Summary
Warning! Spoilers ahead for The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #11!The mystery behind DC Comics’ newest Joker draws to a close with one final piece of the puzzle. The new name and origin behind the new Clown Prince of Crime reveals one surprising secret and changes the game for DC’s notorious villain.
In The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #11 by Matthew Rosenberg, Carmine Di Giandomenico, and Romulo Fajardo Jr., the war between DC’s two Jokers is tearing Gotham apart. Gotham’s Joker is kidnapping people as part of some devious plan while LA’s Joker is doing his damnedest to track down his doppelganger. Things aren’t going well as LA’s Joker is losing underlings at an alarming rate.
Manhunter and Ravager continue their hunt for either Joker as explosions ripple throughout Gotham. The two heroes track down Gotham’s Joker where they discover the villain has turned his kidnapping victims into living bombs. As Gotham’s Joker gets away by detonating his army, he runs into a henchman named Mr. Waffles who works for the LA Joker. Joker reveals he knows everything about the impostor being a former henchman named John Keyser whom Joker had surgically altered to look like him. Waffles confirms the story is true, but adds that Gotham’s Joker was John Keyser all along.
The ‘Joker’ is John Keyser, a Surgically Altered Henchman
For some time now, the DC Universe has been haunted by two Jokers. One in Gotham, a disheveled vagrant, and one in Los Angeles, a more put-together supervillain. Both were insistent that they were the real one and that the other was a copycat. The majority of Gotham believed that the real Joker was the one living in LA, but The Man Who Stopped Laughing largely followed the exploits of Gotham’s Joker (who was even the star of his Knight Terrors tie-in).
This sudden twist was actually hinted at in the last issue when Gotham’s Joker remembered how the new Joker was created: The fake Joker that was surgically altered possessed an inability to die (something Professor Pyg found out when operating on the poor bastard). Throughout this series, Gotham’s Joker has been shot in the head, poisoned, nearly drowned, hit by a train, and even underwent impromptu brain surgery. While these seemed to be unrelated, this was actually the biggest clue to Joker being John Keyser. While this series has had plenty of misdirection, it seems like readers finally have an end to the mystery of Joker’s doppelganger.
What is the Future for John ‘Joker’ Keyser?
Though John’s been the star of the series for the past year, chances are that when all is said and done, the DCU is going back to having just one Joker. But how exactly is DC going to get rid of Keyser if he’s immortal? Is this realization going to inspire John to find some way to undo his Jokerization? Or is he going to go all in, killing the mortal Joker and becoming the only clown villain in town? Anything could happen in the final chapter of the series, meaning a henchman like John could win and become the one and only Joker. The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #11 is on sale now.
The truth about the ‘Joker’ is revealed. Read More