Joker Reveals a Major Difference Between His DCAU & Mainstream Versions
The DCAU’s Joker is a crazed killer, but his recent refusal to help defeat Batman shows how he’s different from the villain’s mainstream depictions.
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Warning: contains spoilers for Batman: The Adventures Continue: Season Two #7!
While the Joker is widely acknowledged as the craziest of Batman’s many enemies, it turns out that in the reality of Batman: The Animated Series, he does have limits. In mainstream comics, Joker is generally seen as an amoral agent of chaos who’ll do anything to get under Batman’s skin, but it turns out his DCAU self draws the line at getting involved in politics.
Recent issues of Batman: The Adventures Continue: Season 2 have centered around Emerson Mayfield, a former Mayor of Gotham City, who Batman blackmailed into resigning rather than having his corruption exposed. Mayfield made a surprising comeback in a run for reelection to the Mayor’s seat, despite the circumstances of how he left office. Batman determined this was because Mayfield had bought the assistance of the Mad Hatter, who had constructed a special cane for Mayfield that allowed him to mesmerize audiences and leave most people convinced he was a good man who honestly cared for them.
With Batman on the verge of exposing their scheme, Mayfield and the Mad Hatter, Jervis Tetch, travel to Arkham Asylum to make a special Election Day stump speech. Mayfield promises the villains that if they helped him to destroy Batman once and for all, his first act as Mayor will be to shut down Arkham Asylum forever and grant them all full pardons for their past crimes. While Two-Face, Scarecrow and the Riddler are game to join Mayfield’s campaign, the Joker isn’t interested.
The Joker’s reasons for not helping Mayfield are simple enough, saying that he finds politics “boring” and “predictable.” So strong are his convictions that he literally sits out the ensuing fight, watching TV as Batman and Robin arrive to beat down the villains and bring Mayfield to justice. The Joker does interrupt the fight, however, to inform Emerson Mayfield that the election results have been announced and that he has lost, laughing because “dirty tricks, smear campaigns, even mind control” weren’t enough to get the public to vote for Mayfield. Ironically, Batman has to step in and save the Joker after Mayfield begins trying to strangle him.
The fact that Batman: The Animated Series’ Joker is so deeply uninterested in politics is surprising given the mainstream villain has famously dabbled with whatever tools allow him to torture Batman. In Batman #428, for example, Joker temporarily escapes consequences for murdering Robin by becoming the Iranian ambassador to the UN, gaining diplomatic immunity. In Batman: Dark Detective #1, Joker threatens to kill Gotham’s elite unless they vote for him as governor, and in the recent alternate-universe Suicide Squad: Get Joker, it’s revealed Joker is funded by the Russian government to spread chaos in America.
Like many villains before him, Joker has often been caught up in politics and even used to tell political stories, but Batman: The Animated Series’ art deco aesthetic and noir themes call for more timeless characters, and Joker’s disdain for politics suits a world less concerned with topical commentary.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/joker-dcau-btas-batman-animated-series-politics-comics/