Could This Explain Geoff Johns's 'Three Jokers?'

With the start of Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok's Three Jokers still a ways off, it seems unlikely anybody is going to stumble onto an explanation for the baffling appearance of multiple Clown Princes of Crime right now -- but it seemed at least worth entertaining an idea that ties specifically into Johns's own writing.

The idea that there are, and have been, three distinct Jokers in the DC Universe for some time now was introduced in DC Universe: Rebirth #1, written by Johns. That story helped to realign the DC Universe timeline following the events of Flashpoint, another Johns story, which launched the unpopular New 52 reboot.

To be clear, The New 52 was not unpopular to start with, and actually sold quite well for a while. Its controversial storytelling ideas were unpopular with long-term readers, though, which contributed to the audience attrition that ultimately led DC to rethink The New 52 entirely and launch Rebirth in specific.

Rebirth was a new status quo, though, and not a full reboot. While some elements of the DC Universe's mythology were altered, added to, or subtracted from, it was generally not restarted from scratch the way it had been five years prior. The status quo of Flashpoint still, for the most part, stands.

Audiences have seen fallout from Flashpoint making its way through titles like Batman (where the Flashpoint version of the Dark Knight has shown up a few times) and The Flash (where Barry's reckless disregard for the space-time continuum and its devastating effects on his former protege Wally West recently played out in "Flash War"). And that got us thinking: could the three Jokers be a result of Flashpoint?

Johns has said that the characters are not going to be alternate-dimension doppelgangers or some other trick: just three guys who have been The Joker, for some time, for some reason.

Still, it is difficult to ignore that in the final breaths of the old DC Universe before Flashpoint rebooted it, the three main publishing lines of DC at the time -- the DC Universe, the WildStorm Universe, and the Vertigo Comics titles that are owned by DC and featured characters like John Constantine and Swamp Thing -- were merged into a single Earth, with elements of the WildStorm and Vertigo timelines appearing in early New 52 comics.

In the time since Rebirth, we have seen a distinct difference between the WildStorm Universe (as depicted in The Wild Storm and The Wild Storm: Michael Cray) and the DCU, with DC superheroes playing violent and sometimes evil versions of themselves, suggesting that a full integration of the universes never entirely happened, or that if it did, they were separated again along the way. The New 52 Superman and the traditional Superman were split in two, Superman Red/Superman Blue-style, by Mxyzptlk as part of an elaborate plot involving Doctor Manhattan (which ties into Johns's Doomsday Clock, in which one of the Jokers has already appeared).

We have no idea how it might work, but the temptation to view the three merged universes of DC's publishing lines, as conceived by Johns years ago, and three Jokers who have been hanging around the DCU all that time, as connected? Well, it's hard to avoid.

What do you think? Are the Three Jokers going to turn out to have been tied to Flashpoint, or are we stretching on this one and thinking way too hard about something that is probably not cosmic in nature? Comment below or reach out to us on Twitter @ComicBook or @RussBurlingame!