POP-A-LOOZA: THE EVERLASTING FIRST! The Joker and Justice Inc.

Each week, the pop culture website Pop-A-Looza shares some posts from my vast 'n' captivating Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do) archives. The latest shared post is an Everlasting First! Quick Takes of my introductions to the Joker and Justice Inc.

You all know I'm a huge, huge Batman fan, and I still buy the comic books. Not all of them; there are too many spinoff titles, and my interest doesn't extend to every last Bat-related series. And I'm waaaay behind in my comics reading, with a big ol' stack of them awaiting my attention and presumed enjoyment. I did read the first issue of the new Gotham City: Year One miniseries, liked it, and bought the second issue when it came out this week. 

But I'm kinda tired of the Joker. There's only so much storytelling mileage one can get from an amoral crime clown determined to prove he's crazier and more vicious than anyone else ever. It would be fine with me if the Joker were removed from the active roster for a year or three, and only brought back when a compelling story can be told.

Listen, I get it. If I were writing a Batman comic book, I'd find it hard to resist bringing in the Batman's biggest nemesis, the most famous comic book villain of all time. Both of the Batman fanfic pieces I attempted as an adult--the purple-prose pulp short story "The Undersea World Of Mr. Freeze" and the introductory paragraphs of its abandoned sequel "Paradise Does Not Believe In Tears"--featured cameo appearances by the Joker; if I'd continued the storyline, it would have eventually led to a full-blown Joker appearance in a later chapter.

For kicks, here's a replay of the Joker's cameos in those two pieces. First, from "The Undersea World Of Mr. Freeeze:"

"...Arkham Asylum was Hell, perhaps literally. Designed as a hospital for the criminally insane, Arkham seemed an earthly counterpart of Dante's Inferno, a desolate place of misery, despair...and madness. Its freakish inhabitants never had any hope to abandon in the first place. Killers. Monsters. Madmen. And, worst of all, a laughing maniac whose clownlike visage haunted the nightmares of all who had ever met him. If they were lucky enough to survive the meeting.

"But the Joker was silent this night; he hadn't been sedated--the staff at Arkham knew from dreadful, repeated experience that their medications had no effect whatsoever on the insane harlequin--but in a self-imposed catatonic state. It was nothing new. The Joker often withdrew into the murky labyrinth of his own demented psyche, no doubt plotting yet another crazed scheme that could only make sense to him, and to him alone. The Scarecrow whimpered in the corner of his cell, the master of fear ironically consumed by terror himself. The Penguin simmered with sheer anger. The Mad Hatter smiled sweetly. Poison Ivy licked her lips, and preened and pouted, writhing seductively. Tweedledum and Tweedledee bickered. Two-Face, deprived of his trademark coin, paced nervously, undecided. False Face, as always, protested his incarceration, insisting that the Batman had captured the wrong man.

"The Batman moved past them all, unseen...."

And from "Paradise Does Not Believe In Tears:"

"...Mr. Freeze's fury at being denied this reunion with his own late wife Nora chilled the hearts of all who had hearts. But everyone, all across this tear-stained globe, was also dealing with the hopelessness they themselves felt within. They'd all seen someone, or even many someones, lovers and friends, parents, children--everyone on Earth has lost someone at some time, and now those losses were all felt again, keenly, like a fresh wound that could never heal. Even the Joker had seen someone. The Joker was not laughing today...."

Speaking of purple-prose pulp, Justice Inc.'s leader the Avenger was a fixture of my fascination with pulps and superpulp paperbacks when I was a teen in the '70s. Here's something I wrote for an imaginary expansion of the first issue of Justice Inc., DC Comics' short-lived 1970s adaptation of the Avenger:

"...The Avenger had originally been Street & Smith's attempt to duplicate its previous newsstand sales bonanzas with The Shadow and Doc Savage. The character was even credited to Kenneth Robeson, the pseudonym used (mostly by Lester Dent) for chronicling Doc Savage's exploits. Both Dent and the Shadow's raconteur Walter Gibson consulted with writer Paul Ernst on the creation of the Avenger. The Avenger ran for 24 issues from 1939 to 1942, far short of the long runs of its predecessors. Nonetheless, when Bantam's paperback reprints of old Doc Savage pulp novels found a new audience for the Man of Bronze in the '60s and '70s, other publishers wanted a piece of the pulp action. In 1972, Paperback Library (a division of Warner Communications, which also owned DC) started reprinting The Avenger. The character was more popular in paperbacks than he'd been in his original pulps, and Warner continued the series with new Avenger novels (still credited to Kenneth Robeson, by now written by Ron Goulart). The back cover of each paperback reprised the Avenger's back story in delicious purple prose:

"In the roaring heart of the crucible, steel is made. In the raging flame of personal tragedy, men are sometimes forged into something more than human.

"It was so with Dick Benson. He had been a man. After the dread loss inflicted on him by an inhuman crime ring, he became a machine of vengeance dedicated to the extermination of all other crime rings.

"He turned into the person we know now: a figure of ice and steel, more pitiless than both; a mechanism of whipcord and flame; a symbol to crooks and killers; a terrible, almost impersonal force, masking chill genius and super-normal power behind a face as white and dead as a mask from the grave. Only his pale eyes, like ice in a polar dawn, hint at the deadliness of the scourge the underworld heedlessly invoked against itself when crime's greed turned millionaire adventurer Richard Benson into--THE AVENGER.

"Jesus. Every attempt I've ever made to write pulp fiction has been an effort to channel that...."

Those attempts continue. And my introductions to a terrifying Batman villain and a tragic pulp avenger provide the latest Boppin' Pop-A-Looza.

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