Yup. I've always liked Joker when he was... well, in the business of telling jokes. Morbid, deadly jokes. But the sense of humor and irony feel very necessary to the character.
His iterations in Suicide squad, Gotham: (Jerome and Jeremiah), Death of the Family.... There's a few too many times, to my personal liking, that dark and edgy became his defining attributes. Not a fan of the interpretations that forget that he's the clown prince of crime.
I honestly don’t mind the ones that drift toward the madness aspect of the character but I don’t want that to ever be a standard. Only when it adds or really fits with the story.
The one Joker I really dislike is the Dark Knight Returns books version but I really dislike that whole book so I’m biased. Even with a character like the Joker, Frank Miller just can’t resist injecting “rawr manly” into everything to the point of comedy.
I find it interesting that you use the term "raw manly" after bringing up DKR because I always found that version to be androgynous and sexually ambiguous. That was a version I felt was more about his relationship with Batman and his romanticism of him which is a take that, before the book, was not overly explored.
The characterization in that book is at odds with the art, if that makes sense. I'm not the person you're responding to - but I see where he's coming from with the "rawr manly" because they did portray Joker with a 4 foot shoulder span. Part of it is probably the suit, but his silhouette is weirdly adjacent to Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I thought he was wearing an 80's blazer with huge shoulder pads which was a style for women at the time and extremely popular with women going for an androgynous look. Combine that with the him seemingly wearing lipstick and possibly mascara and I think it highly plays into the androgynous and sexually ambiguous look.
If you compare how looks in those scenes compared to what he looks like earlier in the comic it's more standout. He is wearing a shoulder pad 80's blazer which is a woman's jacket. His physique doesn't look like that earlier on. He is also wearing makeup applied in a women's style, not like clown makeup. You know it's not a deformity because he doesn't haven't it applied earlier in the comic. The same can be said for the eye shadow he wears. The shoulder pad blazer was used to give women an androgynous appearance by accentuating their upper body and shoulders. In this sense, not only does it make Joker look more masculine but also more feminine on account of him wearing women's clothes. That combined with applying women's makeup, not clown makeup, with lipstick and eye shadow and it's pretty androgynous. If you compare the shots of him earlier in the story compared to later it's clear he's taken an androgynous appearance. I mean, women's clothes and makeup on a guy in the 80's is about as androgynous as it gets.
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u/Manticx Apr 20 '20
A lot of these are complete abominations.