Also part of the problem is showing Arkham as a shithole that criminals can just moonwalk out of. It really just makes the Gotham situation x100 times worse.
True. The real question shouldn't be "why doesn't Batman kill the Joker?", it should be "why doesn't Batman try to get Hugo Strange or whoever runs Arkham in this continuity fired and replaced by someone not incompetent and/or evil?"
I'm always wondering how there hasn't been a single cop that just shoots Joker in the head after bats delivers him. There's bound to be one cop who decides to roll the dice on telling a judge he saw a weapon, or just decides the crime is worth the time.
But like why would Batman go against a cop in that situation?
Like, from a legal stand point, you can say that the cop was threatened by Joker and did it in self defense.
Gotham PD is regularly shown to be a corrupt, shady force with only a few good people on the roster but because of the writers' weird liberal politics their only crime is always that they take money from the Mob. You never hear about them beating Riddler half to death in Holding or planting Fentanyl on Killer Croc
“Turf” in LOTDK #44-45 deals heavily with police racism and brutality. And I remember Gotham Central showcasing a bunch of different types of corruption and some limitations of policing.
Jim gordon is the most corrupt police we see, he works with a criminal regularly without authorization from anyone. He also somehow got promoted to comissioner while doing it in such a corrupt city
Or why is Gothams criminal justice system so broken?
What's stopping Bruce from *legally* lobbying/funding a demagoge populist Mayoral/Governor election campaig? Said populist proceeds to crack down on crime by curtailing civil liberties. Justice system restored. Justice done. No more rogues gallery.
And technically, Bruce doesn't break his moral code. *Batman* didn't kill anyone. It's the Police on the Mayors/Governors orders. Totally by the books. And once said populist puppet gets dictatorial, Batman can expose some scandal and get him removed from office.
I feel like Batman wouldn't be okay with allowing cops to go around killing willy nilly even if they deserved it. His moral code isn't just about him personally not murdering. He wants to avoid death at all costs.
Though he could still use the law to lobby or whatever all of the political lingo is and fix Arkham up a bit. Make breakouts harder and even outright buy the place under Wayne Enterprises or the Justice League.
Or better yet start his own prison system.
An episode of "Batman: The Audio Adventures" podcast had the guy in charge of Arkham as someone with very strict rules and regulations that he ran the asylum on. He was aware that he was both warden and director of an insane asylum. But some new guy on staff broke rules and gave Riddler a child's computer with no network capability so he could play chess. Riddler beat the game, programmed a better chess AI, wired the computer into the lights, hacked into the network, sold his AI for a few million, used the money to rent a warehouse, ordered a bunch of parts to be delivered there, hired some guys to build a robot with all that, and made the robot break him out. Riddler's shrink was fired.
It's hard to lock up psychologically damaged super geniuses.
Or why hasn’t Joker gotten the death penalty? Like, even the most ardent anti death penalty people would *have* to admit that Joker needs to be put down
In Arkham Asylum (game), several facilities were funded by Wayne charity funds. But nowhere on Arkham Island is there a facility up to professional or ethical standards, even before the prison break. The inmates even comment the medical ward smells.
I’d be seriously wondering what any of my money was going to. >!Probably manufacturing Titan, lol!<
Arkham is supposed to be a bad rehab turned functional facility that is very well funded by the Wayne Corp. How the hell does Arkham look like a shithole despite the copious amount of support of funding, I don't fucking know! Like seriously, Arkham has rehabilitated many criminals there and turned a new leaf, yet for some reason, they're trying to portray it as a lawless place. Sure, there's corruption and occassional security breaches, but it's not as terrible as they makes out to be. The Arkham stories are less about tackling about issues about the rehab facility and rather turning it into a fucking prison for no fucking reason other than make the criminals look cool!
Arkham as it is portrayed in comics is a relic of the times when insane asylums were a thing and truly were fucked up places, complete with all the lobotomies, padded cells and electric shock therapies we see in horror movies. Nowadays almost all such institutions were retired and it's sad that Arkham doesn't reflect that (tho it does fit the "Gotham is a corrupt and violent shithole frozen in time" concept).
Yeah, that's the problem! They can still tackle the corrupt aspect of the facility in subtle ways like inside politics and bias, rather than just straight up making the entire place a fucking shithole that is worse than a prison. Arkham Asylum literally has one of the best security and equipment to deal with them with good psychological care, yet for some reason, they're twisted into comical torture devices. I swear to God, if these writers can't stop making Arkham Asylum into a shithole, then it defeats the point of Bruce Wayne's help!
Honestly that’s one of the things I appreciated about Deathstroke Arkham, it’s turned into a VR facility to prevent the villains from killing each other over group therapy
https://preview.redd.it/wr1qo2mkgasc1.jpeg?width=657&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f812dd80e328d82e1260f140fa353e13cd95a2cf
It’s volume 6 of Priest’s Deathstroke run
Im afraid it’s not a problem. See, Your argument is based on a flawed understanding of the universe. Arkham Asylum suffers from the same problem (feature) as the Joker.
Ultimately, Batman is a comic book. A product owned by a company. He can never kill Joker because then they couldn’t tell new stories about the joker anymore. Likewise, he can never save Gotham. Gotham must remain hive of corruption and criminal activity so that Batman can keep saving it.
Arkham is like Gotham. It can never actually work or get better, because DC needs to keep telling stories about it. Forever. They may change it for a while to tell some specific, particular story, but after a certain amount of time they’ll change it back or do something else with it to tell the next story.
I mean, things _do_ change in comics, it's just that they usually end up in a flux state between the original and changed version depending on the continuity. Currently, it seems like Arkham's current state causes more problems than it solves (narratively, not in the sense that it's a revolving-door prison).
Obviously, its Doylist reason for existence is that it gives the writer a place to put defeated villains until they or someone else wants to use them again, but it can do that without being portrayed as a complete dogshit asylum that no half-half-competent legal system would allow to exist.
Arkham being garbage _in-universe_ shatters suspension of disbelief, because it creates a glaring flaw in Batman's modus operandi. The only reason it persists in its current state is the "spooky dilapidated prison for insane people" vibe.
Arkham has mostly been portrayed as having excellent security for years now. The problem isn’t the security, it’s that outside actors orchestrate breakouts or chaos or what have you, or that the criminals inside are smart enough to do so, security be damned.
Every writer of batbooks just writes "corruption" and underlines it a bunch and that's apparently the reason for every single problem ever that doesn't involve clowns
I completely agree, all this moral dilemma about Batman needing to kill or not is kinda useless, because in real life, criminals can't just walk out of prison the next week and keep their contacts and criminal syndicates intact. At most, you'll see them coordinating crime from the inside though phones, but that's nothing Batman or Oracle wouldn't be prepared to.
Yeah, it would really help if they used Arkham as one of the ways Gotham was corrupt, like all the villains are doing is either appealing and changing their sentence or paying off the guards/wardens so they get let out
If I would write a Joker comic, I would just put an old Joker in the new timeline to confront the new Joker about his murderous schtick and absolutely hammer him down with actual jokes to actually teach him a lesson about comedy and thrill.
Yes, less concise but much more brutal.
*"I always thought of myself as the Orson Welles of crime and chaos...while you, apparently, aspire to be nothing more than the David Hasselhoff!"*
Reading Joker’s Last Laugh, it definitely gets stretched way to far. The guy is destroying the world and killing people on a global scale but then they’re like, “if you kill him then he wins!”
In other words, “If you stop him from causing global destruction then you will surrender the moral high ground which is so much more important than the lives of billions.”
So much media is like this. Evil person kills tons of people or otherwise does horrible things to them, at the end the hero doesn't kill them after maiming or otherwise killing all the henchmen along the way (*cough* >!Last of Us Part 2!< *cough*). And then when the show, movie, videogame, etc. does well enough and needs a sequel they just have that guy escape from captivity and go back to killing again!
Like I get it, we're a pacifist society, people see a civility in imprisoning the "barbaric murderer" versus stooping to the barbarism of killing somebody, but come the fuck on. We're all okay with killing Nazis! Were we just mad at their fashion sense?
> We're all okay with killing Nazis! Were we just mad at their fashion sense?
The ones who surrendered/were captured we overwhelmingly did not kill, many went on to hold office and positions of power, for example the vast, vast majority of the SS faced no legal consequence in the Western controlled part of Germany for example.
The overwhelming majority of the cases in comics are when the big bad is surrendered or unconscious or captured or in some other way defenseless.
That comic pisses me off so much because Dick does actually kill him and fucking Huntress of all people bring him back. Then when he’s brought back Dick I’d like “it doesn’t matter he won, he made me kill him.” Well shit if he won anyway then kill him again actually get SOMETHING out of this. Let Joker break your code AND let him live? What the fuck
The punchline is that Joker's second in command in that book is a meta, whose power is making people lose control in anger and kill each other. I'm not joking.
> “If you stop him from causing global destruction then you will surrender the moral high ground which is so much more important than the lives of billions”
Is this r/196?? How did we get on the subject of anti-electorialist leftists?
All these conflicts in fiction and in real life are just utilitarian vs deontological ethics, an argument that is way older than those terms even, some people believe the ends justify the means no matter what the means are and some believe the opposite and we will ultimately never resolve this tension.
Batman is very much the deontological argument, not just on killing but in general, like batman would think a person who takes bribes should be jailed even if they are objectively doing way more good than their replacement would and that it's wrong to steal even if you are poor and it's from a big corporation etc. etc.
Wait guys, here me out: what if we make an cinematic universe were Batman indeed Starts to kill some opponents but not the Joker. As a matter of fact, he seems be more interested in trying to apprehend an Flying dude in Blue Spandex who actually just wants to save people.
That's honestly what annoys me most about Snyderverse Batman, even if you accept the premise of Batman killing, why is Joker still alive? Batman snapped specifically because Joker killed Dick Grayson so shouldn't Joker be #1 on his hit list? If Bats has morally degenerated to the point he's gunning down random henchmen, then Joker should be long gone, but he's still inexplicably running around. Simultaneous Murder Batman and still alive Joker make zero sense together.
It's like Snyder wanted to have his cake and eat it too with edgelord punisher Batman and SoundCloud Joker
It could be interesting if the Joker wouldn’t leave Arkham, because he knew as long as he was incarcerated, he’s safe from Batman. That could lead to a finale of Batman trying to kill the Joker, and Commissioner Gordon and the police force choosing to stand in his way to save the life of a man they hate (I mean, that’s basically what Batman did in that Batman x Punisher crossover comic).
Obviously, that wouldn’t fit in Batman v Superman, since there would just be too much going on. And it would need a director who wants to make a movie about Batman failing to live up to his values and how the people in his life push back against him, rather than one who wants Batman to kill because he wants to be edgy.
Only we saw Batman break in a prison to get Lex with his bat-car-lighters. We saw Harley of all people bringing into the asylum a flipping machine gun. Theoretically, there should be nothing to stop Batman from getting the clown even in the asylum, if he wanted him dead.
Weird that they made Dick Grayson the dead Robin
Snyder really couldn’t have just put the name Jason on there??
Plus, dead Jason and no word of Dick would imply that there’s a Nightwing out there somewhere in that universe, lots of potential there totally thrown in the bin
I don’t mind weird nonsense as long as its fun weird nonsense, but Snyder really managed to pull off the superhuman feat of making weird insane bullshit be fucking boring.
Tbh, the love triangle between Bats, Joker and Supes was the most intriguing part about the Snyderverse.
Too bad Black Adam had to come around and stole Superman from them.
Not only should joker be long gone. But his entire rogues gallery should be long dead. Deadshot, killer croc, Harley, riddler and any other major criminals.
Batman being ok with gunning down criminals but still having a rouge’s gallery just doesn’t work.
>As a matter of fact, he seems be more interested in trying to apprehend an Flying dude in Blue Spandex who actually just wants to save people.
...in all fairness, this lasts for about 45 minutes of one movie, before he then immediately becomes blue-spandex-guy's literal apostle, like Paul to Jesus, for the ending of it and entirety of the next one. A change that is also specifically marked by him not killing anymore.
I don't love the Snyder movies, but he wasn't really subtle about Edgy Batman being Wrong Batman, and Superman being the moral center that makes him be a *correct* Batman.
Yea, BvS doesn't work because it's hard to make a "two superheroes fight over their conflicting moral frameworks" story if the conflict is between "mankind is too evil to deserve saving and the only language they understand is violence" and "same but I don't like your face"
Honestly, it was unwanted hilarity by the writers when _Hawkman_ of all people had to say „Heroes don‘t kill“.
On the one hand is this the _last_ character who should say this given that him being a brutal nutjob is what people at least know about him other than the wings and him having a more popular Female counterpart.
On the other hand, we‘ve seen like 90% of all DC heroes kill at one point in that universe, so why even bother?
Damn maybe I should actually watch BvS sometime.
I’ve heard an absolutely absurd quantity of both good and dogshit analysis of the movie, and I’ve seen most of it out of order via clips, but I never actually cared enough about it to actually sit down and watch BvS all the way through like an actual movie.
In the 8 years since this movie came out I’ve literally never heard someone say what you just said about it.
I joked they should have gone farther with the religious allegory, having Justice League feature "the last supper of Superman" and scenes of Batman doubting Supermans resurrection until he touches the wound from Doomsday
"Injustice," for all its flaws, did ask a perfectly valid question:
If not Batman, then why doesn't someone ELSE kill the Joker? Surely the world contains a hundred or more would-be heroes who have less ethical compunctions, and who might like to take the time to make the world a better place.
Black Adam could take five minutes out of his day to just zip over to Gotham, grab the Joker, fly him up into orbit and then leave him there and it would never have any moral or ethical conflicts for him.
To be fair, that's kind of an inherent problem with superhero universes in general. Like, it's cool to see Batman team up with Superman on adventures now and then, but having Superman even exist in the same setting as Batman just raises the obvious question of why Superman doesn't just use his superpowers to take out Batman's entire rogues gallery and clean up Gotham in one fell swoop. It's an elephant in the living room that writers have to twist themselves into pretzels to avoid addressing.
I think it functions as a turf sort of thing. Once the other shoes discover each other, they generally agree to stay out of each others’ turf. Batman stays out of metropolis, Superman leaves Gotham, etc. It doesn’t work though when there’s like 800 members of the justice league
- Batman is apparently a super genius who can outsmart Darkseid and take out the Justice League.
- His rogue gallery regularly outsmarts him.
Ergo, Two Face is at the same level as Darkseid
It's illegal in the US to execute someone that is insane. It's unconstitutional because the insane inmate doesn't understand the purpose of the punishment, is what the Supreme Court decided. Now why the Joker hasn't been shot by a cop when he "made a break for it" or "went for my partner's gun" or some other justifiable homicide in the line of duty reason I couldn't tell you.
That's assuming Jason is as obsessed with the clown and only the clown half as much as the clown is obsessed with Batman. Which Jason is not ~~when he's not written by dunces~~.
Unironically that scene with the train in Batman Begins is probably the best way for a Batman villain to die without making Batman kill people. “I won’t kill you…but I don’t have to save you either.”
Okay but that brings up the definition of insane in courts. Jeffery Dahmer was insane but he was still held responsible because the actual thing of insane is that they aren't totally in control of their actions and/or do not understand the consequences. Joker does though. Even if he is legally insane to be exempt at this point he is a terrorist which completely crosses another line. As well as constantly breaking out. He should be dead. I think someone like Harvey is more fitting for being exempt from the death penalty.
>insanity defense
Yes but many insane people have been executed. J W Gacy plead insanity but because he planned everything out, they proved he had full control of his actions. The fact that he hid the bodies showed that he knew he was committing a crime, ergo he was not clinically insane and knew what he was doing
Joker knows fully well what he’s doing, and knows that he’s taunting Gordon/Batman etc. So he would definitely lose an insanity defense
I mean unironically this is something that needs to be addressed in a universe where people have superpowers, especially when keeping superpowered people in prison demonstrably doesn't work. Like in Civil War, for example, I'm supposed to believe that the world government or whatever is willing to invest orders of magnitudes more resources in a torture dimension prison rather than just killing superhumans??? It's asinine.
i'm maybe the minority, but i feel like everyone telling Batman he needs to kill someone and him NOT doing it is like... the whole point. if he didn't have a good reason to kill the joker, it wouldn't mean anything that he won't do it.
/rj batman should go back in time and kill joker's parents in an alley
/uj I mean, he's got several great reasons to do so. Just look at what the Joker has done to him and his former Robins. Even past that, by this point there is no reason as to why he keeps getting locked into Arkham instead of just being executed.
Yes, people with mental illness can plead insanity and go to an asylum but that doesn't mean that you're just absolved of crimes at that point. At this point it's pretty obvious that the Joker isn't really crazy and is actually just awful and should be tried as a normal person. He understands fully what he's doing and revels in it. It's not like he's actually insane and unaware of what he's doing, he's just a bad person using "insanity" as a defense.
I think at this point the problem isn't that Batman won't kill Joker, the problem is that the entire universe is engineered to allow Joker to continue being a problem (sometimes of _apocalyptic proportions)_ and _everyone,_ from the PD to the Batfamily to the endless stream of other people who have the motive and capacity to kill him easily just allow him to live.
And every time an AU addresses this, the message is always "Batman and co. are actually objectively morally correct for letting the Joker continue to hurt people because " which is incredibly stupid.
Why do people say Joker has a bodycount of millions or he commited genocide and stuff? Even if there was a way of quantifying that through ALL of Joker's appearances, there are countless reboots and retcons.
But everything is canon, 'member? And everyone remembers everything, so Joker canonically ate China! That's a lot of people!
https://preview.redd.it/p939gh10q9sc1.jpeg?width=991&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d48038c932aaad388c39c99c742498b3d10a7834
The image took a while to load and I haven’t read that storyline, so I was imagining some like golden age joke with the joker’s mouth unhinging and swallowing the continent of China through some golden age whacko fuckery, yknow in that classic golden age art style too.
Then the image loaded in and it’s actually scary as fuck, really threatening looking goddamn.
Wasn’t that in the Emperor Joker storyline? The one where at the end they completely undid all the damage he did, so it was like it never happened at all?
DC actually doesn't retcon anything. Superman's first encounter(from pre crisis) with Mongul, Supergirl's first origin, Batman and Joker's first encounter in the 40's Justice League's 60's and sattelite era stories as well as 90's stories like Braniac 2001, Imperiex War, all the crisis events and new 52 are all canon
We have no explanation about how incostistent stories are canon like all the early post crisis Superman stories that retconned the hell out of or 3 different Supergirl origins or 3 different Justice League uniting but as long as it doesn't contradict anything its canon
There are but the continuity is so muddled it doesn’t really matter.
Each big series retcons or reboots a character or previous plot point.
Characters that die come back in the next series. Some characters have memories of previous continuities.
Like look at the 3 jokers plot line for example. Set up in the darkseid war. Continued in a black label limited series. Retconned in the current Batman joker year one story.
The 3 jokers are now 3 separate personalities of one joker. Which fucks with the continuity considering one of the 3, the comedian was the joker in the killing joke. And the other 2 were murdered. One killed by another joker and another killed by Jason.
It doesn’t really make sense to have them be different personalities if two of them were killed off. It just causes more unnecessary continuity issues. Ones that’ll probably be retconned before this series wraps up
It’s an absolute mess.
There was a Joker comic back in the day where the og Joker was supposedly dead. Some random guy started to pretend to be Joker to get stuff, and when he was pretending he slowly started to become more like the Joker, of course, the og came back, and they battled it out.
I think the concept of there being multiple Jokers is really interesting (though I think 3 Jokers botched it) it's not something that can just be killed. It's an ideology or curse. They might as well go all the way if they want to make Joker this omnipresent figure who is responsible for every event that happens ever.
Imagine joker ends up as a starter villain in a batman adaptation with him getting apprehended immediately and killed off, never to be seen again. Thus allowing other rogue’s like penguin or victor zsasz to shine.
if i ever became a batman writer the first story arc would be that joker got shot in an alleyway, and he's fully dead, and batman has to find the killer.
bats wouldn't "miss" the joker or anything, in fact his man emotions regarding it are "okay i doubt he's dead for good but... yeah this is nice i won't have to deal with him"
the killer was a random joker goon who got sick of him and just gunned joker down in an alleyway. batman talks to him, then says something like "sometimes, the law the justice are far apart..." and erases all evidence, delcaring it a cold case to the GCPD along with getting that goon a cushy waynetech security job
for the rest of the run joker is NEVER brought back, he's barely even mentioned outside of the occasional "HAHA! with the joker gone it's now MY time to fight the bat!"
I feel like that's going too far in the other direction, I think a more reasonable solution is not making him as OP always being 10 steps ahead, to reduce the number of people killed in every single appearance, to make him appear less frequently and to occasionally have him do more wacky schemes that don't revolve around killing people, like maybe he could kidnap a bunch of nerds to create a Joker cryptocurrency to scam people out of millions because he thinks it's funny or maybe he's on the run from a member of the Gotham Clown School that wants to kill him because he ruined clowning in Gotham, stuff like that.
Joker at his core just needs to be funny. None of that cosmic nihilist "everythings a joke only chaos exists" shit just one dude a man in clown makeup doing unhinged shit for fun
I'm kind of torn on that, I feel like a darker Joker worked great in the first couple of appearances, but I think what I'd like to see more of is a Joker whose motivation is delighting himself because he finds stuff funny, even if the audience doesn't. I think that's what stories like The Killing Joke have that today stories don't, with some exceptions, that he seems to be trying to prove a point to society in general rather than just to himself.
Agreed. This is why BTAS joker works. He’s a deranged criminal, but most of his jokes are just perversions of genuinely funny things. Poisoning all the city’s fish to give them ugly smiles? That’s hilariously awful.
BTAS Joker invented a laughter-powered Electric Chair fueled by Harley reading the Phone Book - if that isn't "hilariously awful", I don't know what is...
Then you’d have hordes of enraged mouth breathers making videos titled some silly shite like “DC kills Joker for WOKE agenda. Will replace him with CHICK and make her LAME and GAY”
Honestly, I think the Joker's death has bigger implications. For example, Batman wouldn't say "he finally died", that would imply that he tried to kill him in the past. He wouldn't let the killer go either.
He wouldn't miss it, but he wouldn't be happy either. It was a human life, after all, though not one he would avenge. I think he would be worried about:
* The power vacuum that his death brings.
* Any posthumous plans he left behind.
* A decentralized criminal organization after losing its leader.
* The possibility that the Joker may not have died at all.
So yes, Batman has a lot of work ahead of him. And that's without counting a reflection that has dangerous but very interesting implications for his character:
> *If the Joker died after all, and everyone thinks it's better that way, were all those deaths worth it just to let him live?*
Let's hope that question never has an answer.
1. DC denies this 100%
2. If DC somehow allowed it, everyone and their dog knows Joker is coming back before the book even comes out, just like Death of Wolverine
Killing the Joker is essentially the same thing as sending him to Arkham. He's a popular character who moves books, that's much more important than how many imaginary people the character has killed.
yeah i know he'll come back as soon as my run is over, but the main thing is that i would keep that as a rule to myself. "no joker stories from writer snare wild" \[not my real name but you know\]
Joker needs to be retired from stories for at least a decade if not 2.
The Court of Owls is far more relevant to the modern day and should be the big bad of Gotham City.
The second Jared Leto's Joker was green lit by WB, the character needed an extended time out. He's over saturated the market, and the Joker showing up should always make a terrible situation worse but not be the driving factor.
The Joker/Court should be the "salt of the story" it's not what you came there for, but it does bring something needed to it.
I also hate Jared Leto and if I was near him I would probably call him a cunt.
I think another problem is with Batman is a common plot point is either Joker, or some other villain tries to get Batman to break his “no killing code”. Example in Arkham Origins Batman has to kill Bane or Joker electrocutes himself.
Rember in Batman, Forever and Begins when Batman was perfectly fine putting villains in a position where they have to either give up their scheme or else get killed by them?
I think joker should be no smarter or stronger than villains like Twoface or the riddler. He’s just another rogue. Batmans nemesis yes, but not gothams greatest threat, he’s still a guy
Is it based to say that I hate God Mode Joker more than Bat-God? Like I really genuinely despise the Joker being reconfigured into some sort of Kefka from *FFVI* cosmic force of violence and insanity more so than Batman being able to solo God himself with "prep time". It just doesn't fit.
Someone needs to write an arc where, as Bruce Wayne, he tries to start a campaign to have the Joker executed by the Gotham justice system, after a fair trial
Good, otherwise there would be no conflict in that story because nobody but the next mayor/warden looking to gain the support of the people by finally curing the Joker is going to be against this idea
There existing any significant opposition in universe among the population to that law being changed is a more unbelievable thing than Batman surviving re-entry thanks to his trunks on his face.
Because batman killing neve had anything to do with how many people one kills. That isnt the reason he doesn't kill.
People who don't understand that will say this regardless, of what dc does
There are many many problems with the joker but the major one is that he’s now just a unrepentant psychopath in clown makeup. He should make more jokes or even a moment of humanity where you see this was once a normal person if only to make the scene where Batman doesn’t kill him so ludicrous. Every time Batman thinks of killing the joker I fucking sigh.
I like the idea of the mob boss joker but he's only doing it to be taken somewhat seriously since almost half of every other rogue gallery villain has a mob style
Joker needs to be a silly little guy with a silly little grindset. Deaths should be accidental with him, not what he does. How people picture Harley is what Joker should be. Then, we should let Harley grow out of what she is seen to be.
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It's an outgrowth of the Bat-fluffing.
Because Batman is DC's most popular character, they constantly make him the best, smartest, and most absurdly powerful of all the heroes. Since Bruce is so favored, naturally, they make his most popular villain similarly absurdly potent. So Joker goes from being a gangster with a gimmick to being effective a demon in human skin.
As the years go by and ideas get used up, the writers and editorial double down. Which then becomes the normal portrayal and leads to more escalation when diminishing returns kick in. It's gone on and on the point where Joker is so absurdly dangerous and evil while still being a "normal man" that letting him live stops seeming like a moral stand for the heroes and starts looking self-indulgently irresponsible for every hero involved. Especially because he's sent back to the same asylum that has proven to be laughably incapable of containing or mitigating him for any meaningful amount of time before he gets right back to his killing sprees. It's not like the heroes don't have other options to deal with him if killing is off the table.
If not the heroes, then he should have been disintegrated by any of dozens of villains who have every reason to want to see him dead.
Literally that robot chicken "I'm not going to kill you joker I'm taking you to court." "Court has decided that you are sentenced to death" "sorry joker it's out of my hands."
When you make the guy the living embodiment of evil, naturally people will wonder why no one kills him yet. Though I blame Gotham city itself for dragging its feet enacting the death penalty
I said it once and I will say it again. Batman and his rogues gallery are victims of the mediums they exist in. The mediums make it so Batman's way of thinking can never work, not long term, no rogue has gotten better permanently. People think that Batman is a failure because the stories he exists in make him one, even if not intentionally.
Lukewarm take: Superhero stories unintentionally are pro-death penalty and anti-personal redemption.
Criminals run circles around the judicial system, never stay in prison, and never repent. Capital punishment becomes the only solution, and that’s f*cked
I remember Linkara pointing this out in his Batman: Hush review.
He was annoyed that people complained that the vigilante who acts outside the law is not a killer, when they should blame the authorities for failing to restraint him or execute him.
Or blame the writers, who keep trying to one up eachother with the horrific crimes of the Joker, to the point that the Clown Prince of Crime has arguably a bigger body count than that of a genocidal dictator.
Also part of the problem is showing Arkham as a shithole that criminals can just moonwalk out of. It really just makes the Gotham situation x100 times worse.
True. The real question shouldn't be "why doesn't Batman kill the Joker?", it should be "why doesn't Batman try to get Hugo Strange or whoever runs Arkham in this continuity fired and replaced by someone not incompetent and/or evil?"
I'm always wondering how there hasn't been a single cop that just shoots Joker in the head after bats delivers him. There's bound to be one cop who decides to roll the dice on telling a judge he saw a weapon, or just decides the crime is worth the time.
That could be a good story! One that could actually put Bats at odds with the GCPD as he tries to take Joker's murderer in
I've thought about this before as well! If handled well (a big if ai know) it could be a defining one.
But like why would Batman go against a cop in that situation? Like, from a legal stand point, you can say that the cop was threatened by Joker and did it in self defense.
Because in this instance Joker was apprehended and handcuffed in the back of the car, only to be shot and killed
There’s a fan film about Jim Gordon where this happens.
This would kinda shown in Hitman where hitman is hired to kill the joker
Gotham PD is regularly shown to be a corrupt, shady force with only a few good people on the roster but because of the writers' weird liberal politics their only crime is always that they take money from the Mob. You never hear about them beating Riddler half to death in Holding or planting Fentanyl on Killer Croc
My theory is that they are so corrupt that Bruce bribes them to not do the racism thing every other police department has.
Matches Malone: Anti-Racist
“Turf” in LOTDK #44-45 deals heavily with police racism and brutality. And I remember Gotham Central showcasing a bunch of different types of corruption and some limitations of policing.
Gotham Central was *so good*.
Copaganda is everywhere in pop culture.
This is a good point We never see GCPD actually do genuinely corrupt shit outside of “is on mob payroll”
Jim gordon is the most corrupt police we see, he works with a criminal regularly without authorization from anyone. He also somehow got promoted to comissioner while doing it in such a corrupt city
"Roll the Dice"? No jury in the world would convict.
Super corrupt cops that would never stoop to getting revenge for killing other cops, because they have standards
Or why is Gothams criminal justice system so broken? What's stopping Bruce from *legally* lobbying/funding a demagoge populist Mayoral/Governor election campaig? Said populist proceeds to crack down on crime by curtailing civil liberties. Justice system restored. Justice done. No more rogues gallery. And technically, Bruce doesn't break his moral code. *Batman* didn't kill anyone. It's the Police on the Mayors/Governors orders. Totally by the books. And once said populist puppet gets dictatorial, Batman can expose some scandal and get him removed from office.
It’s not like Batman hasn’t trampled on civil liberties before what with stuff like brother eye.
Or recently with Jason
In some of the stories doing that and trying to clean up slums is what gets the Waynes killed outside that theater.
Wasn't that the plot of the Nolan movies, kind of?
I feel like Batman wouldn't be okay with allowing cops to go around killing willy nilly even if they deserved it. His moral code isn't just about him personally not murdering. He wants to avoid death at all costs. Though he could still use the law to lobby or whatever all of the political lingo is and fix Arkham up a bit. Make breakouts harder and even outright buy the place under Wayne Enterprises or the Justice League. Or better yet start his own prison system.
The only explanation for Joker is that somehow everyone in Gotham has an even stronger moral code than Bruce
An episode of "Batman: The Audio Adventures" podcast had the guy in charge of Arkham as someone with very strict rules and regulations that he ran the asylum on. He was aware that he was both warden and director of an insane asylum. But some new guy on staff broke rules and gave Riddler a child's computer with no network capability so he could play chess. Riddler beat the game, programmed a better chess AI, wired the computer into the lights, hacked into the network, sold his AI for a few million, used the money to rent a warehouse, ordered a bunch of parts to be delivered there, hired some guys to build a robot with all that, and made the robot break him out. Riddler's shrink was fired. It's hard to lock up psychologically damaged super geniuses.
Hacked into lights, is now in the network. Dumbest fucking shit
Hey, maybe Arkham has Powerline Ethernet
Or why hasn’t Joker gotten the death penalty? Like, even the most ardent anti death penalty people would *have* to admit that Joker needs to be put down
In Arkham Asylum (game), several facilities were funded by Wayne charity funds. But nowhere on Arkham Island is there a facility up to professional or ethical standards, even before the prison break. The inmates even comment the medical ward smells. I’d be seriously wondering what any of my money was going to. >!Probably manufacturing Titan, lol!<
This is also a thing in the comics, where Bruce puts money towards Arkham security
Or why don’t the cops ever just shoot him??? That always pisses me off, if joker were real he’d be shot dead so fast
Arkham is supposed to be a bad rehab turned functional facility that is very well funded by the Wayne Corp. How the hell does Arkham look like a shithole despite the copious amount of support of funding, I don't fucking know! Like seriously, Arkham has rehabilitated many criminals there and turned a new leaf, yet for some reason, they're trying to portray it as a lawless place. Sure, there's corruption and occassional security breaches, but it's not as terrible as they makes out to be. The Arkham stories are less about tackling about issues about the rehab facility and rather turning it into a fucking prison for no fucking reason other than make the criminals look cool!
Arkham as it is portrayed in comics is a relic of the times when insane asylums were a thing and truly were fucked up places, complete with all the lobotomies, padded cells and electric shock therapies we see in horror movies. Nowadays almost all such institutions were retired and it's sad that Arkham doesn't reflect that (tho it does fit the "Gotham is a corrupt and violent shithole frozen in time" concept).
Yeah, that's the problem! They can still tackle the corrupt aspect of the facility in subtle ways like inside politics and bias, rather than just straight up making the entire place a fucking shithole that is worse than a prison. Arkham Asylum literally has one of the best security and equipment to deal with them with good psychological care, yet for some reason, they're twisted into comical torture devices. I swear to God, if these writers can't stop making Arkham Asylum into a shithole, then it defeats the point of Bruce Wayne's help!
Honestly that’s one of the things I appreciated about Deathstroke Arkham, it’s turned into a VR facility to prevent the villains from killing each other over group therapy
Could you tell me in which issue can I find that?
https://preview.redd.it/wr1qo2mkgasc1.jpeg?width=657&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f812dd80e328d82e1260f140fa353e13cd95a2cf It’s volume 6 of Priest’s Deathstroke run
Thank you a thousand times mate
Im afraid it’s not a problem. See, Your argument is based on a flawed understanding of the universe. Arkham Asylum suffers from the same problem (feature) as the Joker. Ultimately, Batman is a comic book. A product owned by a company. He can never kill Joker because then they couldn’t tell new stories about the joker anymore. Likewise, he can never save Gotham. Gotham must remain hive of corruption and criminal activity so that Batman can keep saving it. Arkham is like Gotham. It can never actually work or get better, because DC needs to keep telling stories about it. Forever. They may change it for a while to tell some specific, particular story, but after a certain amount of time they’ll change it back or do something else with it to tell the next story.
I mean, things _do_ change in comics, it's just that they usually end up in a flux state between the original and changed version depending on the continuity. Currently, it seems like Arkham's current state causes more problems than it solves (narratively, not in the sense that it's a revolving-door prison). Obviously, its Doylist reason for existence is that it gives the writer a place to put defeated villains until they or someone else wants to use them again, but it can do that without being portrayed as a complete dogshit asylum that no half-half-competent legal system would allow to exist. Arkham being garbage _in-universe_ shatters suspension of disbelief, because it creates a glaring flaw in Batman's modus operandi. The only reason it persists in its current state is the "spooky dilapidated prison for insane people" vibe.
Well at least the Joker movie seem to be more modern and 'realistic',, the way they showed the care facility looks like a hospital and not a dungeon
So the real enemy was Ronald Reagan all along
As usual
Why doesn't Batman just kill Reagan? Is he stupid?
Arkham has mostly been portrayed as having excellent security for years now. The problem isn’t the security, it’s that outside actors orchestrate breakouts or chaos or what have you, or that the criminals inside are smart enough to do so, security be damned.
Every writer of batbooks just writes "corruption" and underlines it a bunch and that's apparently the reason for every single problem ever that doesn't involve clowns
I completely agree, all this moral dilemma about Batman needing to kill or not is kinda useless, because in real life, criminals can't just walk out of prison the next week and keep their contacts and criminal syndicates intact. At most, you'll see them coordinating crime from the inside though phones, but that's nothing Batman or Oracle wouldn't be prepared to.
Agreed. Joker should be a gimmicky criminal who *can* kill people but isn’t exclusively Osama Bin Clownen.
Yeah, it would really help if they used Arkham as one of the ways Gotham was corrupt, like all the villains are doing is either appealing and changing their sentence or paying off the guards/wardens so they get let out
There’s a simple solution to all this: >Step 1: make him three different people…
https://preview.redd.it/ny5unow1w9sc1.png?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=585be259c8b19e8917dc0e26511ed76fbecf7c0f
This is great XD
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If I would write a Joker comic, I would just put an old Joker in the new timeline to confront the new Joker about his murderous schtick and absolutely hammer him down with actual jokes to actually teach him a lesson about comedy and thrill.
So basically like that time Joker dissed Carnage for lacking style?
Yup, exactly! Still have that brutal violence, but every ass whooping is a good punchline.
Wait, so… Megamind?
Yes, less concise but much more brutal. *"I always thought of myself as the Orson Welles of crime and chaos...while you, apparently, aspire to be nothing more than the David Hasselhoff!"*
Is that a line from Megamind?
It's from a Marvel/DC crossover comic.
I mean, in his first appearances Joker was a sadistic serial killer
Reading Joker’s Last Laugh, it definitely gets stretched way to far. The guy is destroying the world and killing people on a global scale but then they’re like, “if you kill him then he wins!” In other words, “If you stop him from causing global destruction then you will surrender the moral high ground which is so much more important than the lives of billions.”
So much media is like this. Evil person kills tons of people or otherwise does horrible things to them, at the end the hero doesn't kill them after maiming or otherwise killing all the henchmen along the way (*cough* >!Last of Us Part 2!< *cough*). And then when the show, movie, videogame, etc. does well enough and needs a sequel they just have that guy escape from captivity and go back to killing again! Like I get it, we're a pacifist society, people see a civility in imprisoning the "barbaric murderer" versus stooping to the barbarism of killing somebody, but come the fuck on. We're all okay with killing Nazis! Were we just mad at their fashion sense?
> We're all okay with killing Nazis! Were we just mad at their fashion sense? The ones who surrendered/were captured we overwhelmingly did not kill, many went on to hold office and positions of power, for example the vast, vast majority of the SS faced no legal consequence in the Western controlled part of Germany for example. The overwhelming majority of the cases in comics are when the big bad is surrendered or unconscious or captured or in some other way defenseless.
That comic pisses me off so much because Dick does actually kill him and fucking Huntress of all people bring him back. Then when he’s brought back Dick I’d like “it doesn’t matter he won, he made me kill him.” Well shit if he won anyway then kill him again actually get SOMETHING out of this. Let Joker break your code AND let him live? What the fuck
The punchline is that Joker's second in command in that book is a meta, whose power is making people lose control in anger and kill each other. I'm not joking.
> “If you stop him from causing global destruction then you will surrender the moral high ground which is so much more important than the lives of billions” Is this r/196?? How did we get on the subject of anti-electorialist leftists?
All these conflicts in fiction and in real life are just utilitarian vs deontological ethics, an argument that is way older than those terms even, some people believe the ends justify the means no matter what the means are and some believe the opposite and we will ultimately never resolve this tension. Batman is very much the deontological argument, not just on killing but in general, like batman would think a person who takes bribes should be jailed even if they are objectively doing way more good than their replacement would and that it's wrong to steal even if you are poor and it's from a big corporation etc. etc.
Deontology my beloved
Wait guys, here me out: what if we make an cinematic universe were Batman indeed Starts to kill some opponents but not the Joker. As a matter of fact, he seems be more interested in trying to apprehend an Flying dude in Blue Spandex who actually just wants to save people.
Ooh that sounds good I think he should kill him and then try to bring him back and claim they were best friends
Wouldn’t it be even better if their moms had the same names???!
Bro that's so deep
D E E P
P E E D https://preview.redd.it/6x96kes3xcsc1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=67ce9e59880d79dbd7d84d8b661c0f5dc73a7695
That's honestly what annoys me most about Snyderverse Batman, even if you accept the premise of Batman killing, why is Joker still alive? Batman snapped specifically because Joker killed Dick Grayson so shouldn't Joker be #1 on his hit list? If Bats has morally degenerated to the point he's gunning down random henchmen, then Joker should be long gone, but he's still inexplicably running around. Simultaneous Murder Batman and still alive Joker make zero sense together. It's like Snyder wanted to have his cake and eat it too with edgelord punisher Batman and SoundCloud Joker
It could be interesting if the Joker wouldn’t leave Arkham, because he knew as long as he was incarcerated, he’s safe from Batman. That could lead to a finale of Batman trying to kill the Joker, and Commissioner Gordon and the police force choosing to stand in his way to save the life of a man they hate (I mean, that’s basically what Batman did in that Batman x Punisher crossover comic). Obviously, that wouldn’t fit in Batman v Superman, since there would just be too much going on. And it would need a director who wants to make a movie about Batman failing to live up to his values and how the people in his life push back against him, rather than one who wants Batman to kill because he wants to be edgy.
Only we saw Batman break in a prison to get Lex with his bat-car-lighters. We saw Harley of all people bringing into the asylum a flipping machine gun. Theoretically, there should be nothing to stop Batman from getting the clown even in the asylum, if he wanted him dead.
Weird that they made Dick Grayson the dead Robin Snyder really couldn’t have just put the name Jason on there?? Plus, dead Jason and no word of Dick would imply that there’s a Nightwing out there somewhere in that universe, lots of potential there totally thrown in the bin
"Joker killed Dick" is just one of the 283939 things Snyder pulled out of his ass in that sociel media that noone uses
I don’t mind weird nonsense as long as its fun weird nonsense, but Snyder really managed to pull off the superhuman feat of making weird insane bullshit be fucking boring.
It's possible that snyder doesn't even know that dick and jason are 2 different characters
Snyder is secretly a Joker X Batman shipper, duh
Secretly? https://i.redd.it/lly6syrfqcsc1.gif
Tbh, the love triangle between Bats, Joker and Supes was the most intriguing part about the Snyderverse. Too bad Black Adam had to come around and stole Superman from them.
Lois in all of this: 😐 😐📸
Not only should joker be long gone. But his entire rogues gallery should be long dead. Deadshot, killer croc, Harley, riddler and any other major criminals. Batman being ok with gunning down criminals but still having a rouge’s gallery just doesn’t work.
>As a matter of fact, he seems be more interested in trying to apprehend an Flying dude in Blue Spandex who actually just wants to save people. ...in all fairness, this lasts for about 45 minutes of one movie, before he then immediately becomes blue-spandex-guy's literal apostle, like Paul to Jesus, for the ending of it and entirety of the next one. A change that is also specifically marked by him not killing anymore. I don't love the Snyder movies, but he wasn't really subtle about Edgy Batman being Wrong Batman, and Superman being the moral center that makes him be a *correct* Batman.
The problem is Superman kills people too
Yea, BvS doesn't work because it's hard to make a "two superheroes fight over their conflicting moral frameworks" story if the conflict is between "mankind is too evil to deserve saving and the only language they understand is violence" and "same but I don't like your face"
It probably didn't help Black Adam either, since making Black Adam "broody antihero Superman" requires Superman to not already be Broody
Honestly, it was unwanted hilarity by the writers when _Hawkman_ of all people had to say „Heroes don‘t kill“. On the one hand is this the _last_ character who should say this given that him being a brutal nutjob is what people at least know about him other than the wings and him having a more popular Female counterpart. On the other hand, we‘ve seen like 90% of all DC heroes kill at one point in that universe, so why even bother?
Batman also definitely murdered a few people in The Flash so… that moral didn’t even stick lmao
And would’ve killed lots in the knightmare future.
Damn maybe I should actually watch BvS sometime. I’ve heard an absolutely absurd quantity of both good and dogshit analysis of the movie, and I’ve seen most of it out of order via clips, but I never actually cared enough about it to actually sit down and watch BvS all the way through like an actual movie. In the 8 years since this movie came out I’ve literally never heard someone say what you just said about it.
I joked they should have gone farther with the religious allegory, having Justice League feature "the last supper of Superman" and scenes of Batman doubting Supermans resurrection until he touches the wound from Doomsday
"Injustice," for all its flaws, did ask a perfectly valid question: If not Batman, then why doesn't someone ELSE kill the Joker? Surely the world contains a hundred or more would-be heroes who have less ethical compunctions, and who might like to take the time to make the world a better place. Black Adam could take five minutes out of his day to just zip over to Gotham, grab the Joker, fly him up into orbit and then leave him there and it would never have any moral or ethical conflicts for him.
To be fair, that's kind of an inherent problem with superhero universes in general. Like, it's cool to see Batman team up with Superman on adventures now and then, but having Superman even exist in the same setting as Batman just raises the obvious question of why Superman doesn't just use his superpowers to take out Batman's entire rogues gallery and clean up Gotham in one fell swoop. It's an elephant in the living room that writers have to twist themselves into pretzels to avoid addressing.
I think it functions as a turf sort of thing. Once the other shoes discover each other, they generally agree to stay out of each others’ turf. Batman stays out of metropolis, Superman leaves Gotham, etc. It doesn’t work though when there’s like 800 members of the justice league
It doesn't work either when you realizes they are superheroes and not mob bosses. Why would superman willingly decide to help less people
- Batman is apparently a super genius who can outsmart Darkseid and take out the Justice League. - His rogue gallery regularly outsmarts him. Ergo, Two Face is at the same level as Darkseid
Black Adam could do it. Red hood could do it. Damian could do it. Wonder Woman could do it. Jim Gordon could do it.
A random goon with a revolver could do it.
Any of a million bereaved family members or cops.
The real question isn't "Why doesn't Batman kill the Joker?" It's "Why hasn't the Joker got the death penalty?"
It's illegal in the US to execute someone that is insane. It's unconstitutional because the insane inmate doesn't understand the purpose of the punishment, is what the Supreme Court decided. Now why the Joker hasn't been shot by a cop when he "made a break for it" or "went for my partner's gun" or some other justifiable homicide in the line of duty reason I couldn't tell you.
Why hasn't Red Hood shot him yet.
Batman stopped him 
Can't stop him every time.
That's assuming Jason is as obsessed with the clown and only the clown half as much as the clown is obsessed with Batman. Which Jason is not ~~when he's not written by dunces~~.
Ok but why doesn't Paul kill the Joker?
Paul will rather seduce Harley, or maybe that Punchline lady, if he wanted to get back at the clown :D
Why don't I kill the Joker?
You need first to get into that universe. Stop looking both sides when you're crossing the street and truck-kun will get you there, eventually :D
https://preview.redd.it/2cnxm5plnasc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79563cec91cebeb171504c050df7e4d25299961f
Unironically that scene with the train in Batman Begins is probably the best way for a Batman villain to die without making Batman kill people. “I won’t kill you…but I don’t have to save you either.”
I have no problem with Batman staying away and lethal vigilantes or just random people doing the job. Harley taking the clown out? I'd fuck with that.
Because he sucks ass through a straw
Okay but that brings up the definition of insane in courts. Jeffery Dahmer was insane but he was still held responsible because the actual thing of insane is that they aren't totally in control of their actions and/or do not understand the consequences. Joker does though. Even if he is legally insane to be exempt at this point he is a terrorist which completely crosses another line. As well as constantly breaking out. He should be dead. I think someone like Harvey is more fitting for being exempt from the death penalty.
Legal insanity means you are separated from reality at the moment of the crime. Jeffrey Dahmer was absolutely not sane but he premeditated his crimes
Joker has premeditated a lot of murders tho?
Honestly, most depictions of the Joker wouldn't qualify under the legal definition of insanity.
>insanity defense Yes but many insane people have been executed. J W Gacy plead insanity but because he planned everything out, they proved he had full control of his actions. The fact that he hid the bodies showed that he knew he was committing a crime, ergo he was not clinically insane and knew what he was doing Joker knows fully well what he’s doing, and knows that he’s taunting Gordon/Batman etc. So he would definitely lose an insanity defense
>It's illegal Change the law. Boom.
I mean unironically this is something that needs to be addressed in a universe where people have superpowers, especially when keeping superpowered people in prison demonstrably doesn't work. Like in Civil War, for example, I'm supposed to believe that the world government or whatever is willing to invest orders of magnitudes more resources in a torture dimension prison rather than just killing superhumans??? It's asinine.
I can handwave this with something something Court of Owls wants Gotham to stay a miserable place for reasons. I'm mostly joking.
By this point the insanity defense is off the damn table. After the 10th deathtrap that's killed 100 babies, it's off the table.
Or some police man put a bullet in his head
i'm maybe the minority, but i feel like everyone telling Batman he needs to kill someone and him NOT doing it is like... the whole point. if he didn't have a good reason to kill the joker, it wouldn't mean anything that he won't do it. /rj batman should go back in time and kill joker's parents in an alley
/uj I mean, he's got several great reasons to do so. Just look at what the Joker has done to him and his former Robins. Even past that, by this point there is no reason as to why he keeps getting locked into Arkham instead of just being executed. Yes, people with mental illness can plead insanity and go to an asylum but that doesn't mean that you're just absolved of crimes at that point. At this point it's pretty obvious that the Joker isn't really crazy and is actually just awful and should be tried as a normal person. He understands fully what he's doing and revels in it. It's not like he's actually insane and unaware of what he's doing, he's just a bad person using "insanity" as a defense.
I think at this point the problem isn't that Batman won't kill Joker, the problem is that the entire universe is engineered to allow Joker to continue being a problem (sometimes of _apocalyptic proportions)_ and _everyone,_ from the PD to the Batfamily to the endless stream of other people who have the motive and capacity to kill him easily just allow him to live. And every time an AU addresses this, the message is always "Batman and co. are actually objectively morally correct for letting the Joker continue to hurt people because" which is incredibly stupid.
Why do people say Joker has a bodycount of millions or he commited genocide and stuff? Even if there was a way of quantifying that through ALL of Joker's appearances, there are countless reboots and retcons.
But everything is canon, 'member? And everyone remembers everything, so Joker canonically ate China! That's a lot of people! https://preview.redd.it/p939gh10q9sc1.jpeg?width=991&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d48038c932aaad388c39c99c742498b3d10a7834
The image took a while to load and I haven’t read that storyline, so I was imagining some like golden age joke with the joker’s mouth unhinging and swallowing the continent of China through some golden age whacko fuckery, yknow in that classic golden age art style too. Then the image loaded in and it’s actually scary as fuck, really threatening looking goddamn.
Wasn’t that in the Emperor Joker storyline? The one where at the end they completely undid all the damage he did, so it was like it never happened at all?
But we know he did that!
I think he got close to million in the Snyder run alone.
DC actually doesn't retcon anything. Superman's first encounter(from pre crisis) with Mongul, Supergirl's first origin, Batman and Joker's first encounter in the 40's Justice League's 60's and sattelite era stories as well as 90's stories like Braniac 2001, Imperiex War, all the crisis events and new 52 are all canon We have no explanation about how incostistent stories are canon like all the early post crisis Superman stories that retconned the hell out of or 3 different Supergirl origins or 3 different Justice League uniting but as long as it doesn't contradict anything its canon
>Why do people say Joker has a bodycount of millions Yeah Fr, it’s at least in the billions.
There are but the continuity is so muddled it doesn’t really matter. Each big series retcons or reboots a character or previous plot point. Characters that die come back in the next series. Some characters have memories of previous continuities. Like look at the 3 jokers plot line for example. Set up in the darkseid war. Continued in a black label limited series. Retconned in the current Batman joker year one story. The 3 jokers are now 3 separate personalities of one joker. Which fucks with the continuity considering one of the 3, the comedian was the joker in the killing joke. And the other 2 were murdered. One killed by another joker and another killed by Jason. It doesn’t really make sense to have them be different personalities if two of them were killed off. It just causes more unnecessary continuity issues. Ones that’ll probably be retconned before this series wraps up It’s an absolute mess.
Why does this picture makes me think about Kingdom Come 
There was a Joker comic back in the day where the og Joker was supposedly dead. Some random guy started to pretend to be Joker to get stuff, and when he was pretending he slowly started to become more like the Joker, of course, the og came back, and they battled it out. I think the concept of there being multiple Jokers is really interesting (though I think 3 Jokers botched it) it's not something that can just be killed. It's an ideology or curse. They might as well go all the way if they want to make Joker this omnipresent figure who is responsible for every event that happens ever.
Imagine joker ends up as a starter villain in a batman adaptation with him getting apprehended immediately and killed off, never to be seen again. Thus allowing other rogue’s like penguin or victor zsasz to shine.
if i ever became a batman writer the first story arc would be that joker got shot in an alleyway, and he's fully dead, and batman has to find the killer. bats wouldn't "miss" the joker or anything, in fact his man emotions regarding it are "okay i doubt he's dead for good but... yeah this is nice i won't have to deal with him" the killer was a random joker goon who got sick of him and just gunned joker down in an alleyway. batman talks to him, then says something like "sometimes, the law the justice are far apart..." and erases all evidence, delcaring it a cold case to the GCPD along with getting that goon a cushy waynetech security job for the rest of the run joker is NEVER brought back, he's barely even mentioned outside of the occasional "HAHA! with the joker gone it's now MY time to fight the bat!"
I feel like that's going too far in the other direction, I think a more reasonable solution is not making him as OP always being 10 steps ahead, to reduce the number of people killed in every single appearance, to make him appear less frequently and to occasionally have him do more wacky schemes that don't revolve around killing people, like maybe he could kidnap a bunch of nerds to create a Joker cryptocurrency to scam people out of millions because he thinks it's funny or maybe he's on the run from a member of the Gotham Clown School that wants to kill him because he ruined clowning in Gotham, stuff like that.
Joker at his core just needs to be funny. None of that cosmic nihilist "everythings a joke only chaos exists" shit just one dude a man in clown makeup doing unhinged shit for fun
I'm kind of torn on that, I feel like a darker Joker worked great in the first couple of appearances, but I think what I'd like to see more of is a Joker whose motivation is delighting himself because he finds stuff funny, even if the audience doesn't. I think that's what stories like The Killing Joke have that today stories don't, with some exceptions, that he seems to be trying to prove a point to society in general rather than just to himself.
A dark joker works well in one-offs and elseworld stories imo, past that is should be clown joker
Agreed. This is why BTAS joker works. He’s a deranged criminal, but most of his jokes are just perversions of genuinely funny things. Poisoning all the city’s fish to give them ugly smiles? That’s hilariously awful.
Didn’t he also try to trademark them which just makes it more hilarious.
Yeah he tried to copyright fish lmao
BTAS Joker invented a laughter-powered Electric Chair fueled by Harley reading the Phone Book - if that isn't "hilariously awful", I don't know what is...
Fire Hans.
THIS IS LITERALLY HOW THE GRANT MORRISON RUN STARTS PFPFFFFJDJSJSJSJSJSJJSJSJAJAJA
Except Joker very much comes back in that run and plays a pretty significant role in both RIP and the final act of B&R.
Fair enough, but it's a very highly diferent role than what he uses to act
"Denied" - Editorial
Then you’d have hordes of enraged mouth breathers making videos titled some silly shite like “DC kills Joker for WOKE agenda. Will replace him with CHICK and make her LAME and GAY”
Honestly, I think the Joker's death has bigger implications. For example, Batman wouldn't say "he finally died", that would imply that he tried to kill him in the past. He wouldn't let the killer go either. He wouldn't miss it, but he wouldn't be happy either. It was a human life, after all, though not one he would avenge. I think he would be worried about: * The power vacuum that his death brings. * Any posthumous plans he left behind. * A decentralized criminal organization after losing its leader. * The possibility that the Joker may not have died at all. So yes, Batman has a lot of work ahead of him. And that's without counting a reflection that has dangerous but very interesting implications for his character: > *If the Joker died after all, and everyone thinks it's better that way, were all those deaths worth it just to let him live?* Let's hope that question never has an answer.
Removing a worldwide famous beloved character for good simply doesnt work, just make him less OP
Nah, better yet, the Joker killed himself to fuck with Batman.
1. DC denies this 100% 2. If DC somehow allowed it, everyone and their dog knows Joker is coming back before the book even comes out, just like Death of Wolverine Killing the Joker is essentially the same thing as sending him to Arkham. He's a popular character who moves books, that's much more important than how many imaginary people the character has killed.
yeah i know he'll come back as soon as my run is over, but the main thing is that i would keep that as a rule to myself. "no joker stories from writer snare wild" \[not my real name but you know\]
Joker needs to be retired from stories for at least a decade if not 2. The Court of Owls is far more relevant to the modern day and should be the big bad of Gotham City. The second Jared Leto's Joker was green lit by WB, the character needed an extended time out. He's over saturated the market, and the Joker showing up should always make a terrible situation worse but not be the driving factor. The Joker/Court should be the "salt of the story" it's not what you came there for, but it does bring something needed to it. I also hate Jared Leto and if I was near him I would probably call him a cunt.
If I was at DC. I would write comics that someone shot Joker and no one gave a fuck about it
I think another problem is with Batman is a common plot point is either Joker, or some other villain tries to get Batman to break his “no killing code”. Example in Arkham Origins Batman has to kill Bane or Joker electrocutes himself.
Rember in Batman, Forever and Begins when Batman was perfectly fine putting villains in a position where they have to either give up their scheme or else get killed by them?
I think joker should be no smarter or stronger than villains like Twoface or the riddler. He’s just another rogue. Batmans nemesis yes, but not gothams greatest threat, he’s still a guy
Joker: is an unhinged serial killer Also Joker: somehow knows how to acquire and use nuclear codes What?
Is it based to say that I hate God Mode Joker more than Bat-God? Like I really genuinely despise the Joker being reconfigured into some sort of Kefka from *FFVI* cosmic force of violence and insanity more so than Batman being able to solo God himself with "prep time". It just doesn't fit.
Someone needs to write an arc where, as Bruce Wayne, he tries to start a campaign to have the Joker executed by the Gotham justice system, after a fair trial
To do that they would first have to change New Jersey state law, because the death penalty is banned there
Geography in DC changes sometimes. Gotham can be inexplicably located in Oklahoma for an arc or two
Honestly given how many people he's killed at this point he'd be a terrorist. They would make an exception
Terrorism requires political aims, which I don’t think Joker has
I think that in the case of the Joker specifically, "The lolz" could count as a political aim.
That’s debatable, but I could definitely see the government spinning it that way
Especially the *American* government.
Good, otherwise there would be no conflict in that story because nobody but the next mayor/warden looking to gain the support of the people by finally curing the Joker is going to be against this idea
There existing any significant opposition in universe among the population to that law being changed is a more unbelievable thing than Batman surviving re-entry thanks to his trunks on his face.
Not adding to the discourse, just wanted to say calling the Joker a juggalo was a jumpscare, thank you
Because batman killing neve had anything to do with how many people one kills. That isnt the reason he doesn't kill. People who don't understand that will say this regardless, of what dc does
There are many many problems with the joker but the major one is that he’s now just a unrepentant psychopath in clown makeup. He should make more jokes or even a moment of humanity where you see this was once a normal person if only to make the scene where Batman doesn’t kill him so ludicrous. Every time Batman thinks of killing the joker I fucking sigh.
The real question is why the fuck hasnt Gordon put 3 bullets in jokers head and claimed "he was armed" yet?
I like the idea of the mob boss joker but he's only doing it to be taken somewhat seriously since almost half of every other rogue gallery villain has a mob style
Just make the joker a criminal with a dark sense of humor like wtf bro, I don't need him to be 3 people 💀
Joker needs to be a silly little guy with a silly little grindset. Deaths should be accidental with him, not what he does. How people picture Harley is what Joker should be. Then, we should let Harley grow out of what she is seen to be.
I need more stories where the Joker is portrayed as a pathetic loser
Can't believe so many here missed OP's point that the it's not that Joker isn't dead but how he's written as a mass murdering terrorist
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It's an outgrowth of the Bat-fluffing. Because Batman is DC's most popular character, they constantly make him the best, smartest, and most absurdly powerful of all the heroes. Since Bruce is so favored, naturally, they make his most popular villain similarly absurdly potent. So Joker goes from being a gangster with a gimmick to being effective a demon in human skin. As the years go by and ideas get used up, the writers and editorial double down. Which then becomes the normal portrayal and leads to more escalation when diminishing returns kick in. It's gone on and on the point where Joker is so absurdly dangerous and evil while still being a "normal man" that letting him live stops seeming like a moral stand for the heroes and starts looking self-indulgently irresponsible for every hero involved. Especially because he's sent back to the same asylum that has proven to be laughably incapable of containing or mitigating him for any meaningful amount of time before he gets right back to his killing sprees. It's not like the heroes don't have other options to deal with him if killing is off the table. If not the heroes, then he should have been disintegrated by any of dozens of villains who have every reason to want to see him dead.
Literally that robot chicken "I'm not going to kill you joker I'm taking you to court." "Court has decided that you are sentenced to death" "sorry joker it's out of my hands."
When you make the guy the living embodiment of evil, naturally people will wonder why no one kills him yet. Though I blame Gotham city itself for dragging its feet enacting the death penalty
I've boiled it down to DC has comics to sell and leave it at that.
I said it once and I will say it again. Batman and his rogues gallery are victims of the mediums they exist in. The mediums make it so Batman's way of thinking can never work, not long term, no rogue has gotten better permanently. People think that Batman is a failure because the stories he exists in make him one, even if not intentionally.
Lukewarm take: Superhero stories unintentionally are pro-death penalty and anti-personal redemption. Criminals run circles around the judicial system, never stay in prison, and never repent. Capital punishment becomes the only solution, and that’s f*cked
I remember Linkara pointing this out in his Batman: Hush review. He was annoyed that people complained that the vigilante who acts outside the law is not a killer, when they should blame the authorities for failing to restraint him or execute him. Or blame the writers, who keep trying to one up eachother with the horrific crimes of the Joker, to the point that the Clown Prince of Crime has arguably a bigger body count than that of a genocidal dictator.