Batman Curse of The White Knight Reveals Joker’s Origin Story:
DC Comics has its way to enamor the audiences to its else-worlds story arcs. The recent-most attempt at doing so was Batman: White Knight – an alternate universe storyline where the Joker is the hero and Batman is the culprit and villain. That was a twisted but interesting take on the entire Batman-Joker dynamics. And it was a best seller. But with Batman: Curse of the White Knight, which was set to be the second part of the White Knight saga, is changing the game entirely, bringing the alternate universe Batman and Joker into such a cross-head that it might change the game forever. They have already started revealing secrets so vast and impactful that could make the skies of DC tremble with its implications. For starters, the story arc has revealed the truly horrifying origin of none other than the Joker, the clown Prince of Crime.
SPOILER ALERT: Major Spoilers for Batman: Curse of the White Knight #3 up ahead. Enter at your own risk!!!
To put it bluntly, Batman: White Knight was a very topsy-turvy tale of the Clown Prince of Crime! It took us several rounds of re-reading to simplify the over-complicated plot direction in the issue. But that is what made it even more interesting. Nobody could actually figure out what is going on inside the Joker’s crazy head until we truly give it our all. For the first couple of pages, we actually believed that the Joker has reformed and is trying to save Gotham from Batman’s rampage. Not just the residents of Gotham, the Joker even had the readers fooled about his true intentions.
That’s right!! The Joker was just PRETENDING to be a good guy all along!!!
In Curse of the White Knight, we come to realize that the Joker is the actual hands behind the curtains pulling the strings. His end goal – destroy Gotham from the inside out by showing its true colors to everyone. And this time, he has taken the most powerful weapon of all to do it, a weapon that has no weakness and is virtually unstoppable- Truth.
In the third issue of the series, the Joker reveals his plan to tarnish the legacy of the Wayne Family – the founders of Gotham City and plunge the entire place into darkness. But instead of showing how he intends to do that, creator Sean Gordon Murphy instead takes the unconventional route and digresses into a topic that is also of utmost importance, which is, how did the Joker come into existence? To be precise – What turned Jack Napier into the Joker?
The origin story of the Joker has been dealt with in-depth but there has been no singular and definite answer to the question of his origin, part of the reason why fans are so eager to read Geoff Johns’ 3 Jokers comic book series. The Joker’s origin story was made even more mysterious after Nolan’s Dark Knight turned his origin story into a guessing game for the audiences, with Ledger’s Joker giving a new explanation to how he got those scars every time he tries to explain his tale.
In the earlier entries to the issue, we found that Jack Napier found Laffy Arkham’s decomposed corpse in the Arkham Asylum catacombs. While trying to escape the Asylum, Napier gets his hands on Laffy Arkahm’s diary, and the secrets in that diary is what sent him into such a rage that it eventually drove him insane and turned him into the Joker. The Diary explains how Laffy Arkham was betrayed by Edmond Wayne, who later on found Gotham City and became one of its elite. Arkham also states how the Waynes ended up exploiting the poor and the destitute as well as reaping of huge benefits out of the peoples’ sorrows. There was another secret message that Laffy Arkham writes literally in his own blood that only the Joker was able to read and he removed it before Jim Gordon and Bruce Wayne could lay their eyes on them.
A lot more is mentioned about Azrael’s family and how wicked the Waynes actually were during the earlier phases of Gotham City. What the Joker wants now is to make the Waynes pay for what they have done. He intends to become the savior of Gotham City by destroying it into rubble so that something new and something purer could rise from its ashes. In more ways than one, he is a White Knight after all.
