One of the things that sometimes annoys me with part of the comics fandom is how much people tend to obssess with accuracy to details. They want things to be EXACTLY like the comics, even given that it´s impossible to begin with. That´s especially true to characters´ looks, and sometimes even relatively small changes - am I the only one who sees that the Superman Returns suit is still 90% an accurate to comics Superman suit? - can cause quite a stir. That comes with some distortions of priorities, such as people giving more value to details accuracy than the look giving you the right tone and feel of the character.
Let´s see a look that can be considered pretty "accurate". In theory, Cesar Romero´s Joker is not only pretty accurate to the comics of his period, but even close to the modern comics look: the bright red lips are there, the chalk-white skin, the green hair, it could even be said it´s closer than Jack Nicholson´s look - hey, it has no perma-smile! But could a modern interpretation of Joker look just like Romero and still work? No. Because in spirte of those details, what Romero´s Joker gives you is a campy clown, which of course is what Joker was back in the day, but is totally inconsistent with the psychotic Joker of Bill Finger and Bob Kane, Dennis O´Neil and Neal Adams, Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland, etc.
We don´t even need to go that far: In theory, Two-Face´s makeup in Batman Forever is accurate. Yeah, if you look you can even find pinkish versions of the acid-burned half in comics. What was the real problem with Two-Face? He was portrayed as a cackling, jumpy, campy villain instead of the dark and tragic character from the comics.
Now, I´m sure if there was Internet back in 89, a lot of fans would have made tons of noise against Batman wearing black instead of blue and gray: he had been wearing light blue and gray suit for decades in comics, even in the darker O´Neil/Englehart ones - and I´m not even gonna get into the rubber armor thing or the absence of briefs, etc. If you wanna really nitpick it, even Joker´s look wasn´t 100% right. Nicholson was chubby while comics Joker is notoriously skinny, not to mention the perennial smile. Accurate it wasn´t. But in the end of the day, it worked, why? Cuz the tone and feel were right. Batman is supposed to look dark, creepy, stealthy, mysterious. And Joker, while still with a good deal of camp in him, was also the homicidal maniac from comics. It´s the purpose of the look, not the details.
People´s initial reaction to the new Joker isn´t too different from what it´d have been, there was Internet in 89, to Batman´s black suit - hey, in theory it´s a more radical change than anything done to Superman´s suit in SR! And it´s also not too different from what the recent reaction was to, say, The Tumbler in Batman Begins, not the traditional sports car with fins from most comics incarnations.
And that´s why I´m not shaken by all those negative comments against Joker´s look. The look may not be "comics-accurate" - or it is, you just have to look at the right comics -, but the tone is right. The Joker I love from comics looks like a creepy psychotic distortion of a clown´s look, and that´s the concept here as well, details aside. Okay, it´d have probably helped if he was smiling in the picture, but I remember the first pics we saw of The Tumbler and Batman´s suit in BB didn´t exactly do them justice either. The clever, anarchic and unusual way that the image was revealed to us, however, was brilliantly Joker-like. They know the character. There will be plenty of time for people to see that there´s much more to The Joker than clean white makeup and neat red lips, and Nolan and his people know it.
