The Joker 80 Years of the Clown Prince of Crime

Great artwork. Bought as a Christmas gift. Highly recommend.

Classic stories of the Joker great!!!

I think this is by far the best of the 80 Years books DC has put out so far. Every story is a stone-cold classic and even when you get an issue that is part of a longer story they have carefully chosen an issue (or, in the case of The Killing Joke, an excerpt) that still works and is 100% understandable when read by itself. You get all of Mad Love in this volume which costs about £15 to buy by itself so think of this book as Mad Love plus an extra 350 pages of some of the greatest Joker stories ever - The Laughing Fish, The Man Who Was Red Hood, The Joker's Five-Way Revenge, Dreadful Birthday Dear Joker, Slayride etc.In many ways this is actually a better Batman 'Best Of' collection than Detective Comics: 80 Years of Batman book as, unlike in that previous volume, every single story features Batman! Seriously in his own 80th Anniversary book Batman is only in 300 of it's 400 pages (as the editors of that volume wanted to highlight other characters that debuted in Detective Comics too like Martian Manhunter, Slam Bradley etc) but he's in all of this Joker book's 448 pages!The Joker gets the last laugh on Batman by having a better Batman anniversary book than Batman himself had!

“The Joker – 80 Years of the Clown Prince of Crime” collects 420-odd pages of comics (minus a couple for text pages), plus a short cover-gallery to fill out the signature.It starts with the first two Joker stories, from Batman #1 (the original Batman #1 from 1940), followed by the first ‘Red Hood’ story from 1951, then jumps to a 1963 team-up with Clayface, then to the 1973 Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams attempt to ‘revive’ the Joker from the legacy of the Batman TV show.On page 93 we have a text-piece by Steve Englehart giving us a view of the Joker’s career up to then, with the editorial decisions about his character that toned-down his original psycho-killer character and turned him into the TV show caricature.That leads us into the 1978 Steve Englehart/Marshal Rogers 2-issue makeover of the Joker that made him the character that we know and fear today (and heavily influenced the Tim Burton films), which is followed by a Len Wein/Walt Simonson story from 1980.Mark Hamill then pops-in to reminisce about his voice-work, before we move into the 1980s and early 90s, with an excerpt from ‘The Killing Joke’, the finale of “A Death in the Family”, and then a 40-page story by Denny O’Neil & Brett Blevins.Then Paul Dini drops by to reminisce before we get the entirety of “Mad Love”, before Jeph Loeb introduces the run up to the New 52, with episodes from ‘Hush’, ‘Gotham Central’, Tim Drake’s run-in with the Joker, and the first issue of the New 52 Detective Comics and the beginning of the Joker’s “face off”.Scott Snyder then talks us through his take of the subject, before we finish with the conclusion of his “Death of the Family” storyline.This is a collection of some of the best talent to work on any DC comic-book, and well-worth reading (even if, like me, you read your local library’s copy).