If you find The Three Jokers in your Christmas stocking, blame Krampus. Jason Fabok’s art is good, but Geoff Johns’ story for the three-issue miniseries embodies everything wrong with the Clown Prince of Crime in the 21st century.
There’s a line or two in Astro City #10 where Winged Victory reflects that her foe Karnazon used to do things — rob banks, conquer nations — until he became obsessed with beating her, with achieving symbolic points through her defeat. That’s the modern Joker, a guy who no longer does things for their own sake; his only interest is hurting Batman. But unlike Astro City, DC seems to think this makes him cooler, not pathetic.
On top of which, Three Jokers makes no sense whatsoever. And like so many of Johns’ Green Lantern arcs, it doesn’t change anything: Batman and Joker end up right back in the same place they’ve been since at least the New 52.
The Three Jokers reveal happened during Johns’ Darkseid War big event, when Batman briefly sat in Metron’s Moebius Chair and gained a few seconds of cosmic wisdom. In that instant he realized the Joker’s he’s been battling over the years is three different men — which, somehow, the World’s Greatest Detective had never even noticed. Three Jokers doesn’t even try to explain how Batman never suspected this; it attempts to explain why there are three Hoodlum Harlequins, but not very well. The story eventually labels the three as the Criminal (classic Golden/Silver Age Joker), the Clown (the Joker who beat Jason Todd’s Robin to death) and the Comedian (the Joker who shot Barbara Gordon in the spine).
The story tells us the three men’s crimes differ subtly, with the Killing Joke Joker the truly scary one (“There’s something behind that smile.”). I didn’t buy it: they’re interchangeable sadists fixated on being Batman’s nemesis. True, the Clown sadistically beat Jason to death while the Comedian crippled Barbara Gordon to make a philosophical point, but I don’t find the difference as stark as the story claims. It would have made more sense to separate out the Criminal from the other two, making him an actual criminal who wants to steal stuff and maybe is actually funny. That, however, goes against current DC dogma that the Joker has to be obsessed with the Bat (being funny now means the Joker kills people but he laughs while he does it). As a result, the Criminal is as fixated as the other two, he just expresses it differently.
The story suggests at first that the Criminal might have created his colleagues, using the chemicals that created him. Or maybe none of them are the original, but there’s a fourth Joker behind them — which Batman should have dismissed out of hand, because why would the chair show him three but not four? In any case, neither of these hypotheses is true. Perhaps inevitably, The Killing Joke‘s Comedian is the one true Joker, because that, rather than “Joker’s Five-Way Revenge” or “The Laughing Fish” or Batman #1 is apparently DC’s definitive Joker, the one that really matters. 
The Criminal, as I said, is just as Bat-obsessed as the other two. His goal is to make the Joker “mean more to you than anyone … I need to be everything to you.” The best way to do that, he’s decided, is to create a new Joker who has a deeper personal tie to Batman. The Criminal considers Jason, but he’s too weak, while Barbara’s too strong to break bad. But Joe Chill, currently a lifer in Blackgate? Yes, that’s it! Make him the Joker and Tim Burton’s Batman is retroactive comics canon! It all makes sense!
Batman, however, discovers Chill repented the murder years ago, but didn’t have the heart to ask Bruce for forgiveness. He explains that he lashed out at the Waynes because he didn’t know about the good they’d done for Gotham; he assumed they were rich parasites, living in luxury while guys like him had nothing, and fired in anger. Only later did he realize how wrong he was about them. This is apparently meant to make him tragic and sympathetic, rather than a murderer; to stack the deck further, the prison chaplain tells Bats Chill is also learning disabled. Tugs at the heart strings, doesn’t it?
The Criminal plans to dump Joe in a vat of joker-chemicals but Batman saves him, then the Comedian executes the Criminal (Jason already murdered the Clown). The Comedian shares the Criminal’s desire to be Batman’s soulmate sinister, but he’s going to do it by resolving things between Chill and the Bat: “I healed your greatest wound, so now I can be your greatest pain.” He swears he’ll continue to inflict pain on the Bat until he tires of the game and puts Batman out of his misery.
At the Batcave later, Bruce makes one final reveal to Alfred: he knew who the Joker was within a week of their first battle (but somehow never noticed the other Jokers running around. Right). The Comedian is the real Joker; the possibly imaginary backstory in The Killing Joke is the real deal. Except he was an abusive husband so the cops helped his wife and son escape, then faked the story they’d died in an accident (because that makes so much more sense than arresting the guy, right?). Bruce keep’s the Joker’s name secret because if the media got hold of it, they’d inevitably figure out his family were alive and where they were. And then the Joker would come home ….
Like I said, this interpretation of the Joker is more pathetic than terrifying. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, either: why did the Criminal apparently not know he was just a wannabe? Why would the Joker, that most egotistical of villains, want to share the spotlight, or imagine a better version of himself is even possible? Beyond that, what the hell was the point? The story changes nothing; the existence of three Jokers changes nothing. The story doesn’t alter or illuminate the Batman/Joker relationship. It doesn’t retcon out any glaring discontinuities. It definitely doesn’t make the Joker a better character. Not that every big story needs to be a game changer, but surely having three Jokers should be.
Only it wasn’t.
#SFWApro. Covers by Dick Giordano, Marshall Rogers and Brian Bolland, top to bottom.
Wow, that sounds worse than I imagined. I mean, wow. Thanks for taking the bullet for the rest of us!
This sounds lame. I mean, the greatest detective can’t figure out that there are 3 different people as his supposed biggest enemy? Pffffft
Thanks Fraser, you just saved me a few bucks(not that I wanted this series, but I’ve been known to buy awful things(*cough Marvel mangaverse cough*) in digital if they are cheap enough. I really, really don’t like the part of Geoff Johns that is dedicated to dig up everything that Alan Moore wrote.
Nothing I’ve seen in Batman lately has appealed to me.
Thanks for taking that bullet through the spine and warning us off.
I’m pretty sure the Mangaverse was better! 🙂
At least Jason Fabok can draw. Go do a image search for “ghost rider mangaverse” and look at the things that Marvel decided to call “drawings” and then decided to charge money for that
Wait, that’s professional work?
Looks like the kind of stuff you draw while you’re still learning; you’ve got a little skill, but have a couple of years yet to go before you’re any good. Not the kind of thing they should be paid for.
Some of the credit goes to Durham Library for maintaining a sizable graphic novel collection. I would never have picked this up on my own, even though I was curious how bad a mess it would be.
Geoff Johns really needs to be let go from DC. His work may have been good years ago but it has been garbage for years. He just keeps recycling and trying to imitate Alan Moore but it is all just superficial artifice and none of the substance.
I should like Geoff Johns because he seems to like the same DC characters I do: the Flash, Green Lantern, Legion of Super-Heroes. But I want something more than returning to the Silver Age status quo and worshiping Alan Moore.
I sometimes feel bad about how much I enjoy reading reviews that trash Johns… but I don’t think the criticism is undue. As silly as it may sound, I think Johns’s predecessors wrote superhero comic books that were about real things in life, but Johns just writes superhero comics that are about… superhero comics. I’m a continuity wonk as much as the next guy (probably more), but I think that self-referential comics need to have some kind of deeper theme to be worth it.
He’s hardly unique in that, but it’s certainly a fair criticism. Case in point, Infinite Crisis. When I reread it a couple of years back, I realized at least three-quarters of the series is a recap of pre-Crisis history, COIE itself and then the post-Crisis reboot. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the ending moral had been “See, this is the kind of continuity heavy crap we used Crisis to get rid of!” But of course, it wasn’t.
I still enjoy his Justice Society run, though.
I’ve always figured the Silver Age retro stuff was mostly Dan Didio with Johns executing it. Didio was always emphatic that Barry and Hal were the only Real Flash and GL, Dick Grayson was useless if he wasn’t Robin (which I find several times more a WTF view) and I assume pushed to get Babs back in the Bat-suit.
By contrast Johns’ biggest retro impulse seems to be his fondness for the Seven Soldiers of Victory.
All of that sounds completely awful and, coming from Geoff Johns, not at all surprising.
For decades now, Marvel and DC comics have been written for and by people who grew up reading Marvel and DC comics and Johns is kind of the apotheosis of that.
As has already been pointed out, it’s ridiculous that Batman somehow wouldn’t figure out that there were three Jokers running around, but I also don’t buy that there’s any meaningful difference between the Joker who beat Jason Todd to death and the one who shot Barbara Gordon. Isn’t the whole point of the Joker supposed to be that he’s violently unpredictable? Making a sick philosophical point on one capper and then beating a kid to death just for the hell of it the next? In trying to resolve an inconsistency that never existed except in his own head, Johns has written a story that lessens both the Joker and Batman. Congratulations.
My impression wasn’t that John’s was tidying up an inconsistency. it felt more like he just wanted to invoke those two Joker landmarks and then had to rationalize these were not the same Joker (if they were, he couldn’t have had Jason kill the Clown). But yeah, the difference is obviously not that great.
Picking 1950s never-kills-anyone Joker and really making the Criminal the calculating killer of Batman #1 would have made more sense. But the Golden Age Joker would have whacked the Clown and the Comedian from sheer contempt.
Correction: For decades now, Marvel and DC comics have been written for and by people who grew up reading NOTHING BUT Marvel and DC comics and Johns is kind of the apotheosis of that.
This is a problem with creative areas outside comics too. I’ve seen the same complaint made about SF for years: the field has been around long enough that it’s possible to grow up reading nothing else, and some writers in the genre have indeed read nothing else.
Terry Pratchett once said:
“I’m tired of reading the people who’ve read the people who’ve read the people who’ve read Tolkien.”
Maybe… I don’t know. I wouldn’t call Johns the highest point / climax of the practice. I think that would have to go to Mark Waid or Kurt Busiek. Everybody else after them are just diminishing returns, in that aspect, IMO.
Three Jokers? You know, I can’t muster the energy to formulate some kind of coherent comment on the whole idea. I’ll just quote Doug, one of the proprietors of the now-defunct blog, Bronze Age Babies, who used this as the title for a series of posts: “That’s just dumb.”
Yikes. Knew it wasn’t worth the trouble to even look at, but… GAH!
Perhaps he will follow up with a story about the three Batmen: the Cop, the Vigilante, and the Planner.
Who knew there were 3 millionaire Bruce Waynes living in Gotham?
I like that!
Reminds me of Generations, with Superman and Batman changing over the years to match their various depictions in different decades.
I didn’t know Generations had done that! Interesting idea.
… though isn’t Superman effectively immortal?
I don’t know if Byrne played with that idea in the story, as it’s been a while since I did it. But yes, he does very well mimicking the various shifts in style and tone over the decades.