett put it "the Ledger effect", in viewing the Joker in these readings. Obviously I'm biased by Nolan's Joker, which in my opinion is one of the single greatest acting performances of all time, but rationally speaking it makes sense. That kind of character would have been too much for the 1980s let alone the 1940s and the idea of continuous super villains hadn't really been established in comics yet. I will say though that the elements for Nolan's Joker are there, with the 1940s Joker still undeniably evil, in a different sense.
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