Batman has many great enemies, but the Joker is indisputably his greatest nemesis. Symbolically, this is because he represents the chaos that Bruce Wayne dedicated his life to controlling. However, Batman #143 by Chip Zdarsky, Andrea Sorrentino, and Giuseppe Camuncoli reveals how Joker trained to be Batman’s philosophical foil.
The current The Joker: Year One storyline reintroduced the character of Dr. Daniel Capito, from Zdarsky’s miniseries Batman: The Knight. Capito was an expert on reshaping the mind and one of the mentors who trained Bruce Wayne to become Batman. It was Dr. Capito who taught Batman how to compartmentalize his emotions and helped to create his Batman of Zur-En-Arrh persona. However, the mentor and student came into conflict, after Bruce realized his teacher’s amorality.
Dr. Capito was a bored academic who only used his knowledge to amuse himself rather than to help people. This led him to seek out the young Joker, who fascinated him as a manifestation of his belief in the cosmic paradox that “nothing matters and everything matters.” However, Dr. Capito went one step beyond teaching the Clown Prince of Crime how to ignore fear and pain.
The Joker Trained To Give Himself Multiple Personas
Under Dr. Capito’s instruction, Joker mastered the lessons in mind-shaping that Bruce Wayne refused to embrace. He learned how to change his emotions on a whim. This led to his developing three unique personalities, which Dr. Capito dubbed The Clown, The Demon, and “the calm like a black ocean at night.”
These personas match the three incarnations of Joker introduced in the Batman: Three Jokers storyline. However, there have been more than three versions of the Clown Prince of Crime over the years, each with varying degrees of humor and psychosis. Zdarsky’s revelation that The Joker trained in the same mind-manipulation techniques as Batman would justify his ever-changing personality beyond the metatextual whims of various writers.
Batman #143 is now available at comic shops everywhere.
