The many faces of the Joker

The character called the Joker was introduced in the first Batman comic in 1940. Co-creator Bill Finger modeled the grinning villain on a photograph of actor Conrad Veidt (best known as Maj. Strasser in "Casablanca,") from the silent film "The Man Who Laughs." His discolored face is usually attributed to falling into a vat of chemicals. In his early incarnation, the Joker was a murderous sociopath, responsible for the deaths of several people close to Batman, including Batgirl. With the advent of the Comic Code in the 1950s, the Joker was tamed into an almost harmless prankster in a purple suit. That is the kind of Joker played by Cesar Romero in the campy mid-'60s television show "Batman." The campy Joker was pumped up on laughing gas and unleashed with a vengeance in Tim Burton's pop-Gothic "Batman" movie of 1989. As the... [read full story]