The Joker is arguably in a similar tier as the Star Wars franchise's Darth Vader when it comes to iconic pop culture villains, and the Clown Prince of Crime has continually wreaked havoc in Batman's life and more. Joker's plots of terror are expectedly most notorious in the Dark Knight's corner of the world in Gotham City, but he's also run amok in crossover events in the wider DC universe.
His unpredictability is one aspect of what makes him so dangerous, but there's also a criminal genius underneath. Whether it's in landmark Batman arcs like A Death in the Family and The Killing Joke or his role as a catalyst to the dystopian Injustice timeline, the Joker has executed a myriad of complex masterplans against DC's heroes.
Joker's First Public Killing Spree
The Man Who Laughs is a one-shot comic that remakes the Joker's first appearance in Batman #1 in 1940. Writer Ed Brubaker and artist Doug Mahnke's 2005 comic book details the first public appearance of the villain in Gotham City, as well as his first meeting with Batman himself.
In The Man Who Laughs, Joker maps out the murders of certain Gotham millionaires and announces his targets as he goes. Bruce eventually unravels the villain's motives as his revenge on the people indirectly attached to the Ace Chemicals plant that disfigured Red Hood into the Joker, and the culmination of the plan was poisoning the city's water supply with the very same chemicals.
Killing Jason Todd And Becoming A UN Diplomat
The death of Jason Todd — the second Robin — in A Death in the Family is undoubtedly one of the worst things to happen to Batman in the comics. That makes it fitting that this is done by the Joker as one part of a heinous and outright bizarre greater plan. The Joker kidnaps and blackmails Jason's runaway criminal mother to sell out her Boy Wonder son to the clown, only to end up killing the both of them.
Jason is beaten within an inch of his life by a crowbar-wielding Joker and, despite Batman's best efforts, fails to make it in time before the warehouse he was in exploded. Bruce Wayne would go on to mark this as his greatest failure, and it somehow led to Joker becoming Iran's UN ambassador to poison everyone in the chamber and goad Batman into intervening.
Attempting To Murder Batman's Bat-Family
Writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo's New 52 run on the Dark Knight made for some of the best Batman comics of the 2010s. One such arc was Death of the Family, aptly named in an homage to the aforementioned Jim Starlin and Jim Aparo comic. Snyder's arc was one crescendo of his take on the Joker and his role in this timeline, with the villain coming back with a vengeance to systematically orchestrate the deaths of his Bat-family.
It was an excruciating wild goose chase stained with gore that was all a sick attempt to regain Batman's "attention," as the Joker felt his family was making him weak. Death of the Family is one of the best depictions of the warped nature of the Batman/Joker dynamic.
The Joker Going Scorched-Earth With Their Dynamic & Batman's Life
Snyder and Capullo return for their explosive finale to the Joker's time in the New 52 timeline with Endgame, which stars with Zero Year and continues in the aforementioned Death of the Family. Ever since Joker's reappearance in Death, Batman has noticed something more sinister about the Joker. He's gotten far more violent and personal with his attacks, and Endgame quickly opens with a drug-induced Justice League leading an onslaught on the Dark Knight.
Later, he unleashes a strain of Joker toxin so pure that finding a cure is nearly impossible, with the villain also using an underground pool of Dionesium to grant him regenerative abilities. It was a plan so elaborate that Batman needed the combined strength of his allies and enemies to bring him down -- and could have easily been justified as Joker's final story.
Crippling Barbara Gordon & Torturing Jim To "Prove A Point"
Despite being a brief one-shot comic, Alan Moore's The Killing Joke easily cemented itself as one of the best Joker stories and most influential Batman comics in general. It was a major influence on Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger's characterization of the villain in The Dark Knight, and the comic portrayed one of Joker's most sadistic schemes in comic book history.
The Clown Prince of Crime cruelly cripples Barbara Gordon/Batgirl and immediately kidnaps and tortures Commissioner Gordon, so he can attempt to prove his nihilistic point that everyone's as fundamentally "insane" as he is. Of course, Batman puts an end to this misery and outs the Joker for being a coward desperately trying to justify his atrocities.
Using Scarecrow's Fear Toxin To Have Superman Kill Lois Lane
Though this famous storyline began in NetherRealm Studios' fighting video game of the same name, the Injustice series was eventually adapted into a prequel comic book. It chronicles the buildup to the games' disastrous events, where the Joker served as the spark for its conflict.
The villain uses the Scarecrow's Fear Toxin laced with Kryptonite to weaken Superman and trick him into thinking he was fighting Doomsday when it was actually an unconscious Lois Lane. Getting even more morbid, Lois' heart was synced with a nuclear warhead rigged to explode when her heart stopped, resulting in her death and Metroipolis' destruction. This spirals Superman into grief and rage, killing the Joker and eventually becoming the authoritarian overlord of Earth.
The Three Jokers' Plan To Become Batman's Center Of Attention
Three Jokers told an alternate-canon story that functioned as a loose sequel to The Killing Joke and Under the Red Hood, as Batgirl and Red Hood helped the World's Greatest Detective in a harrowing case and blood trail left by what appears to be multiple Clown Princes of Crime.
Batman and co. discover that there have been countless Jokers over the years, and there were three at the moment trying to create the perfect version to break the Dark Knight. It's an entertaining story from an "Elseworlds" perspective, providing an alternative depiction of the Joker's sick obsession with being Batman's center of attention.
Contaminating The Fish In Gotham's Harbor
It's now arguably most known as a classic Joker-centric episode of Batman: The Animated Series, The Laughing Fish was originally a comic book storyline by writer Steve Englehart and penciler Marshall Rogers. And in the grand scheme of the villain's crimes, this one was a weirdly funny plan of his.
Batman discovers fish are surfacing in the harbor with grotesque grins. Unsurprisingly, Joker was behind the plan, but not for the reasons most would think. He had been contaminating the fish in an attempt to copyright and earn a cut on all their sales in the city's markets.
Convincing Gotham That He Was Immortal
Joker's brand of prep work for his Endgame plan was impressively complex by itself. After coming back from a long, uneasy absence in Death of the Family, he disappears to bide his time until Endgame.
Part of that was convincing Batman, Gordon, and just about anyone else terrified enough to believe it that he was an omnipresent entity that's been skulking through Gotham for over a century. Before the Dionesium was discovered as the truth, the Joker had (presumably) laid out fabricated documentation of him dating back to the early 20th century.
A Blimp Full Of Glass
It's simple on paper, but what must have gone into executing it takes a level of insanity and detail only Joker is capable of. Lovers and Madmen is an early-career Batman arc, telling the story of an early encounter with the Joker.
This storyline of the Batman Confidential series by Michael Green and Denys Cowan shows how Joker would become a major influence on Gotham's criminal underworld, and the villain concocts a plan to poison countless pieces of glass shards and fill a blimp with them. To his own surprise, the plan works, rigs it to explode, and rains the poisonous glass on the citizens below.