At some point within relatively recent DC Comics history, Batman discovered that the Joker is actually three people. Or that there are three Jokers? Whatever. The gist was that there are three people in Gotham city with green hair, purple suits, and clown makeup, and that maybe that has always been the case and the Joker was never really one guy. This weird concept, introduced in one crisis event or another, was finally directly addressed in Geoff Johns, Jason Fabok, and Brad Anderson’s Batman: Three Jokers miniseries.

The idea behind it, presumably, was to reconcile with the fact that different writers through different eras have had different approaches to the ol’ Clown Prince Of Crime. Sometimes he’s a criminal mastermind, sometimes he just wants to cause chaos, and sometimes he wants to orchestrate wicked schemes designed to make people as insane as he is.

Because of that, it’s a story that seems very concerned with cleaning up — or at least acknowledging — longstanding DC canon stuff. Specifically, it’s all about the fallout from the bad things the Joker did in The Killing Joke and A Death In The Family, but, at the same time, it really picks and chooses what parts of those stories it cares about.

The argument has been made many times before that The Killing Joke’s somewhat ambiguous ending is supposed to represent Batman executing the Joker. That part was never part of DC canon, and yet, for many years, writers decided that the earlier scene where the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon in the stomach, hitting her spine and paralyzing her from the waist down, did happen.

Having a well-known, popular superhero use a wheelchair for a long time was good for diversity and representation, but it was always a little off-putting how one excessively violent moment from an otherwise questionably canonical comic book was considered an ironclad thing that could never be undone, especially when so many superheroes — many of them men, by the way — are constantly just dying and coming back to life like nothing happened.

A Death In The Family, the other big touchstone for Three Jokers, is the storyline where the Joker brutally beat Jason Todd, the second Robin, with a crowbar and then blew him up with a bomb. Readers actually voted on whether or not he should die, and they chose blood.

That did happen in regular continuity, and Jason stayed dead for a long, long time, but everyone likes to forget what happened after that: The Joker somehow became Iran’s representative to the United Nations, and Superman had to step in to explain to Batman that, if he were to do anything to the Joker now, it would create an international incident. It’s up there with “Doctor Manhattan created the New 52” (as referenced in a previous newsletter) on the list of funniest things to happen in a DC comic.

Now, nobody needs every Joker story to include a scene where someone asks him about Iran, but Three Jokers has a moment where one of the three Jokers (we’re way into this and we haven’t talked about the actual plot at all, huh?) is talking to Jason about what happened after the whole crowbar beating and it doesn’t line up with the actual comic. He says Batman simply caught him and sent him to Arkham Asylum, as usual, knowing he would eventually get out and do more clown crimes. But we know from reading A Death In The Family that that’s not what happened!

Three Jokers was published under DC’s Black Label imprint, which technically means it’s not strictly canonical to the main DC Universe. That also means that it can establish whatever canon it wants. In other words, in the Three Jokers universe, maybe Joker didn’t work for the Iranian government. Maybe Batman didn’t kill the Joker for shooting Barbara. That’s all totally fine! The Black Label was partially established to allow creators to tell whatever dark and scary stories they wanted to without worrying about the regular canon.

But the idea of there being three Jokers in the first place was introduced in a regular Batman story, and this is clearly banking on the reader being familiar with The Killing Joke and A Death In The Family, but the closer you follow any of that, the less this makes sense! It’s weird!

Oh, uh, anyway, the three Jokers are the clown (the one who killed Jason), the comedian (the one who shot Barbara), and the criminal (the one who… third thing). As it turns out, the core issue with Three Jokers is that they don’t really pinpoint three distinct Jokers. The criminal one is supposed to be inspired by early Batman adventures, when he just did crazy crimes and wasn’t full-on evil, but that’s pretty arbitrary. In the end, two of the Jokers die and it’s implied that only one was the real Joker anyway, so it all… works out?

Weird Batman continues with Part IV, which will focus on Batman: Damned, a dark story with cool art in which Batman must begrudgingly accept the help of English magic guy John Constantine.