'Scars'
2020
QUAINTANCE: Where did the idea to approach The Joker from the perspective of his victims come from?
SNYDER: We’ve done so much with him over the years. It’s always been in relation to Batman. I haven’t really had a chance to do a Joker story where it focuses on him without any sort of Batman presence in it, or to just define him. I’ve had a clear vision in my head of how my take on The Joker — I’ve done it with multiple artists — has worked from Black Mirror all the way through Last Knight on Earth. For me, he’s literally The Joker card to Batman, where he takes on any kind of value he can given Batman’s worse fears. He makes himself those to be able to win or fight Batman, always making him as strong as possible.
It’s almost that he’s making it his duty to challenge Batman with the greatest nightmares of his soul, and through that trial by fire make Batman better or kill him — one or the other. So, I wanted to do something here that really focused on how scary that is as a concept, how wonderfully malleable as a concept, and it’s why I think he’s so enduring, why there are so many version, why he has so many faces, so many looks, and why so many great creators over the years have done so many incredible interpretations over the years.
QUAINTANCE: A lot of times when you write villains, they have really clear and easy to understand motivations, but The Joker maybe less so. How do you approach figuring out what The Joker wants in any given story and why he’s doing what he’s doing?
SNYDER: What I tried to do with each story I told with Batman and him was focus on something I was really afraid of either for my kids or myself, something that was difficult to admit, and then have Batman face off with that thing in its most terrifying form, which was The Joker’s version of it.
For example, Death of the Family was a very personal attempt at that. We were pregnant of our second kid when I came up with that story, and I was terrified of being a bad father, being too selfish to be a good parent. I was thinking to myself, Batman must be wrestling at certain moments with similar demons in the way he has developed that incredible family at that time in continuity with all of these allies. He cares about all of them, but isn’t there some part of him that worries they might be a weakness. That’s where Joker comes in and says, wouldn’t you be the best Batman possible without your family. So, I’ll just kill them for you.
Whereas something like Endgame was much less about my personal fears and more about my fears for the moment, some of the things we all worried about. I was worried for my kids at that time about the kind of violence that erupts out of nowhere, and I felt like it was always in the news, making your daily actions feeling meaningless. The Joker was there celebrating those things, saying whatever you do, it doesn’t matter. There’s no action you can take that’s going to mean anything. Everything is at best meaningless, and at worst cruelty and savagery. That’s it.
I try to take a personal fear of mine at that moment and have Joker extend it to its worst possible version and have Batman face off with that. That’s my approach to using him. I wanted to define that here with something that’s not epic and weird and over-the-top.
QUAINTANCE: Well, with all the different work you’ve done with Joker, what do you hope to have added to the legacy of the character?
SNYDER: That’s a tough question and it’s hard for me to answer that. It’s less about me and what I’ve added. I just hope that I’ve done it justice as an incredible antagonist, one of the best antagonists in all of literature, just by trying to use my own personal fears and be honest about what I find terrifying, and about human nature and the world, having him express those in ways that are celebratory and cruel and evil, making him the demon that really tests us with our own worst imaginings and fears.
I love writing him. I feel like I had him exist in one form or another in pretty much every story I’ve done on Batman, from Black Man even through Superheavy or the beginning of Zero Year. He was the one consistent thread to everything I’ve written, Batman-wise, outside of All-Star. The strain Joker represented through all of that was this underlying anxiety that Batman would succumb to his own worst fears, whether he was the main antagonist or in the background.
And there’s so many different versions. I love Grant [Morrison’s] version where he’s hyper-sane and so he’s always emerging as a new wild version of himself because he reinvents his own personality. I love the [Batman: The Animated Series] version where he’s slightly more sympathetic, more of a common criminal at times, all the way to the more obsessive Frank Miller version. There’s so many great stories too; I just wanted this story to be the definitive version of our take and the way I see him, a dictionary definition for The Joker that has haunted my whole run, regardless of artist.
















