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Posted in: Batman, Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: jorge jimenez, matt fraction, The Joker
What's With The Way The Joker Looks In Batman? And How Did He Survive?
What's up with the way The Joker looks in Batman? And how did he survive DC's K.O.? Matt Fraction spills it all (well, some of it)
Article Summary
- Matt Fraction reveals why The Joker looks so bloated in his latest Batman run and how he survived DC's K.O.
- The Joker’s bizarre appearance is tied to Dr. Zeller’s experiments and the mysterious Crown Of Storms.
- Inspired by real-life neurobiology, The Joker’s "super-sanity" influences his mind and metabolism.
- Fraction credits Grant Morrison’s concept: The Joker reinventing himself daily to handle the world’s chaos.
In a recent appearance on the BIFF! BAM! POW! podcast, writer Matt Fraction talked about his current Batman run with Jorge Jimenez, noting that have sales climbing issue after issue, an rarity in today's market, with Fraction describing the run as "the most fun I've had in work-for-hire comics," crediting the freedom to get far ahead in scripting (at one point scripting deep into future arcs) and the luxury of rewriting issues privately.
And also how it all ties in with DC's K.O., why the Joker is as bloated as he is, and it turns out that being stabbed in the back and killed by Batman wasn't enough to dispatch him…
…and that Dr Zeller's experiments on him with the Crown Of Storms are very much based on real life.
The super-sanity of The Joker
"He gets the sh-t knocked out of him in DC's KO, so something happens between there and this, and who knows what it is. There's something I believe Grant Morrison came up with in Arkham Asylum with Dave McKean: that the Joker has super-sanity; he has to reinvent himself every day to try and keep up with all the stimuli the world throws at him that he can't regulate. And I have a friend who's a neurobiologist, and we were talking about stuff, and I read things about people with profound, untreatable depression issues."
"And this guy built a cap that regulates electricity. He had a patient whose entire life was depressive episodes, suicide attempts, institutionalisations, in an endless cycle, and at some point, on an MRI or a CT scan or something, he saw that some part of her brain wasn't lighting up as it should be. And he went to RadioShack and just made it; it literally just pings 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 one year, and she was engaged to be married, like everything was different for this woman. It's just kind of playing with all this stuff like, what if that super sanity is generating like all this electrical activity beyond what people are supposed to have in your brain, and that's why he's so thin all the time, he's like just burning like a marathon's worth of calories every day, just being alive… And what happens if you stop that? That's where we meet our boy is in a tube, and because now his metabolism has stopped, he's not wraith-like and thin anymore."
Maybe not super-sanity, Matt, but what about his super vanity?
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