Batman Poster #26 vs Joker Detective Comics #475 (1978) Marshall Rogers

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In 1977, writer Steve Englehart and artist Marshall Rogers teamed up for a memorable six-issue run on Detective Comics. While their tenure on the title was short-lived, their take on Batman remains definitive for many comics readers of that era. Certainly the climactic two-parter of their collaboration, presented in Detective Comics #s 475 and 476, represents a turning point in the evolution of the character of the Joker. “The Laughing Fish” presents a Joker who is clearly insane, driven by some psychotic impulse to poison all the fish in Gotham so that they all have his grinning smile in the mad hope that he may be able to copyright the resultant monstrosity and skim off a percentage of worldwide fish sales. After all, as the Harlequin of Hate himself puts it, “if Colonel What’s-His-Name can have chicken, when they don’t even have moustaches,” then why can’t he have Joker Fish?” The question of whether the Batman’s archnemesis is actually criminally insane or just plain criminal is one that would arise again and again in the various Batman titles of the next three decades, and inform the portrayals of big-screen Jokers Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger. “I tried to redefine Joker, as he has been when he started but also modern, not just regurgitate what had been done in the 60s. “The Laughing Fish” was my attempt to try and show that this guy just wasn’t logical…I really wanted to come up with some concept that was just insane on the face of it. I mean, the whole idea of copyrighting fish based on dumping chemicals into the ocean and trying to get the government to go along with it, anybody else would look at that and go, “That’s clearly not sane.” But from the Joker’s standpoint, the more insane, the better.” -Steve Englehart, weighing in on the question “Is the Joke insane?” in a 2009 interview. Batman continues patrolling the city and eventually swoops down towards the Gotham docks. A stevedore approaches him and shows him barrels of freshly caught fish. Ordinarily, this mundane incident would not rouse the Batman’s attention but for the fact that all of the fish bear faces similar to that of the Joker. The fisherman asks Batman why someone would want to create fish with Joker faces, but Batman discourages the inquiry, saying “The Joker’s mind is clouded in madness! His motives make sense to him alone!” The following morning, the Joker and his henchmen barge into the office of the city Copyright Commission. The Joker introduces himself to a clerk named G. Carl Francis, indicating that he wishes to trademark his designer Joker Fish. The man is clearly terrified by the Joker’s presence, but tells him that nobody can register a copyright on a natural resource – even one as mutated as the macabre Joker Fish. The Joker scoffs at Francis and tells him that he has until midnight to make his desires a reality or else he will be “dead as a mackerel”. The Joker leaves the office to confer with his underlings. As he is wont to do, he arbitrarily pushes one of them out into oncoming traffic where they are struck and killed by a truck. “The Joker must have the Batman! Nay, the Joker deserves the Batman! What fun would there be in humbling mere policemen? I am the Greatest Criminal ever known! HA HA HA HA! And for anyone else to destroy the Batman would be unworthy of me!”– The Joker. With writer Steve Englehart, Rogers penciled an acclaimed run on the character Batman in Detective Comics #471-476 (Aug. 1977 – April 1978), providing one of the definitive interpretations that influenced the 1989 movie Batman and be adapted for the 1990s animated series. The Englehart and Rogers pairing, was described in 2009 by comics writer and historian Robert Greenberger as “one of the greatest” creative teams to work on the Batman character. DC Comics writer and executive Paul Levitz noted in 2010 that “Arguably fans’ best-loved version of Batman in the mid-1970s, writer Steve Englehart and penciller Rogers’s Detective run featured an unambiguously homicidal Joker…in noirish, moodily rendered stories that evoked the classic Kane-Robinson era.” In their story “The Laughing Fish”, the Joker is brazen enough to disfigure fish with a rictus grin, then expects to be granted a federal trademark on them, only to start killing bureaucrats who try to explain that obtaining such a claim on a natural resource is legally impossible. Rogers also penciled the origin story of the Golden Age Batman in Secret Origins #6 (Sept. 1986) with writer Roy Thomas and inker Terry Austin. William Marshall Rogers III (January 22, 1950 – March 24, 2007), known professionally as Marshall Rogers, was an American comic-book artist best known for his work at Marvel and DC Comics in the 1970s, particularly as one of the illustrators of Batman and Silver Surfer. In addition, Rogers illustrated one of the first graphic novels, Detectives Inc.