Superman: Emperor Joker with Anthony Desiato
We’re back with another episode of Trade School! This time, we’re talking about Superman: Emperor Joker! Our host this week is Anthony Desiato!
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⏱️ YouTube Chapters
00:00 Welcome and Introduction
00:46 Why Emperor Joker Stands Out
01:36 The Story’s Premise
02:24 The Original Joker Reveal
03:37 Collection History
04:21 Batman’s Role in a Superman Story
05:05 Superman’s Choice
05:45 Mxyzptlk and Emperor Joker’s Legacy
06:25 Bizarro, Scorch, and Ignition
07:11 Final Recommendation
07:59 Digging for Kryptonite Promo
Transcription
00:00
Welcome to Certain Point of View's Trade School, where each episode a different host talks about a comic book trade paperback that they loved and why they love it. Hey everybody. This is Anthony Desiato from the podcast Digging for Kryptonite, A Superman Fan Journey. For this edition of Trade School, I'm going to spotlight the 2000 storyline Superman Emperor Joker, most recently collected in a deluxe edition hardcover. This storyline fell during the Jeph Loeb Joe Kelly era of the super titles from the early 2000s, which is a portion of the Triangle era that is very near and dear to me. I loved those stories as a kid when I was 12 and 13 years old, and I've had an absolute blast in recent years on my podcast going back and revisiting those stories multiple times in fact.
00:46
And Emperor Joker in particular is a standout for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it's truly standalone. One of the joys of the Loeb Kelly era is how all of the storylines tied into each other and built off of each other and but that does make it a little trickier to highlight one trade, for example, to give to someone. I suppose. Another Exception is Joe Kelly's action comic 775, what's so funny about Truth, justice and the American Way. Certainly one of the most famous standalone Superman issues that comes from this era. But yeah, there's something to be said for Emperor Joker. Being as standalone as it is, you can really just dive right into it. So that's number one. Number two, it's just fun. So this originally came out, as I said, in the summer of 2000. It's a perfect summer blockbuster storyline.
01:36
You can read it at any point in the year, but it has that summer blockbuster feel to it. The premise, for anyone who's not familiar, is that Superman wakes up in a world gone mad. He's an inmate at Arkham, he's in his black costume, Lois is bald and hates him, and there's an Acme bomb instead of the Daily Planet globe at the top of the building. Everything is upside down and he has to figure out what's going on. Now you know from the title of the story that we're ultimately building towards the Joker. However, worth noting here that back in the day when this storyline was originally solicited and was starting to be published, D.C. hid the ball with respect to Joker's involvement in this. I specifically remember that the first month of this crossover storyline was labeled Superman Arkham.
02:24
And then there was a one shot special in between the first and second months that was Solicited with the dummy title of Emperor Question Mark. Now it may very well be the case that word had leaked on message boards or things like that. I don't know. But from my perspective as that 13 year old kid going to the comic shop every week, I remember being genuinely surprised when that Emperor Joker special came out with its full title finally revealed. It's one of those things, obviously. Now the story is known and labeled and collected as Emperor Joker, so you know what you're getting when you dive in.
02:57
But I did just want to mention part of the magic and the fun of this as it was originally coming out was the surprise of the Joker's involvement because you wouldn't necessarily expect that character in a Superman story. Although as I've talked about a lot in my discussions of this period of DC Comics, you were seeing at this time a good amount of, I think, organic cross pollination between the Bat books and the Superbooks. For example, we had Lex Luthor show up at the end of no Man's Land with his real estate scheme and now we have something like this. And those are not the only instances either. So I think it was a period of some pretty organic cross pollination between the Bat Books and the Superbooks. And this is another instance of that.
03:37
Now, on the note of how it's been collected, frustratingly, D.C. did not collect this for many years. So much so that when Jeph Loeb did a quasi follow up to this storyline in his final arc of Superman, Batman, it's the with a Vengeance storyline. There's a joke in there, a fourth wall breaking joke about how D.C. had not collected at that point the Emperor Joker storyline. Thankfully, they have since collected it at least a couple of times over. There was one, perhaps two soft cover collections and now most recently this deluxe edition hardcover and all of the issues are available on the DC app. So the story is now thankfully readily available. But for a long time it wasn't, which was quite frustrating.
04:21
One of the other reasons why I selected this in particular, aside from it being standalone and being this really fun summer blockbuster type story, is that it does a really great job of incorporating Batman into without Batman dominating the story. Batman has a very key role to play here. It's quite heartbreaking what Joker puts Batman through over the course of this story. And Batman, or perhaps I should say the idea of Batman plays a really critical role in the ultimate resolution. I won't spoil it, but I thought the story did a great job of remembering that this is a Superman event. But at the same time giving the Batman side of things its due, given that we are dealing with the Joker.
05:05
And again, I won't spoil anything, but Superman makes a choice at the end of the story with respect to Batman that would tie in thematically with the ideas DC would explore over the next few years in Identity Crisis and the aftermath of Identity Crisis, building up to Infinite Crisis and this fracture among the Trinity. I'm keeping it vague because I want people to go in and be able to experience the story on their own. But just to say that there are some ideas at play here that would continue to bear fruit even if they weren't explicitly addressed in those subsequent stories. I think you can still kind of read into them the events that we see here, so I think it's really interesting on that front.
05:45
Lastly, as far as the legacy of Emperor Joker, I think one of the things it did was forge this connection between Joker and Mxyzptlk. I'm not really giving anything away here. You'll know this simply from reading the synopsis on the back of the book, but the way the Joker is able to rewrite reality and turn everything upside down is with the power of Mxyzptlk. So thought that dynamic was rather interesting. We also got, as I was mentioning before, a follow up of sorts in Jeph Loeb's final Superman Batman arc. So there's a companion piece to this for those who are looking to dive in further. And most recently, I was quite surprised, pleasantly so, by this.
06:25
In the DCKO event, Joker at one point adopts his Emperor Joker form, which I thought was really cool and a nice nod to the story from creators who clearly also have a lot of affection for this time period. But perhaps most notably, this storyline introduced a new version of Bizarro Number One. At this point in DC Comics continuity post Crisis, we had actually had a number of Bizarros along the way. They were all clones of Superman that went awry. But in this iteration we have a Bizarro who's an outgrowth of this Emperor Joker world. And that character, that version of the character would go on, so there's that piece of it too. And as far as other characters, maybe they haven't had the same shelf life as Bizarro Number One.
07:11
But this arc also introduced the character Scorch and Ignition, who recently got referenced in another recent issue of the Joshua Williamson Superman run. So another reason I suppose to recommend this is if you've been reading recent DC comics and you've seen Ignition and you've seen Emperor Joker and KO and you are curious about this? Well, Emperor Joker is a story to read to see, the basis for all of that. So there you have it. Superman, Emperor Joker. My pick for this edition of Trade School. I hope you check it out and that you enjoy and happy reading. Digging for Kryptonite is a weekly podcast series hosted by yours truly, Anthony Desioto, examining Superman's vast mythology across time and media. If you have a favorite story, creator or adaptation, chances are we've covered it over the past 200 episodes.
07:59
I've interviewed creators including Mark Waid, Dan Jurgens, Jeph Loeb, Joe Kelly, and many more. Whether you're a lifelong Superman fan like me or you're new to the character, we have you covered. Subscribe to Digging for Kryptonite wherever you get podcasts and remember, it's about what you do. It's about action. Cpov. Certainpov. Com.