red hood was the joker before becoming the joker.
red hood was the joker before becoming the joker.
who was the joker before becoming the joker?
red hood
the character was introduced in "batman" #1 (1940), in which he announces that he will kill three of gotham's prominent citizens (including mayor henry claridge). although the police protect claridge, the joker had poisoned him before making his announcement and claridge dies with a ghastly grin on his face; batman eventually defeats him, sending him to prison. the joker commits whimsical, brutal crimes for reasons that, in batman's words, "make sense to him alone". "detective comics" #168 (1951) introduced the joker's first origin story as red hood: a criminal who, during his final heist, vanishes after leaping into a vat of chemicals to escape batman. his resulting disfigurement led him to adopt the name "joker", from the playing card figure he came to resemble. the joker's silver-age transformation into a figure of fun was established in 1952's "the joker's millions". in this story the joker is obsessed with maintaining his illusion of wealth and celebrity as a criminal folk hero, afraid to let gotham's citizens know that he is penniless and was tricked out of his fortune. the 1970s redefined the character as a homicidal psychopath. "the joker's five-way revenge" has the joker taking violent revenge on the former gang members who betrayed him; in "the laughing fish," the character chemically adds his face to gotham's fish (hoping to profit from a copyright), killing bureaucrats who stand in his way.
joker (character)
hunted by the police, batman's investigations shift towards discovering who framed him and how everything that has occurred since the joker's death factor together. he ultimately disguises himself, to find more information, only to discover a knife that the joker was holding the night he fell from the bridge, confirming that the joker is still alive. batman realizes, that with the joker's plans occurring over such a long period of time, his end goal is massive and threatens to destroy the entire city. the joker finally resurfaces on the roof of the gotham gasworks with the stolen blimp and his gang, where he reveals that he was behind the entire crime wave that occurred after faking his death by subtly manipulating the other villains and using isaac evers' research, having worked with the scientist and funded all his experiments and operations through his ill-conceived fortune, to produce large quantities of the highly flammable promethium. weeks earlier, the joker had arranged the fake kidnapping scheme to fake his own death in order to reside in the shadows and out of the police and batman's scope, while he manipulated the other villains; he sent mr. freeze the promotional tape on promethium to provoke him into attacking isaac's lair so his men could convince evers to hire their services in an insurance scam with the use of gotham gasworks, provided poison ivy with the plant enhancement chemical and used her schemes to rebuild gotham chemical to mass-produce his own signature joker toxin in a quiet fashion without batman noticing, and finally used harley to relay false information to batman to send him deeper into his plot at the gasworks and ultimately frame him for attacking commissioner gordon. using evers as a scapegoat for the gasworks scheme, the joker reveals that he manipulated batman into opening up the pipes to the sprinkler system, which the joker then plans to pump with his joker toxin, mixed with evers' altered drug to make it highly flammable, all over the city through a feed tube connected to the previously stolen blimp, now filled with the deadly compound, and burn the city to the ground, while its citizens choke to death on their own laughter. the villain's ultimate 'joke' is that gotham would be completely destroyed, with the punchline being batman had been unknowingly aiding due to the joker's manipulation. the clown prince of crime then prepares to escape in the blimp and watch gotham from above become engulfed in flames and toxin, leaving groups of his men, armed with explosives and flamethrowers, to slow the hero down. despite this, batman manages to shut down the gas flow, defeat all of the joker's thugs, and subdue harley quinn just in time to get on the joker's blimp before it takes to the sky. despite having stopped the flow of promethium and joker toxin into the sprinkler system, joker plans to use the remaining compound stored in the blimp to destroy the city by setting the blimp on a collision course with the heart of gotham, city hall, to explosively release the compound into the air. batman deteriorates the gas, and disables the auto-pilot after solving a mechanism created by the ace of knaves to protect the auto-pilot controls. the dark knight manages to defeat the joker and destroys the blimp, taking his archenemy back to arkham asylum. as mr. freeze, poison ivy, harley and the joker sit in arkham asylum, commissioner gordon calls batman to apologize and inform him that harley's fingerprints were found on the batarang that hit him. batman looks out over the city as the bat-signal ignites on him.
batman: vengeance