False Facts About The Joker You Always Believed

Publish date: 2024-05-03

It's tough to deny that the Joker was a hit from the very beginning. He's one of the few characters who made his first and second appearances in the same comic — Batman #1 features them both, broken up with Catwoman's first appearance. It's even harder to argue that the Joker isn't the most popular Batman villain, and probably the most popular villain in the entire superhero genre today. He's in the canon of the all-time great antagonists, and it's nearly impossible to imagine Batman comics without him. 

With all that in mind, it's easy to think that the Clown Prince of Crime had that same amount of popularity for the 70-odd years in the middle, too. That's not actually the case, though. In fact, there was a time when the Joker's stock had fallen so low that there wasn't a new Joker story in the pages of Batman or Detective Comics for over four years. Today it's pretty rare for four months to go by without getting some kind of Joker appearance. Also, keep in mind back then, comics usually had three complete stories in every issue rather than a single story, built around a single villain, that ran for five or six months at a time.

As for why he was persona non grata for so long, there are a couple reasons. First, the years in question were 1969 to 1973, which coincided with the end of the Batman TV show. While the show had been a huge hit, the die-hard comics audience at the time was eager to get away from campy humor and back to more "serious" adventures. The Joker, as one of the more outlandish Arch-Criminals featured on the show, was closely identified with those goofy adventures.

Of course, there's another reason that has very little to do with the Joker's popularity — at least, among the fans. The Batman books were being edited at the time by Julius Schwartz, who had been brought on to revive the fading titles in 1964, and he just flat-out was not a fan of the character. That would explain both why his appearances were pretty sporadic in the '60s in general — and allegedly only fueled because he was so popular on the show — and why his few appearances between '69 and '73 happened in titles Schwartz was not editing, like Brave and the Bold and Justice League of America. 

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