The Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime

The Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime by Dennis O'Neil
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In 1975-76, DC gave the Joker his own series. It lasted nine issues, all of which are collected in The Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime.

For my money, DC has been more willing to take risks with its characters than Marvel. Thusly, they put The Joker in a starring role in his own book. To be fair, though, I think Marvel did Super Villain Team-Up around the same time.

Anyway, The Joker's book feels like a sitcom from the mid-seventies. There are forced attempts at humor and every story has a "crime doesn't pay" ending. You can almost hear the laugh track and the sappy music.

In this volume, The Joker, with his goons Tooth and Southpaw in tow, encounters Two-Face, The Creeper, The Scarecrow, Catwoman, Green Arrow, Lex Luthor, The Royal Flush Gang, Sherlock Holmes, and more mundane characters like Willy the Weeper. I know I shouldn't measure a collection of comics from 1975-76 against today's but these feel like throwbacks to the 60s, possibly earlier. Heck, the Riddler's on the cover and he's not even featured in the stories!

I chuckled a few times during the Sherlock Holmes tale but most of the jokes in the book were fairly lame. The book wasn't totally bad, however. The art was great for the time period. You can't go wrong with Jose Garcia Lopez or Dick Giordano.

The Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime is an interesting curiosity in the world of late Silver Age comics but does not stand the test of time nearly as well as other works from the same time period. Two out of five stars.


View all my reviews