Joker

The Lego Batman toy line has been going strong for over a decade now, but with this week's release of the Lego Batman Movie, we've seen a truly unprecedented explosion of merchandise based around the Caped Crusader's blockiest incarnation. And with that many figures, going from the Dark Knight himself all the way down to super obscure deep cuts like the Mime and March Harriet, our course here at ComicsAlliance is clear. We need to rank them. So today, we've dug through every single Lego Batman Movie minifig (and eliminated simple variations like "Batman with a slightly different face") to rank them all, worst to best.

You know how every now and then, you'll see a cover on an old comic, and it'll stick with you even if you don't actually read the issue? That happened to me with Detective Comics #365. Ever since I spotted it on the wall at the comic book store where I used to work, I've held on to that image of that Carmine Infantino image of Batman and Robin attacking a house shaped like the Joker's face, a brick facade shaped into the ramshackle rictus of their arch-nemesis, with guns emerging from his eyes and mouth. It's an amazing image, but it wasn't until I saw it floating around Tumblr the other day that I realized I should actually read the comic --- and it turns out that it's one of the weirdest stories with one of the most fun ideas that I've ever seen in a Silver Age Batman comic.

For as much as I love the madness that was the comics of the 1990s, I cannot even imagine how incredible it must have been to be a comic-loving kid (or weird comic loving adult) in the 1950/60s period known as The Silver Age. Within this gallery, I've put together only the smallest of fractions of some of the entertaining, out-of-context fun that Batman's 75 years of non-stop published stories have afforded us. Try your best to make sense of them.

Welcome to Wayne’s World, the latest ComicsAlliance TV recap series, jumping right into the middle of the third season of Fox’s Gotham, the show about the childhood of Bruce Wayne and the world of Batman before Batman. This week, the city of Gotham plunges into chaos as Jerome takes Bruce Wayne out to the carnival in the Gotham winter finale.

There’s a certain theatrical nihilism to Donald Trump that lends itself well to Batman’s greatest nemesis, as we’ve seen Mark Hamill repeatedly demonstrate with his Joker-ized take on Trump tweets. As it turns out, the parallel works eerily well with other Jokers, as The Daily Show discovers with horrifying precision.

Welcome to Wayne’s World, the latest ComicsAlliance TV recap series, jumping right into the middle of the third season of Fox’s Gotham, the show about the childhood of Bruce Wayne, and the world of Batman before Batman. Your Gotham guides are Dylan Todd, an old hand at the recap game, but completely new to the show; and Tara Marie, a new recapper, but a dyed-in-the-wool Gotham fan. In this episode, Barbara schemes, Selina gets played, and the proto-Joker's face gets taken out for a spin. "Smile Like You Mean It" was directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, and written by Steven Lilien and Bryan Wynbrandt.

Love that Joker, but not in the mood to laugh? NBC’s Powerless has you covered. A clever new in-universe ad for the NBC DC comedy promotes Wayne Security’s latest anti-villain measure; one that should get you out of a jam when the Clown Prince of Crime rolls through town with his famous laughing gas.

It was only a matter of time until the DC Bombshells made their way to the realm of Funko Pop. The characters that started as a statue series, then got their own series, and then got action figures and more collectibles based on that comic series have officially come full circle. As with any bit of pop culture though, you haven't truly transcended your medium until you get a Funko figure. Now that the DC Bombshells have found their way to the affordable vinyl figure series, they're even more unstoppable a force than they were before.

The most widely recognized iterations of Batman’s constant foe the Joker would probably have to be Heath Ledger as the unchained mad-dog of The Dark Knight, Jack Nicholson as an urbane creep in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, and to a lesser extent, Cesar Romero’s campy turn in the goofy TV series from the ’60s. But Mark Hamill logged more hours as the Clown Prince of Crime than the rest of them put together, voicing the Joker in the long-running animated series and its many spin-offs. The man with the greatest claim to the Joker persona dusted off his special crazy-voice this week for a more pointedly political purpose than the usual cocktail-party entertainment.

Q: Where does the Jokermobile fit in Batman’s canon? Is it a necessary piece of their rivalry? — @thybmb A: Okay, the way I see it, there are really two questions here. The first is a pretty easy one, too: No. Strictly speaking, the Jokermobile is by no means necessary, and there's nothing that it adds to or illuminates about the enmity between Batman and the Joker that you can't get elsewhere, especially when it comes to characters who are built far more explicitly around the idea of mimicking Batman's approach to crime fighting. The second question is one that's more implicit in the fact that you asked: Can I write an entire column about how the Joker used to ride around Gotham City in a car with his own face on it? And, c'mon. It's me we're talking about here.