DC Confirms Joker Keeps Failing Because He’s Too Reasonable

Warning! Contains a preview for Suicide Squad: Blaze #1.

No matter how many times he tries to bring down Gotham and Batman, Joker always fails. And it’s come to light that he might be failing because he’s just too reasonable in his plans. This revelation comes in Suicide Squad: Blaze. The series is written by Simon Spurrier and illustrated by Aaron Campbell.

The main threat in Suicide Squad: Blaze is a superhuman cannibal that’s traveling the world and killing people seemingly at random. A Suicide Squad is formed to take out the creature. Its members consists of known villains like King Shark, Harley Quinn, Captain Boomerang, and Peacemaker, but it also contains regular convicts given superpowers through a process called the Blaze. When questioning why they are sent in to stop the threat rather than someone like Superman, one of the squad’s new members deduces that their involvement is more ideological than benevolent. They seek to stop the cannibal because it shows the public what a super-powered individual could do when following its basic instincts.

A scene during the book explains why this cannibal is so scary and such a threat. A metahuman psychologist is seen giving an interview on a television and states, “…when a metahuman puts their desires first — robs a bank, say, tries to take over the world — even then we get it, don’t we? Because these are all societal motives. What I mean by that is, whether they’re heroes or villains, everything these individuals have done — until now — derives from personal, conceptual notions of how the world ought to be.”

This analysis speaks directly to the Joker and his motivations. One of the Joker’s main themes is that the world is in chaos and it’s his job to show regular people just how cruel they can be when pushed. This was a huge part of the film The Dark Knight and Alan Moore’s graphic novel The Killing Joke. In the latter, Joker tries to push Commissioner Gordon’s psyche to the breaking point and ultimately fails.

What Suicide Squad: Blaze is insisting is that the Joker fails because his plans are based around how he wants the world to be, which is easy for regular people to understand from a motivational perspective. However insane his desires are, he’s still acting them out, which is something average people can relate to. Yet this super-powered cannibal is driven by the complete opposite of Joker’s motivations. He doesn’t care about making a point or proving anything to anyone. He’s driven by pure primal instinct. This raw emotional motivation to eat is terrifying the world in a way the Joker could only dream of.

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