Batman: Three Jokers Was a Mistake

the true identity of the Joker has always been one of the greatest mysteries in DC Comics but it's been left unexplored because it would kind of ruin the character for instance the iconic Killing Joke proposes An Origin story of a washed up comedian who's unable to provide for his pregnant wife and turns to a life of crime as a result but this was most likely not true and frankly it doesn't even matter because the Joker doesn't remember his past and if he did he would rather it be multiple choice but in 2015 Batman literally dethroned

Metron the god of knowledge and sat in his Mobius chair a seat that gave Bruce access to all of the knowledge and secrets of the universe naturally Wayne was skeptical so he asked the question who killed Thomas and Martha Wayne the answer of course is the common criminal Joe Chill but then Batman went deeper asking what is the Joker's true name and the answer shocked him to his core at the end of the story we learned that the chair said there's not just one Joker but instead three and funnily enough when DC finally gave us

an explanation there's not one there's three so I guess that's nine jokers in total how exactly does that work well hello and welcome to Comic Drake where I talk about comic books my name is Drake let's talk about it if you're interested in checking out the books that I talk about in this video then the easiest way is through today's sponsor Global Comics they are straight up the best digital comic platform out there and now that they have books from DC it has gotten even better Batman Superman and even my all-time favorite superhero Booster Gold

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with the mobus chair is Justice League Volume 2 written by Jeff Johns and illustrated by Jason fabok in 2015 and a couple years later that same Duo announced a new book simply called Batman 3 Jokers fans were hyped that this mystery was finally going to be explored and DC led into it by building up this comic as the next big thing as it was going to be one of the first books under their new Black Label imprint a line of comics that were meant for serious and mature audiences only I mean their very first book

Batman damned had full frontal bat nudity for crying out loud but not just that well the Black Label not the nudity but DC was promising this was going to be the biggest and most important Joker story since the killing joke and John and fabok explained in interview after interview about how inspired they were and how they were trying to Channel The Killing Joke into three Jokers but funnily enough despite literally being called three Jokers the book itself doesn't really focus on them instead it's about Batman Batgirl and red hood and how they each handle pain

and Trauma and healing from it now it is by no means a bad comic and it has lots of great moments like Bruce forgiving Joe Chill for murdering his parents and being there in his final moments as he succumbs to cancer but it also had a lot of truly baffling decisions like trying to push Jason and into a relationship I hate everything about that evidently though the end result is that John's presented the three Jokers as representing the different eras of the character's publication history each with their own convenient labels so you can try to

keep track of them the first is the Golden Age aka the criminal and he doesn't laugh now why so serious well that's because the Joker wasn't always laughing and Performing wacky hijinks when he first appeared back in the' 40s he was more of a menacing and calculating Mastermind with more than his fair share of scows now granted back in the day did smile and laugh plenty but in three Jokers this guy doesn't laugh because it physically hurts him but when the comics code authorities started cracking down on comic Publishers in the silver Age The Joker

became a much more comical character which is represented here by the clown he's the one that wielded Rubber Chickens chattering teeth and those acid spraying flowers but after a substantial Hiatus and a lightning of the CCA the clown returned in the Bronze Age as a darker and more Sinister presence being the Joker from The Killing Joke who shot Barbara Gordon and killed Jason in the death of the family but the final Joker is the modern Incarnation the sadistic agent of chaos who just wants to watch the world burn this is the one that sliced off

his own face and wore it as a mask the comedian although they've hidden the fact that there have apparently been three of them this entire time the Jokers reveal the secret to the bat family and an attempt to find the perfect candidate to transform into a better Joker one that has more of a personal connection and meaning to Batman at first it set up that Jason Todd is going to become this better Joker I mean it would be perfect since he literally took up the Joker's original identity of red hood when he came back to

life so if he then transitioned into the Joker yeah it's poetic the clown even managed to get taught to cross that line and violate the bat family's no kill policy by taunting Jason with his final words as he was bludging to death with a crowbar please stop please if you let me live I'll do anything you say I'll be your Robin and look at you now my little red hood shooting up people and making Batman's life miserable you are my Robin but Jason was ultimately deemed not bright enough to become the next Joker so the

remaining two moved on to a better candidate Joe Chill which I guess would make him Joker this certainly would give him meaning and it's not unprecedented since Batman 89 already made the guy that killed the wayes eventually become the clown Prince of Crime however earlier in the book Bruce had found a stack of unsent letters in chill's jail cell learning to that he had truly become a changed man while in prison and he wanted to apologize to Bruce for killing his parents and then Batman saves chill's life back to back at the end of the

book first from falling into the pit of Joker acid and then from a wall that was collapsing in all of the intense chaos the comedian kills the criminal and turns himself in and revealed his master plan to Batman in the back of the police F he had been pulling the strings to eliminate the other two jokers and also made chill into the candidate for the next Joker because he wanted Bruce to move on from him because by healing his greatest wound the comedian could officially become the greatest pain in Bruce's life and he also makes

the note that he'll never tell who the original Three Jokers actually was did he create me did I create him I'll never tell and this keeps the mystery of his origin alive for both Bruce and the readers except uh he didn't because we learned that Bruce has actually known the Joker's real name since the first week after their first encounter but he's kept it a secret this entire time so the world will leave the Joker's family alone since they're in witness protection and on top of that that family is pretty obviously the one from The

Killing jokes backstory which goes against the entire point of that comic in the first place and its iconic monologue about having a multiple choice backstory and on top of that despite being the same creative team that introduced the three Jokers Concept in Justice League all of the stuff about the Mobius chair was never mentioned in this comic so is it even Canon well before it came out Jeff John's was adamant about it explicitly taking place in continuity I've never really told a story Batman story I've done Batman Earth one but that's a different Young you

know kind of um lowtech version of Batman in my head and and this was the first time I I had the chance to write a real Batman story in continuity with the joker and there's so many Amazing Stories out there about the Joker but after its release Jason fabok said quote it's Inc continuity like Killing Joke is you can take it or leave it we're going to introduce some pretty gutsy stuff in Jokers that's never been done before so the fans can react to it and they can decide if they want it part of the

main continuity or not like Killing Joke and there in lies the problem The Killing Joke was originally meant to be a non-cannon story but fans loved it so much that DC went on ahead and made a cannon conversely fans universally did not like the three Jokers mostly because it was trying so damn hard to be the next Killing Joke and missing the mark so because of that reception DC basically went okay fine it's not canon but then there's a new problem that Mobius chair scene is Canon so now the three Jokers are back to being

unanswered enter chips zarski he took over the Batman comic in 2022 and in his very first issue Bruce had a nightmare about the three Jokers which reintroduced this concept to readers now look I'm going to be totally real Chip is one of my all-time favorite comic writers but uh this book is a weird and all over the place mess so like the penguin faked his death to frame Batman for his murder which activates a robot fail save that was designed to take out Batman in the event that he ever crosses the line and intentionally kills

someone now very long story short fail safe teleports Bruce to an alternate universe where he encounters a dude named Halliday who is this universe's version of The Joker but he never got transformed so he still has all of his sanity now that being said he does know about the main Universe Joker because of Multiverse gas and is trying to become the Crown Prince of Crime but instead of recreating the pole of chemicals he builds a machine that runs on multiversal energy to connect to the main Universe Joker because Comics now this machine works and connects

holiday to the moment of Joker's creation but he isn't able to properly connect so he tries again and the same issue occurs but here's the thing it turns out that every time that he connects to the Joker's origin with the machine he's actually creating new Jokers Halliday discovers that his purpose in life is literally to create Jokers and in the scene of his origin we see three of them in one panel asking if holiday is up to make a fourth now one could argue that this panel is ambiguous and that there's not actually three of

them but rather the artist showcasing Motion in a single panel plus a later issue shows that the next part of the scene has the three Jokers attack and kill one another until only one remains which is again ambiguous as it could be the internal conflict within the Joker's mind as he begins his descent into madness now sure I would totally believe that but the issue ends with holay Naruto running into the machine and then pinballing across the Multiverse resurrecting dead jokers in Batman 89 and the Arc of games and Batman Beyond and so much more

and in the event that he goes to a universe that doesn't have a joker well then surprise there's one now and you know what's Wild just a few issues later chip revealed a completely unrelated origin for the three Jokers and it's almost just as complicated as the last one to explain in the iconic flash of Two Worlds comic DC segmented off their classic Golden Age Comics into an alternate universe of Earth 2 and with it a lot of the sillier moments in Batman's history were separated from the main continuity but not every writer thought that

that was a good idea for Better or For Worse those early Batman comics helped shape the cape Crusader into the character that he is today and to pretend like those wacky moments never happened plays a huge disservice to the history of this iconic character at least that was the thought process behind the legendary Batman writer Grant Morrison and in their iconic run Morrison sought to integrate the classic elements of the dark Knight's past but recontextualized them for a modern audience notably for this video back in the 50s there was an alien from the planet zurar

that was inspired by Bruce to become the Batman of his planet with a garish red yellow and purple costume now Morrison integrated this into modern Batman Mythology by having zurar kind of be like a a backup personality that Bruce can slip into in the event of psychic attacks and as zari's run chip further expanded upon his lore and basically made Zur into the big bad of his entire run Chip's book explains that Bruce learned the ability to create backup personalities during the time that he was training to become Batman specifically from a mentor named Daniel

capito who taught Wayne how to fully harness his brain and push his mind to the absolute limit so he can be the best both physically and mentally however capito wanted to see what would happen if Bruce met his true opposite and thus he sought out and trained The Joker teaching him how to create multiple distinct backup personalities the clown is your standard Joker he's jovial but evil the demon is just that raw Unholy wickedness and finally there's the cold death a calm and collected Joker something that's interesting to note though is that capito said that

if he believed in heaven and hell that he could absolutely believe that the demon had existed for Millennia which when combined with the sliick back hairstyle seems to be a reference to Scott Snider's Batman run where he was playing around with the idea of Joker actually being an immortal God because Comics honestly I am satisfied with this three personalities angle because I absolutely hate the idea of their physically being three Jokers all running around because it does make the character more interesting it just makes him way more convoluted and hard to follow at the end

of the day I'm just glad that this whole mess is finally over with and we can move the hell on but um I made a theory video about 8 years ago about how the comedian from Watchmen was going to be revealed as one of the three Jokers and you better believe that I lost my when I read Batman 3 Jokers and found out that one of them is labeled the comedian yes I was totally wrong with the theory but um I'm willing to take that as a partial win but but anyway guys I hope you

learned at least a little something new and enjoyed this video and hopefully I'll see you next time