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DC is revamping the Joker with a new status quo inspired by Batman: Arkham Asylum
Batman writer Matt Fraction shares the reasoning behind the Joker's new look in DC Comics
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You may have noticed that in the pages of Matt Fraction and Jorge Jiménez's Batman run, the Joker is looking a bit different than usual. In Batman #7, he was reintroduced after the events of the DC K.O. event, looking heavier than usual, and suspended in a medical tank. In fact, he can't even verbally communicate anymore, as he has a mask on that delivers "nutrients and oxygen" to him, while "cranial implants convert his thoughts to speech and transmit external sound to him in real time." He's not exactly the rail-thin chatterbox of yore anymore.
On the BIFF! BAM! POW! Podcast, Fraction shared that the Joker's current form in DC Comics is part of a new status quo for the character. Readers who may have thought, "Wait, did I miss something?" when they opened up Batman #7 and saw him floating in a tank haven't, in fact, missed anything.
“We’re just here [now]. All kinds of stuff happens, who knows. He gets the shit knocked out of him in DC K.O., something happens between there and this - who knows what it is? Yeah, he’s been medically paralyzed, he’s pipped, he’s got pip needles out of his spine. I was always struck by this thing, I believe Grant Morrison came up with in Arkham Asylum with Dave McKean, where oh, Joker’s got super sanity. He has to reinvent himself every day to try and keep up with all the stimulus of the world he can’t regulate," Fraction began.
"I’ve got a friend who is a neurobiologist and we were talking about stuff, and I had read things with people who had profound untreatable depression issues, and this guy built like a cap and it regulates electricity. He had a patient whose entire life was depressive episodes, suicide attempts, institutionalizations in an endless cycle, and at some point in an MRI or CT scan he noticed some part of her brain wasn’t lighting up like it should be. And it sounds like he went to RadioShack and literally just pinged the dark parts of her mind, and at the time of the article, her life had changed. She had held a job for more than a year, she was engaged to be married, everything was different to this woman… What if that super sanity is generating all this electrical activity beyond what people are supposed to have in their brain, and it’s why he’s so thin all the time, he’s just burning a marathon’s worth of calories every day just being alive. What happens if you stop that?”
With this in mind, it's easy to see how Fraction's learning about neurobiology has shaped his version of the Joker. There are lines of dialogue in Batman #7 that discuss the Joker's electrical activity in his brain. And with this added context, it's fascinating how Fraction grounded his Joker with an actual scientific basis.
Batman is the most well-known superhero in the world — surprisingly, given how much he loves hanging out in the dark. But between his comics, TV shows, movies, games, and more, DC's Dark Knight is the hero this city/country/world/universe needs, and we have all you need to enjoy him even more:
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