Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION Dr. Gym'll's Cultural Rarities Career Counseling for the Joker!

Well, not "career counseling", per se, but how would you re-imagine the Joker, if you had the opportunity? The current version is one of the most hated characters, according to the "Characters you hate" thread, so he clearly needs some fixing up.

My ideas:

1) Make 'em funny! There should be at least one moment per Joker appearance where the reader can't help but laughing at what he does or says. This is perfectly compatible with his being a credible villain, imo. Let him make fun of Bats, super-heroes in general, or engage in meta-commentary on the absurdity of the plot.

2) He's not crazy! Or he's crazy like a fox! Sure, he should be amoral and villainous, but not a completely random psycho. In his early appearances, the Joker was motivated by standard villain motives, most importantly greed. Go back to that. The catch should be that he's such a criminal genius that he regularly fools the authorities into thinking he *is* in fact crazy, but it's all an act. The irony is that he's actually one of the few completely sane Bat-villains!

I always preferred the Miller/"satanic" joker to the 70s (and prior) "funny" Joker (who was rarely funny in the first place).

He should be completely insane, but in a cold, calculated never-blinking way; having some of that be an *act* definitely fits my view on the character.

I definitely hated the animated version of the Joker even more than the current one. I like the idea of him being pretty sane and pulling off the biggest 'insanity' scam in the history of comics.

Greed as a prime motivation is sorely missing from today's comics. The further they could move the Joker away from homicidal and insane, the better.

He could be a performance artist, with a practical joke streak, taking on Batman not only as nemesis but for the publicity. The Joker could become the toast of the Gotham artsy set - which would also place him well for thievery. Maybe he could even get some grants from the Wayne Foundation.

I like the crime-as-performance art idea a lot as well. He could be a kind of failed entertainer who discovers his one true genius is in committing extravagent and flamboyant crimes.

It kind of fits in nicely with my overall vision of crimefighting in Gotham as a kind of extreme sport for the young and rich.

I'd keep him insane but not randomly so. Ruthless, but not intentionally malicious, just amoral. Use him as a reflection of society's ills and how insane our society can be. While Batman frequently comes across as cold and controlled, Joker is passionate and driven to outrageous acts by the insanity he perceives around him. We should identify with him in his frustrations with life. He feels that the joke is on all of us, but he's the only one reacting to it while we all drift passively through life refusing to acknowledge how foolish we all are to go along with it.