Do me a favor: bookmark this page.
Now.
Next time you read someone online asking,
"Why don't they just execute the Joker?"
Give them the link.
And remind them that.
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| "The Joker Walks The Last Mile", Batman #64, 1942 |
They already did. 81 years ago.
He got better.
Usually they don't ask why "they" don't execute the Joker, which I consider a reasonable question (where "they" is the courts). Usually the question is why Batman doesn't kill the Joker.
ReplyDeleteI feel like most of the modern canonical answers are dumb (such as Snyder's "if the Joker died Gotham would just create a worse one"), but I don't think I've seen a better answer than in "Gotham" when young Bruce confronted his parents' killer. He realized that Gotham perpetuates a cycle of evil through its many dysfunctional systems, and his parents' killer isn't a monster, just a man who was in some ways pressured, and some ways chose, to be one of the evil men of Gotham. And Bruce decided in that moment to not be part of the cycle.
My Hal-Jordan-loving battered noggin came up with this reason. Suppose hypothetically there's a really dysfunctional town with muggers, crime bosses, crooked cops, and supervillains; but even so the system still holds together because there's this one guy who's tough enough to beat any of 'em but he still submits to the system. What happens to the system when that guy decides he is no longer answerable, that he gets to decide who lives and who dies?
- HJF1
This question always annoys me, in the same way "why doesn't anyone recognize that Clark Kent is just Superman with glasses?" annoys me.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is the same: "it's a fundamental conceit of the medium".
Or put another way "because if they executed him there wouldn't be more Joker stories".
Comics publishing from the 1930s through at least the 1970s was driven by news-stand sales, which paid close attention to which characters were well received, and brought them back if they were. (That's why the Blob, no one's idea of a classic character, appears so often in the first twenty issues of X-MEN. At that moment, readers liked him, so his issues got a sales bump... and never since, which is why those frequent early apperances are baffling now.)
So the Joker keeps coming back because readers want more of him. That's it.
Notice in the real world that once colourful gangsters and serial killers get caught, they don't get out of prison. It's only in fiction that they constantly re-appear as heroic foils. It's a conceit of this fictional world that villains don't die, they get away or are incarcerated and easily escape again. If you push too hard on that concept, the whole thing falls apart... so don't.
(Sorry, I'm not trying to be peevish with you, Scipio, but rather with a particular kind of self-satisfied critic I've run into way too often.)
"The answer is the same: "it's a fundamental conceit of the medium"."
DeleteIn other words: It's In The Script.
""why doesn't anyone recognize that Clark Kent is just Superman with glasses?""
DeleteThere's an easy answer which could be demonstrated by someone (anyone) accusing Clark of being Superman:
"Oh, come on! You too?! EVERYBODY tells me I look like that guy!"
;-)
"why Batman doesn't kill the Joker." "Because that's very illegal" seems like a pretty obvious answer to me.
ReplyDelete"Sorry, I'm not trying to be peevish with you, Scipio," ha ha not at ALL, Andrew! That is certainly always the answer to , well, everything. I think some people are looking for a non-meta-explanational (which helps them sleep at night because then they can more easily pretend our comics are "realistic").
ReplyDelete"Suppose hypothetically there's a really dysfunctional town with muggers, crime bosses, crooked cops, and supervillains; but even so the system still holds together because there's this one guy who's tough enough to beat any of 'em but he still submits to the system. " This is half the Westerns I've ever seen :-)
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ReplyDelete""why Batman doesn't kill the Joker." "Because that's very illegal" seems like a pretty obvious answer to me."
ReplyDeleteAnd you know, that used to be all the answer anyone needed. Even small children would feel insulted if you tried to explain in small words that Batman thinks killing is bad and breaking the law is bad.
Alas, we live in an era where people confuse contrarianism with cleverness, so they'll stake out idiot positions like "maybe Batman is the real villain and the Joker is the real hero", and they'll keep arguing it because they feel that being contrary is evidence of how smart they are. It never occurs to them to actually have GOOD ideas.
- HJF1
My issue with the Joker is not that he isn't executed, it's that the scale of his crimes have been escalated far past his appropriate scope. If memory serves, he's been behind the murder of whole countries. He's certainly guilty of multiple mass murders of hundreds of Gotham citizens and cops. Joker is a crime boss, plain and simple. He can certainly be erratic and insane, but he should never operate beyond Gotham and, while murders are fine, huge, huge numbers of murders are ridiculous. Joker the international terrorist wouldn't need to worry about Batman, he'd have entire countries sending highly trained assassins to eliminate him. Even if you scale him down to Gotham mass murderer, Batman still wouldn't be the problem. If you murder thousands of people, there's a pretty good chance you'd have dozens of vengeance-crazed friends and family, and eventually one of them would succeed in killing him. The issue with the Joker isn't the concept or his relationship to Batman, it's the scope creep. He should be Cesar Romero's version with maybe a bit more edge, not some sort of apocalyptic angel of death.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree with you more, Bryan.
ReplyDeleteAs noted, Batman doesn't kill the Joker because DC will never allow the Joker to die. However, neither Batman nor the rest of the world are aware of this. Thus, to [most of?] the rest of the world, it looks like Batman is placing more value on his personal moral code than he places on the citizens of Gotham City and elsewhere. If Batman DID kill the Joker, DC will just bring him back, anyway, probably without explanation, and Batman would be faced with the realization that he violated one of his most cherished principles for nothing. Isn't the guy screwed up enough?
ReplyDeleteWhat I think is a "better" question is why doesn't one of Gotham City's notoriously corrupt police officers, or one of Arkham Asylum's dangerously unbalanced attendants, kill the Joker during one of those junctures when they have 24 hour access to him. Because here's the thing: If someone killed the Joker...NO ONE WOULD CARE. I doubt even Batman would care all THAT much. No jury in the world would send anyone to prison for killing the Joker. That person would be swimming in book deals and ticker-tape parades.
Within the confines of Batman's fictional universe, someone -- someone very powerful on multiple levels -- must have some practical purpose to keeping the Joker alive. We just have to wait until some DC writer or another figures out what it is, and tells us, that's all.
Of course, once the explanation has been exposed, we'll need a new explanation, because the Joker's STILL never going to be allowed to die. :-|
Well said, other Anonymous!
ReplyDeletePersonally I suspect Bruce Wayne believes in the death penalty, as an EXTREME option for maybe the Joker and one or two other truly dangerous criminals. He's not stupid; he can do the math. But the death penalty is a matter of courts and process, not Bruce Wayne's personal feelings.
... you know, if the Joker IS on death row, that could actually be a thing. Being on death row means years until the actual execution, so they could actually say that the courts have decided to give him the chair, but he keeps escaping.
Let me spitball about something. During "Infinite Crisis" almost 20 years ago, Alex Luthor floated the mystery of, the multiverse hinges on the existence of Superman, somehow. I always figured it was something like, the universes that DON'T have some sort of Superman eventually hit a crisis that wipes them out of existence. Could the Joker play some sort of similar role, like, the Joker pushes Batman to be his best, which makes him capable of filling some crucial role? I don't really like the idea, but it's not the worst idea DC's ever run with (I'm looking at you ROYBIV Corps).
- HJF1
Thank you, other Anonymous. I make the effort. :-)
DeleteSome people seem to think that "the system" can't execute the Joker because he's insane, but that's not how an insanity defense works. An insanity defense deals only with the LEGAL definition of insanity, not the medical definition, and is only viable if the defendant, at the time of his or crime(s), was genuinely unable to recognize or comprehend that what he or she was doing was illegal/wrong and worthy of punishment.
It doesn't matter how insane their reasons for breaking the law might be, all that matters is whether or not they *knew* that they were, in fact, BREAKING THE LAW.
One real-world example: Serial killer Richard Chase (1950-1980) murdered his victims because he, supposedly, believed that their deaths would prevent "Nazi UFOs" from killing him (the cannibalism and necrophilia were presumably just the lulz); he felt that he was acting to defend his own life. Yet, despite having this [to him] perfectly good reason for his actions, Chase knew that what he was doing was illegal/wrong, and he knew that if caught, he would be punished for it. It's for that reason that, when confronted by police, he fled. Upon his arrest and trial, Chase was found guilty and sentenced to be executed, although he killed himself before that could happen.
(I came across the case once and found it memorable, so sue me. The details are easily accessible on Wikipedia.)
Unless I'm much mistaken, The Joker is well aware that he is breaking the law. In fact, I think that, to him, that's part of the point. If murder was *legal*, he probably wouldn't think it was nearly as much "fun." :-|
Same with Two-Face. And with the Ventriloquist, Black Mask, the Riddler (who has a genuine mental disorder that drives him to leave clues to his own crimes (unless that's changed)), Harley Quinn, the Mad Hatter, and on and on and on. Even someone as divorced from reality as Maxie Zeus understands that his actions break "mortal laws," it's just that that doesn't matter to him. It doesn't matter to any of them.
"Legally sane," the lot of them. Yet there they are in Arkham. Shrug.
"ROYBIV"? What is that, the Rainbow Raider's screenname? No, of course it isn't. ;-)
DeleteWhat I was getting at is, the Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Indigo, and Violet Corps are dumb IMHO, while the Green Lantern Corps is fine. The GLC isn't dominated by any particular emotion, so you've got free will to be whoever you are. That's what makes it a good stable Corps. But all the other Corps are dominated by one emotion or other, and in my mind that should render them wildly unstable. Like, in the Yellow Corps, everyone should eventually be so consumed by fear that either they're spending all their time inflicting fear or they're constantly in a fetal position. Any ability to think, plan, or organize should be lost to all that fear. All the non-Green corps should be something like that, sort of like when college kids try to build a meth lab and blow up their building.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, the Rainbow Raider's actual name was Roy G. Bivolo.
- HJF1
I bailed on DC a long time ago, got tired of reboot after reboot after reboot, well before the introduction of the alternate Corps, so I didn't recognize the reference in the first place. Sorry about that. :-|
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