The Greatest Joeker Stories Ever Told -

DC Comics

DC Comics

1988

288 páginas

9h 36m

ISBN-13: 9780930289362

Here the Joker in the Batman comics gets his own book, which would suit his enormous vanity down to a T. Fans are divided as to whether the "Dark Knight" noir side of the Batman is the only acceptable face to the comic, and in general the lighthearted camp approach of the 1960s TV show is mocked and derided today. Everyone's looking for angst, particularly in their cartoon super-heroes. And so the Joker, with his chalk-white face and his manic grin, is no longer in, though even the zaniest of the late 1950s strips portrayed him as a man mentally torn between madness and street smarts. Fans of the dark approach like the way in which, by the 1970s, the Joker was actually killing people, often in horrible ways, in place of the surprise "laughing gas" tricks and comic crimes he resorted to back in the day. Both tribes of fans will find plenty to like in this book.

It's interesting to note how literate they must have assumed their audience to be back in the 40s and 50s. One story has the Joker adopting disguises--the costumes of famous characters of comedy--to commit his crimes in. I'm not talking Lucy and Ricky here, but Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield, Pagliacci, Pickwick, and Falstaff (who invades a performance of HAMLET and makes a spectacle of himself with his lines from Henry V.) Try that one out on today's comic readers!

The most negligible story here is "Crime-of-the-Month Club" from 1957, in which The Joker tries to sell thugs his own "brilliantly conceived" caper plans for crimes, each one for some reason obviously tied in with particular months (April fools, June brides), in an auction pyramid scheme with some foreshadowing of the EBay of the present day. It's fluff, and it's not even good fluff.