The Clown Prince of Crime

The Joker is absolutely one of the greatest characters I have ever come across in literature. It's easy to be jaded by the ideas of comics, especially superhero-genre comics, as being trite camp, after the Silver Age squeaky-cleanery and Adam-West-weirdness subsequent to the persecution of visual narration via Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent. But I say, in all seriousness, the Joker is one of the most amazing characters ever written. He is...absolutely bone-chilling. He terrifies me, and I love him for it.

When approaching drawing him, there are several things I try to keep in mind, that strike me about him, visually.
First...a sense of uncleanliness. He is, after all, physically stained, creating the clown-makeup look of his face, and the green hair. He should have a messy, imperfect look...a kind of physical reflection of his sordid life and person.

Second, the nose. There are a lot of characters out there with cookie-cutter faces, but the Joker has such a distinctive nose. It deserves emphasis. It saddens me whenever I see it drawn...incorrectly. I tried not to get it wrong.

Third...his teeth. They need to be more distinctly yellow. It increases his sinister look, and calls to attention the bleached pallor of his skin.

Fourth...An essay I read once concerning the dynamic between the Batman and the Joker in Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (a classic which ought to be required reading for everyone.) Batman is a force of order, and Joker is a force of chaos. An important thing to keep in mind with the Joker is the blurring of, among other things, gender lines. He should carry traces of femininity, in a way too vague to really pin down. Gender is one of those basic qualifiers we use to determine identity. Bringing this into question causes the character to be incredibly unsettling, especially because the degree and ramifications remain as unknowns. It remains as an overhanging tension.

A small thing I think of is how much I've always loved how Bruce Timm draws pants, and to try to get that same kind of cut and motion.

Finally, another design point: In the audio commentary for Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker...I forget who's saying it, but in working on the Joker's character design, they made sure to give him very large, long, ugly hands. "Strangler hands" was the phrase they used. That strikes me. "Strangler hands". It implies such incredible brutality, and also...intimacy. Simultaneously. *Shivers.*

...Heh. I go saying all this, and it's not even that much or that great of a painting.
Ah, well. I did try to convey the same speech patterns that Mark Hamill used when playing the role.
...Sorry for all the ramble. Literary analysis gets me excited.

Batman and the Joker created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, DC Comics
art (c) J. E. Seames 2008