I was thinking about how much clowns are associated with creepiness (IT, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, The Joker, Rockzo, Juggalos,etc). Where are the clown heroes? There are none!
I think a Clown would make a good anti-hero, sorta like how Batman takes something scary (bats, urgh) and uses it to strike fear in his enemies. Using the conventional feeling of uneasiness of clowns to intimidate his enemies! Caught between the world of the Normals and his disapproving clown society.
“Why fight for them, Bonko? Their skin is tan and plain. Theyre clumsy and stiff, why you could barely fit two of them in a car! Uncreative jokes, amateur BaloonCraft. Theres no place for you in their unfunny world.”
“Because, Father. I have dreams. Dreams that are bigger than this tent. Dreams that wont settle with making five year olds cry at birthday parties. Of the opression of constantly getting my name queried on Megans Law searches. I am brave and strong! And when my foes hear my round nose squeak, theyll know justice is coming for them atop a tiny unicycle.”
In the comics, Charles Lane was a cop who became a costumed crimefighter because – well, you know how impressionable youths look up to gangsters as tough guys who live like kings? As our hero saw it, even putting a crook like that behind bars doesn’t dissuade the kids. No, not even if you play superhero by pulling on a pair of boots while dressing up in tights and wearing a mask.
Unless, of course, you do all of that to dress up as a superhero jester, making those crooks a laughingstock through the magic of slapstick. Losing respectably to a steroid-enhanced soldier with a bulletproof shield is one thing; slipping on a banana peel after taking a cream pie to the face is just embarrassing. You’re in prison because a polka-dot-clad guy with bells on his toes disarmed you with a yo-yo? Yeah, kids don’t look up to you.
In DC’s Earth-3 universe, the Jester is that world’s counterpart to the Joker. But on that world, people like Ultraman, Owlman, and Superwoman are the villains and it’s the Jester and Alexander Luthor who are the heroes resisting them. The Joker was also recast as a hero in the Tangent and Anti-Matter universes.
For what it’s worth, the Comedian’s original superhero costume (the one with a theatrical “comedy” mask for a belt emblem) is apparently supposed to suggest a clown’s baggy get-up, complete with a bit of a “Pagliacci” look to set up the explicit parallel in issue #2 – where they spell out that his whole schtick involved seeing everything as one big joke and parodying the human condition like an exaggerated reflection in a funhouse mirror: a deliberately amoral cynic brutally playing along with the gag, doing his best to keep things in proportion and see the funny side even while acting like a one-man version of the CIA’s dirty-tricks division…
The Tangent Joker(s) is/are pretty cool. That series may have led into treating Harley Quinn more sympathetically, as almost an anti-villain, in the DCU.
There was a comic set in the Wild Cards universe where a secret agent, marked for death and having nothing to lose, exposed himself to the virus and when he became an Ace took on a clown persona.
The Clown {scroll down a bit} was a short-lived and deeply weird 2000AD strip in the early 90s. And The Crimson Clown {and fuck that’s a good cover} was a tremendously popular pulp hero back in the 20s and 30s.
Also, there’s Slapstick, who “resembles an animated clown and has the abilities of a slapstick cartoon character” in that he can produce a comically-oversized mallet at need and has the nigh-indestructibility of a 'toon. Had his own series in the '90s, has recently been training with the Avengers.
