This was originally going to be all about the laughing man, but quickly I realized the bat is as responsible for him as any. Also, the Joker is a big part of who “Bats” has become.
So, how would you diagnose these two in clinical terms? How do their mindsets draw them together? Does the Joker need Batman? Is Batman grounded by his greatest nemesis?
For a clearer frame of reference, I’m thinking of the modern age, grittier rendition of these characters. Say, 80s and later.
It was a joke in Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” (comic books, collected as graphic novel) that Batman and the Joker are co-dependents, operating in each others interstices.
I once saw a debate between Clark Kent and J. Jonah Jameson (okay, two fan-boys playing the part at a Comic-Con) over this issue. Jameson noted that supervillains didn’t exist until superheroes did. Do they cause each other?
Why do various superheroes have their own “rogues’ gallery,” with relatively infrequent crossovers? Lex Luthor obviously is fixated on Superman; the Joker on Batman. When’s the last time Poison Ivy took on Green Arrow, or Catwoman gave The Flash trouble? The fact that they are all segregated into little karmic circles suggests a kind of interdependence. In “The Dark Knight Returns,” the Joker goes all but catatonic when Batman leaves town. Superman could solve the Lex Luthor problem overnight…by doing the same.
Things are looking up. Jules Feiffer wrote a brilliant essay on Superman, noting that he, himself, (Supes, not Feiff) was psychotically divided, with his “Clark Kent” aspect acting in opposition to his “Superman” aspect. (Imagine if the neighborhood fireman – the firefighter in his yellow overalls and helmet and breathing gear – was “the real man” and Joe Smith, the guy inside, was just a fake persona he created to give himself some breathing room. Now imagine that The Firefighter routinely dismissed and even insulted Joe. We’d recommend hospitalization!)
One of the best things to come out of the “Crisis on Infinite Earths” was that the post-Crisis Superman has been psychologically integrated with Clark Kent. Kent is now the real man, and “Superman” is just a costume he puts on to fight crime.
I could go on… (Why, yes, I am a comic-book geek…)
Both are far too crazy to be functional in real life, so it is best to see it as opera. How the reaction of individuals to the trauma of the world makes them heroes or villains, not working to deal with the world’s trauma, but to battle each other, with the villain having a secondary major interest in seeing the world burn.
I am not a comic book geek (IANACBG?), but it would seem to me that super villains could operate - nay, flourish - in the absence of super heroes, but super heroes could not exist without the villains. I think I get what you’re saying, but it seems backwards.
I can’t believe I’m even debating this in my mind!
I don’t like this particular conceit, if that’s the word I’m looking for. Super-villains exist in superhero stories because otherwise the stories would be boring. To say the superheroes somehow cause the existence of the villains takes away from the simpleminded enjoyment of their heroics, and so stultifies the whole point of reading or watching them.
Sure, but it’s part of “The Game.” (Like pretending Sherlock Holmes was real.) It requires you to begin by making an absurd assumption.
Obviously, you’re entirely correct: supervillains exist out of dramatic necessity. But Commissioner Gordon doesn’t know that: he can’t.
Another meta- argument is simply that in a world where various accidents and mishaps can grant super-powers, it will sometimes happen to bad people. The Flash got his powers from an electrical/chemical accident. Could have happened to Fred Phelps. We would have supervillains for the same reason we have villains in our world. This, I think, makes a little more sense than that the heroes “cause” the villains.
Well, take the ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN series from the '50s: you’ve got George Reeves as the bulletproof strongman who can leap tall buildings in a single bound, and he goes up against kidnappers, counterfeiters, smugglers, hijackers, mobsters of the Protection Racket variety, mobsters of the Put A Hit Out On A Guy variety, and everyone else from commie spies to a whole bunch of jewel thieves, plus assassins gunning for assorted heads of state; our hero also clears the name of a guy on death row, saves people trapped by a cave-in, searches the jungle to find the lost members of an ill-fated expedition, and eventually needs to exile himself after getting irradiated while averting a nuclear disaster – but gets better in time to foil an art heist.
If anything, it would be slightly easier to be a superhero than a supervillian in a super powered world. A superhero’s only enemies are the people he’s wronged: in real life baddies don’t usually go taking down unrelated other powerful people just for the kicks or jealousy. Whereas a supervillian’s enemy is everyone, except their few trusted underlings. Especially in the Internet age, the supervillians vulnerability would soon become widely known and some regular guy with a grudge would just take him out.
That’s not really a meta-argument. It makes perfect sense in universe - more than as a meta-argument, where it’s rendered moot by the whole ‘dramatic necessity’ bit.
There’s also the idea - used with Lex Luthor at least once, and certainly others, though I’ve only got a maddeningly vague recollection of reading about it - that the superheroes neuter supervillains not just by the very fact that they stop their schemes, but by the fact that their existence - the colourful costumes, the flashy nicknames - inspires the villains to take up the same sort of life.
Without superheroes, these guys would still be villains. But they wouldn’t be supervillains.
They wouldn’t be flashy, cackling goons, focussed on big showy effects over more effective but less interesting ones. They wouldn’t have rivalries with superheroes to distract them from their main criminal/conqueror goals.
There are some villains who are ‘caused’ by heroes. People like the Pied Piper who only became villains because they wanted to tangle with the heroes who are generally the harmless ones. Their motives are all focused on the heroes, so they’re not actually trying to hurt anybody, just get their friend’s attention so they can have their little fight. Or the Zooms, who really are truly dangerous, but fully intend for the hero to fix what they break, because that’s what heroes do, and they think it’s helpful, makes them better heroes, to force them to do that.
But the Luthors? The Jokers?
If there was no Batman, the man who became the Joker would still have been a psychopath - he’d just have fixated on somebody else as his ‘rival’, or without someone to challenge him, to give him something interesting to focus on, would have given into his nihilistic urges and just gassed Gotham without giving warnings.
If there was no Superman, Lex Luthor would still be Lex Luthor, but he wouldn’t feel the need to show up the alien, to prove himself the best, so he’d just keep on quietly fucking people over through more mundane methods.
Batman and The Joker don’t actually have superpowers though right? It’s my understanding that Batman is simply prepared for everything and The Joker is pure chaos. In this regard, I would think The Joker gives rise to Batman. Otherwise, Batman wouldn’t really be necessary.
Seems to me like you listed a whole lot of villians, there. Although I suppose a super hero or two could exist just to save people from accidents, be they natural or man made.
That’s the old question though, did Batman beget the Joker because of the Ace Chemicals robbery?
Moore’s take, which I see as semi-canon, used the argument that it was just ‘one bad day’ and that anyone can lose their mind. He realized that there isn’t any point to life and how funny it is for people to care.
So, did the insanity exist manifest simply because of this instance, or would it have manifested anyway?
I go with the former, but I’m curious what others think.
But none of those are supervillains, which is the point.
In the Nolan Batman films, the Joker takes on the exaggerated persona because he sees the Batman is out and about. At least that is what is suggested by Gordon at the end of Batman Begins.
Or is it just an artifact of the origin of superheroes, and the eventual creative need to give them sufficient rivals? In a world where superpowers exist, it seems likely that bad people would be just as susceptible as good people. What if a bad person found himself able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and whatnot? Would he not start robbing banks by breaking through the vault doors? Not worried about getting shot? Why would he need to see a hero running around in tights to get the idea he could use his powers for his nefarious purposes?
One does not go from ‘normal’ to ‘nihilistic psychopath’ because one has a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day. He was miswired from the start. The end of his brief career as Red Hood coloured the timbre of his snap, but it would have happened, anyway.
That’s Joker’s idea, which is proven wrong in the story - no matter what he did to Gordon, he didn’t become like him. Because Gordon isn’t wired to be a psychopath, Joker is.
Well, it’s been shown more than once that the Joker effectively has no existence without Batman. If there’s no Batman in some form, then the Joker basically ceases to be. Either the simply lounges around, or he stops being the Joker, or he basically takes a really long nap. However, he’s an unusual case, as the reality around Gotham City is so screwed up it’s entirely possibly he really does only exist when Batman is around. At times he’s seemed to be vaguely aware of this, or even that he’s a character and not a real person.
Which would rather explain why he’s so insane (need I say… batshit crazy?). He retroactively came into existence because Batman did; maybe his past really is multiple choice. He wouldn’t be the only character in the DC universe for whom that’s true. Even a vague awareness of the constant cycle of reboots, retcons, and alternate realities could break a man.
