Batman Giant Gives Joker a New Origin Story

According to Bleeding Cool the new issue of Batman Giant #5 has arrived on shelves at Wal-Mart stores in the United States and delivering a surprising new chapter into the DC Comics canon. The site reports that the story “Joker’s Wild aka Whacha Got in the Trunk?” in the new oversized issue by Mark Russell, Christopher Mooneyham, and David Aaron delivers a “secret” new origin for the Clown Prince of Crime. Though specifics on the story aren’t revealed, the story itself reportedly follows a tall tale about “the legend of a struggling young comic who finally snapped under the pressure of making it big, But what can say what really happened? No one knows for sure.” The new issue is in stores now with all the details.

No matter what this “secret origin” ends up being in the series, it seems unlikely that it will become a major pillar of DC continuity moving forward. The Joker‘s origins have been explored plenty of times previously in the pages of DC comics, most famously in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke and recently in Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Zero Year. The variety and uncertainty in his origins has become a staple more-so than the actual story of his origin, itself a focal point of last year’s Academy Award winning movie from Todd Phillips.

To make things perhaps even more complicated is the upcoming mini-series Three Jokers, the highly anticipated series from writer Geoff Johns and artist Jason Fabok that reveals the circumstances of how there are actually three versions of the villain running around. DC fans have been teased with the idea of “Three Jokers” for years now, with Johns first planting the seed during the “Darkseid War” storyline and revealing the trio of clown villains in DC Rebirth #1, first published in May of 2016.

The series will not only focus on the titular Jokers but the people most effected by the Joker in the past including Batman himself, Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, and Jason Todd/Red Hood, all of whom have a complicated and violent history with the character. Johns previously confirmed that this new story won’t introduce a “multiverse of Jokers” and isn’t out to specifically change the characters forever, but to dig deep into the relationships between these DC heroes and the clown prince of crime. Its first issue was recently delayed from June until August.