Joker question

[Jack Bauer]

When did The Joker become very eccentric. Was he always like in the beginning of comics or until the 60's TV?

 

[Bathead]

Not sure. When I started with Batman in the 60's (before Adam West), he was already the "wacky" guy he was in the TV show. In his first appearance in Batman #1, he wasn't wacky at all. Sometime in the 50's would be my guess.

 

[Clouseau]

from wikipedia:

The Joker is a master criminal with a clown-like appearance. While later Golden and early Silver Age writers of Batman comic books portrayed him as a goofy trickster-thief, the earliest and most recent writers depict him as a violent psychopath who murders people for fun.

...

In his initial dozen or so appearances, starting with Batman #1 (1940), the Joker is a straightforward mass murderer, much like a typical Dick Tracy villain, with a bizarre appearance modeled after the playing card. He is a master thief who left smiling corpses in his wake. It is of note that in his second appearance ("The Joker Returns", also in Batman #1), the Joker was actually slated to be killed off, with the final page detailing the villain accidentally stabbing himself and lying dead as Batman and Robin run off into the night. Fortunately, DC editor Whitney Ellsworth thought the Joker was too good a character to kill off and suggested that he be spared. So a hastily drawn panel was added implying that the Joker was still alive.

For the next several appearances, the Joker often escapes capture but suffers an apparent death (falling off a cliff, being caught in a burning building, etc.), from which there would be no body. In these first dozen adventures, the Joker kills close to three dozen people, impressive for a villain who didn't use giant robots, mutant monsters, space lasers, or the like. This was the status quo from 1940 until around 1942. Ironically, the turning point came in "Joker Walks the Last Mile" (Detective Comics #64), where the Joker is actually executed in the electric chair (only to be chemically revived by henchmen).

While the Joker is back, he is decidedly less deadly than ever. At this point, the editors decided that only one-shot villains should commit murder, so as to not make Batman look impotent in his inability to punish such recurring foes as the Joker or the Penguin. As the Batman comics as a whole softened their tone, the Joker becomes merely a harmless, cackling nuisance. He quickly became the most popular villain and was used almost constantly during the Golden Age of Comic Books. The use of the character lessened somewhat by the late 1950s and disappeared almost entirely when Julius Schwartz took over editorship of the Batman comics in 1964.

it doesn't give the definite date when the change was made with The Joker, but as you can tell, it started when The Joker returned after Batman #64... not knowing the release date for that issue, i'm afraid i can't be of much more assistance... part of the text seems to point to the idea that this was around 1942, but the quote at the top mentions the "later Golden" Age of Comics, which would refer to the early/mid '50s...

*shrug*

 

[Kaizer]

t is of note that in his second appearance ("The Joker Returns", also in Batman #1), the Joker was actually slated to be killed off, with the final page detailing the villain accidentally stabbing himself and lying dead as Batman and Robin run off into the night. Fortunately, DC editor Whitney Ellsworth thought the Joker was too good a character to kill off and suggested that he be spared. So a hastily drawn panel was added implying that the Joker was still alive.

Fun to think of how the Bat-mythos would have played out if they had killed him off then and there...