Bronze Age Spotlight: The Joker

Editor's Note: Today I am happy to present another Bronze Age Spotlight from Crom who last gave us a great spotlight on Luke Cage. Today Crom has returned and offers us his opinions on The Joker series from the 70's. - Jim

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Death of a Clown

So you’ve finished reading your book for the night, your glass of milk is empty. You ease the bindings shut, and place it back on the shelf while reaching over to turn the reading light off -- and that’s when you see the clown standing on your lawn, his painted smile wheezing hot breath, fogging your living room window.

While you entertain this nightmare, it should come as no surprise that The Joker was voted, time and time again, as the highest rated villain in comic history. There are few things that chill the blood as much as the knock knock joke that melts off a face. But the Joker can deliver, so naturally they tried to push him out from under the Bat shaped shadow, into his own circus spotlight.

In 1975, DC commissioned two of its veterans to come up with The Joker’s own book. Julius Schwartz, long time editor in the DC universe, and at the helm of the Batman title since the mid-60’s, got together with Denny O’Neil, a writer that Schwartz himself advocated to DC. O’Neil had already been writing the Batman book for a few years, and had a grip on the characters. It seemed like a bullet proof idea.

The series only managed to pump out nine issues, and the quality being what it was - nine issues too many. The Joker pushed the clown antics of the character to the top, and shrank the vicious acts down to nothing more than a few seemingly random acts of violence. Playing tag with Two-Face, coaching dime-store criminals through their post-thieving crying jags, and general tom-foolery worthy of Benny Hill, the book painted what was a symbol of humanity’s horror’s, into a buffoon who occasionally drops a safe on someone.

O’Neil and Schwartz fell victim to the Clown.

The Clown: is a violent, horrible fellow, but even with grotesque costumes, and exaggerated features, the clown still makes us laugh. The Clown creates a frame through his performance. It lets us consider the sad, wobbling failures of humanity, but at a distance - outside of ourselves. By employing the prat fall, the clown can show us our doubts, fears, and sadness, all through the catharsis of laughter.

The Joker: is a violent, horrible fellow, who laughs alone. The Joker shatters the frame, and perverts the performance so that the failure of humanity is brought close to home by making his audience live it. The tools of the clown; the smiling face, the odd costume, joy buzzers, and balloons are used as a key past our defenses, but with the Joker - it’s to fill us with terror.

The book embraced the former, and forgot the latter. It’s difficult to feel the full power of fear the Joker is capable of when he’s robbing a gum-ball machine, and spraying Onion juice in your eyes, only to detonate an explosive whoopie cushion on a security guard, so that he can steal a box of novelty items, that serve no narrative purpose.

His performance was neutered and made laughable; antics without truth. They forgot why he wears the purple suit, the face like makeup. Why there’s balloons and toys, with happy music. They forgot the most important part of Joker.

There’s nothing funny about that Clown in your window.

Top 10 Most ridiculous Moments in The Joker

#10 - Joker as Batman... As Joker?
In Issue nine, The Joker's attempt to steal a famous cat actor is foiled by none other than the Catwoman. But when the Catwoman knocks out the Joker, pretending to be a famous actor, he's forced to track down the real deal in order to snatch back the kitty he intended to ransom.

In the midst of his plans, Benny Springer, the movie clown, plays both villains for fools, by dressing up as the Joker himself. Giving us four pages of the Joker battling the Joker.

#9 Rodney Dangerfield providing weapons?
In issue 6, The Joker squares off against Sherlock Holmes; or at least a dazed actor who believes he’s the world’s greatest detective. While fighting on a golf course, The Joker momentarily distracts Holmes by firing a net out of a club-filled golf bag. Very reminiscent of Caddyshack technology.

#8 Overkill
We all know Joker is an irrational being, but in issue 5, he goes from irrational, to downright silly. In his thirst for novelty items, The Joker detonates a warehouse guy an explosion that appears to vaporize half the room. Then makes off with a crate of gag items, worth approximately ten dollars.

#7 Onion juice... seriously?
In issue 2, The Joker is pursued throughout by two bungling Arkham guards, who are determined to get their jobs back by capturing the Clown Prince again. When they confront him on the street, he produces two small bulbs, and squeezes them, shooting onion juice into their eyes.

#6 Need a light?
For no apparent reason, The Joker feels compelled to horrible murder a guard, who isn’t guarding anything in issue 5. When the guard asks for a light, The Joker produces a small zippo-type lighter, that sprays a jet of fire into the guards face, who laughs while burning. Ridiculous, and disturbing...

#5 Super Stretch Arms!
As an Arkham guard attempts to bring Joker in, he discovers that the arms he’s attached his cuffs too, are in fact another great punchline. As they snap back, tripping the guard, Joker covers his mouth, with a knockout juice soaked rag...

#4 Bottle Rockets. No, I’m not kidding...
In issue 7, Joker and Lex Luthor are hanging out togther, as they typically do (wha?). Forced to make a daring escape from a road side diner, Luthor fills up several pop bottles with “paint scraped off the walls” and a few other doo-dads, to create pop-bottle jets. He and Joker fly off into another daring escape.

#3 Making off with the Gumballs...
In issue 2, the Joker befriends a fellow thief, with a really emotional problem. Any time Willy The Weeper steals something, he breaks into a fit of tears. The Joker, determined to cure him, takes him out to start stealing on a small scale, in order to dispel his crying. This results in Willy and the Clown Prince of Crime, robbing a gumball machine. That’s right... they steal all the pennies inside.

#2 Mag... Pie?
While squaring off against the Scarecrow, The Joker is forced to deal with his annoying Crow, that spreads fear toxin around the area. In order to dispatch it, The Joker hurls an intricately iced cake at the bird, which promptly detonates like ten pounds of dynamite. However, fret not PETA, as in the very next panel, it's revealed that the bird survived the explosion (via editorial mandate no doubt.)

#1 Two Face gets Blinded by Hair
In issue one, the Joker spends much of the issue attempting to foil Two Face's latest scheme because the duel natured dastard refused to free the Joker from prison while escaping. The Joker spends the issue thwarting Two Face at every turn with tried and true Joker gimmicks (creme filled pies laced with acid.) However, the highlight of the issue is when Joker stymies Two Face by throwing his own steel-like hair into Harvey’s eyes.

Have a great weekend!

- Crom

Bronze Age Spotlight: A Theory of Power

Editor's Note: Today's Bronze Age Spotlight introduces a new writer to the Flashback Universe Team: Crom! Crom is a fiction and film writer for 2nd Culture, an IP creation company. Crom prefers the rocket launcher to the rail gun, Marvel to DC, and Classical to Post-modern. Crom is not a robot from the future, but we're not sure about his illegitimate offspring. You can learn more at his cromunhinged.com.

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A risk inherent to reading the 1970’s Luke Cage, AKA Powerman, in this day and age is having one’s mind exploded by an overload of stereotypes, dialogue and cliches which run from quaint to outright racist

The story begins with our protagonist (who seems to only be called Lucas in the first story), very black, and very in jail, (it's okay though, he was framed). There is hope for his release... not through his innocence, but as a White Doctor’s guinea pig. The Doctor offers to experiment on Lucas' body in exchange for a full pardon... just kidding, more like vague promises. This experiment could cure the seriously ill, even stop the aging process. But why try it on the old, or the ill when perfectly healthy, mid-twenties Black men are abundant in maximum security prisons?

As it does with all comic book Doctors willing to subject human beings to experiments, things turn to the ridiculous... and for Lucas, add 30 CCs more racism.

Bathing in the salty brine of the "electro-chemical solution", Lucas is confronted by his token prison oppressor, Rackham - the red-neck advocate of the issue. Intent on frying our hero, he hatefully twists the special science-knobs. The searing chemicals penetrate Lucas's body, and from the hate-stew emerged Whitey's ironic nightmare: steely skinned Luke Cage - Blacker ‘an ever.

With one mighty swing of his powerful cliche, Lucas smashes his way free of the miracle healing/death chamber, and keeps on punching till he’s escaped prison. Now a drifter, Lucas makes his way back to New York, to Harlem, and the streets he grew up on. And after beating the living shit out of a random kid, decides that New York needs his super powered skills as a private dick.

Seriously - after picking up the pieces of my mind, I thought about how this story could have came into being...

When 1972 hit, the blaxploitation movement was getting a full head of steam. The previous year had yielded two of the biggest films to make the scene: Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song and the more well known Shaft. The Black badass had arrived. It was an archetype soon placed into mass production.

Archie Goodwin probably woke up screaming in bed, one spring morning. The gravy train of Blaxploitation was pulling away from the platform, and Archie needed to dive for the caboose. Luke Cage was born.

Marvel had been no stranger to the Black Super Hero. Two major Black characters had already set the stage. The Prowler; a villain from the Spider Man gallery; intriguing in his own way. His costume had a unique flavour, and unlike many of Parker’s other villains, wasn’t absurdly zoomorphic. The other was The Black Panther, the next property in line to be ruined by Wesley Snipes.

But The Prowler and Black Panther were Black characters with strong characteristics and a clear vision. Our man Luke Cage was a cat of another stripe.

Where The Black Panther traded on strong roots into the cultural history of African origins, and a moral ideal for Black and White people alike, Luke Cage was a pop culture Frankenstein. As I read Hero For Hire, I was more and more inclined to think of the main character not as the edgy protagonist that blaxploitation such as Shaft could create, but instead as a caricature of that protagonist through the eyes of the whitest boy to ever come out of Kansas City. Goodwin’s premiere tale in “Luke Cage: Hero For Hire” feels like a suburban distillation of the civil rights movement as seen from the back of a theater.

With Archie Goodwin’s death in 1998, and Stan Lee now an animatronic film extra, it’s unlikely we could ever get a straight account of what prompted Marvel to create Luke Cage. The obvious answer is that Goodwin was secretly Black, and decided that the forum of Marvel was his Mount Sinai.

The whole affair feels clumsy and awkward, like an ill-conceived publishing stunt, perpetrated on the naive white teens who watched movies like Shaft, Black Belt Jones, Sweet, and assumed they were reading Anthropology textbooks.

The backstory of a wrongly accused, young Black man, abused in jail by white supremacist guards is nearly prototypical. The metaphorical language of his ascension to power is clunky. The writing is confused, as if written in the late hours while caging lines from Richard Roundtree. Their turning point takes place in a hot tub. For the love of god.

However, let's give Marvel credit for publishing a comic with a black hero as the star and resisting the urge to use the word Black in the title. You KNOW they just wanted to call him Black Power Man. (Which is probably how he ended up with the name of Power Man later on.)

On the flipside - whatever voice of reason inspired them to forego this annoying tradition seems to have left them two years later, as issue 24 of Power Man of sees the long awaited arrival of Black Goliath. :\

Artistically, the artwork of George Tuska and Billy Graham, like most everything else about the comic, was extremely competent, but hardly revolutionary. Before we completely dismiss the lot of them though, we should remember that they were never given a lot of time to find the characters, or the heart of their story. Goodwin was replaced after five issues by Steve Englehart, and he was only able to get another sixteen out before the series was re-imagined.

The departure of Goodwin and arrival of Steve Englehart on the title prompted a fall into the classic comic mold; oddly shaped midgets in goofy costumes, trying to steal famous diamonds. The social commentary, already thinly scraped across the toast of the narrative, was gone. Now the jive-talking, the street knowledge and the trappings of The Black Power Movement had been bussed out of the comic.

Like the movies, blaxploitation in comics was a quickly killed fad. The book only lasted another fifty issues, when the character was joined with another Marvel cult hero, giving rise to “Powerman & Iron Fist”. The attempt to jiu-jitsu the status of Black people from their martyrdom into heroes was a step along a social path to equality, but it possessed all the nutrition of cotton candy with maple syrup. Fortunately with the team-up, Luke Cage was nursed along for many years until he would later find a solid narrative, with interesting people, and a rich spirituality in the hands of other writers.

Which will no doubt be ruined by Snipes in the future.