Who is the greatest villain in the Comic Book World? That sounds like one of those debates you can merrily have with your friends.
But, truth be told, while it easy to imagine debating who is the second greatest villain, the top spot is obvious.
The Joker.
A few years back, in honor of its 75th anniversary, DC comics released a series of retrospectives of its greatest heroes and villains. The Joker: A Celebration of 75 Years is an interesting history, not just of the character but of the course of comic books in that time.
(Yes, I know what you are thinking, “Surely you are not about to write a whole post about comic books.” Ah, ye of little faith. There are more things in comic books than are dreamt of in your philosophy.)
The Joker started out in 1940 as a very nasty criminal. The first image of him is as a clown with an evil glare peering over his shoulder at the reader. His first crime culminates in the corpse undergoing a change, “Slowly the facial muscles pull the dead man’s mouth into a repellant, ghastly grin, the sign of death from The Joker.”
During the Comic Code era, the crimes become less horrific and more playful. The Joker merrily devises clever traps for Batman. And then, at the end of the Comic Code era in the 1970s the ingeniously gruesome murders return. When the infamous “Should Robin Die?” vote was conducted, there was no doubt who the killer would be. He did it in the shack with a crowbar. Of late, the crimes are even more viscerally gruesome.
You can see the transformation of the Joker perfectly reflected in the movies. The Joker in the campy Adam West version was a giggling bad guy. Jack Nicholson brought back the calculated sense of evil. Heath Ledger went over the top. (It is incredible that Nicholson and Ledger pulled off incredible performances with noticeably different personalities.)
After skipping through the history of comic books featuring The Joker, what can we learn? Two things, one about comic books and one about humans.
First, the comic books: if you read comic books from the last 75 years, it is readily obvious that the Joker is much more gruesome of late than he ever has been before. But, when you look at the stories themselves, they haven’t really changed all that much. Take away all the art, and just print out the words, and there really is not a tremendous difference between 1940 and today. During the Comic Code years, nobody ever died, so you would notice that difference. But the nature of the Joker has changed very little.
What has changed in the quality of the art, which is entirely a technical innovation. Take any of the latest stories and recreate them using the technology of yesteryear, and they would be much less visceral.
This is a perfect example of my constant complaint that comic books are not taken more seriously by the Arbiters of High Taste. No comic book I have ever read is Shakespeare or Dante or Eliot. No other writers of literature of any genre are in that league either.
But, if we are willing to say that the written word can produce great stories and that drawings and paintings can be great art, then why is it impossible to conclude that a comic book, which is nothing more than words married to art, could also be great?
Don’t get me wrong: nothing in the present collection rises to the level of Great Books. But, some of the stories herein are as good as many other books I read that nobody would ever think to disparage.
The moral: Just because there is art along with the words does not make it low-brow schlock.
The second lesson from this book. What exactly motivates the Joker?
Unlike your garden variety criminal, the Joker is not interested in wealth or power. At times, it is obvious, he isn’t even really all that interested in winning. He constantly battles his nemesis, Batman, but it is very clear at many points that if he had the ability to kill off Batman, the Joker would refrain from doing so. He needs Batman. He needs a worthy opponent. Why? What does he hope to attain?
That’s just it. He isn’t trying to attain anything at all. He just does horrible, gruesome, evil things because…it is fun.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the first part of Augustine’s Confessions and quoted the following passage:
Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.
Augustine wrote that to show how wicked he was, and by implication how wicked we all are, so that he could tell us all how joyful we should be that God rescued us from ourselves.
But, read that passage again. Stripped of the surrounding narrative in Confessions, that passage could easily be labeled The Joker’s Creed. While Augustine says all that in lament and repentance, the Joker would utter those exact same words with pride and glee.
Why read The Joker: A Celebration of 75 Years? Because in a very worrisome way, it is an autobiography. My autobiography. Your autobiography. The Joker is a truly great villain, the greatest villain of all, because he is us.
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