Joker

Joker was born John Walsh in Bludhaven to parents Joseph and Irene. In many timelines, he has an older brother named Michael. Joseph Walsh was a decorated veteran who in some timelines (ex: Dimension J-510, J-512) is an exemplary father until his son discovers the depths of his bigotry and homophobia. In others (J-511), he suffers a severe head injury that turns him more overtly violent, and he regularly abuses his family. In most timelines John (called Jack) eventually cuts ties with his family and either becomes a chemical engineer, criminal, or a clown. Most iterations tend to call themselves "Jack Napier" in a bid to both distance themselves from their families and pay tribute to their childhood nickname, "Jackanapes".

Dimension J-510 (Batman: The Killing Joke)

On the surface, Jack Walsh in this dimension grows up in a cookie-cutter family setting in Bludhaven. His father earns good money as vice-president of a cannery, and they live in one of the few nice suburbs in Bludhaven. Irene is a housewife, who although a little emotionally distant and a secret alcoholic, has a good relationship with her sons. Michael is older than Jack by four years.

Both boys grow up practically worshiping their father, who instills in them the importance of family and service. He takes the most care raising Michael, who as the oldest Joseph is particularly concerned should carry on the family name with honor. Jack becomes the clown of the family and at school, having developed his humor as a coping mechanism when classmates would pick on him for his gangly appearance and his sometimes volatile nature. Michael and Joseph do step in on occasion to keep Jack in line, but do so lovingly and with sensitivity.

Jack's storybook upbringing comes crashing down the summer after he graduates high school. Joseph catches Michael kissing his college roommate Danny at the family's annual 4th of July barbeque. Joseph disowns Michael and casts him out, which forces him to join the military. He dies during an accident at boot camp, leaving Jack devastated and disillusioned with his father. He makes a scene at Michael's funeral, getting into a physical altercation with Joseph, who now casts his youngest son out as well. It is then that Jack decides to change his name to Jack Napier, and survives on his scholarship and odd jobs on campus.

Possessing a genius IQ, he graduates college early and gets a job as lab assistant to the irritable Rick Sanchez at Ace Chemical Processing Plant in Gotham. A year later, he meets on his walk to work a young woman named Jeannie Núñez, who works at the Monarch Playing Card Company next door to the plant. Sharing the same sense of humor, the two soon fall in love and marry. She encourages him to go after his lifelong dream to become a comedian, and he starts doing stand-up at various Gotham comedy clubs. Although he has an awkward delivery and a bad habit of laughing through his punchlines, Jeannie's answering laughter encourages the rest of the audience. Jack has a successful start, and is optimistic about making a living this way.

His luck begins to turn when he gets in an argument with Sanchez about some strange notes belonging to Rick that Jack found: the formula to the interdimensional chemicals Rick is developing in secret. Jack quits over the incident, only to find out soon after that Jeannie is pregnant. They're hopeful that Jack's growing success at open mic will see them through, along with Jeannie's job at Monarch; however, Jack gets a call during an audition that Jeannie fainted at work. She is severely anemic and the doctor prescribes bedrest. Unfortunately, bedrest is not included in Monarch's maternity leave coverage, and Jeannie is unceremoniously fired. She's also restricted by her doctor from going to Jack's shows, and without her encouragement in the audience, Jack starts bombing repeatedly.

Thanks to this and medical costs, they're soon forced to move to the Narrows into a dilapidated apartment in a tenement housing. Jack is desperate that their baby not be born in this environment, so he takes up his agent Louie's offer to hook him up with two criminals in Louie's acquaintance. They talk Jack into leading them through his old place of work to Monarch next door; Jack's desperation and lingering resentment over Monarch's treatment of Jeannie leads him to reluctantly accept their offer. However, on the morning of the heist, when he goes to meet with his accomplices to firm up arrangements, he learns from police officers Matelli and Ryan that Jeannie has died from an electrical short after a baby bottle heater she ordered on discount malfunctions. Numb with shock, Jack tries to back out of the plan, but his accomplices strong-arm him into meeting them that night. Jack goes to the hospital first to identify Jeannie, and the shock of seeing her causes him to disassociate. He is somehow able to go through the motions and meet with the criminals, but he is detached from the scene around him.

The criminals put a red hood over his head, having earlier told him that the notorious Red Hood is nothing more than a rotating series of men used to throw off the scent of the police. The heist immediately goes wrong, as unbeknownst to Jack, Ace's superiors discovered Rick Sanchez's credentials were forgeries and fired him; they added extra security as a result, since Rick had access to all the proprietary and confidential assets at the plant. A shoot-out ensues, killing both criminals. Jack frantically escapes to the catwalk above the chemical vats, where the suits at the plant had poured Rick's chemicals. There Jack is confronted by Batman, and hysterical at the sight of this shadowy, demonic figure, Jack panics and jumps over the railing into the vats below.

As the swirl of chemicals push him out a pipe and into the river outside, the interdimensional element begins to affect his mind. He experiences all his memories from all the different timelines where he was exposed to the chemicals. He pulls himself out of the water and yanks off the hood, and stares at his reflection in the water. There he sees his grisly transformation: the chemicals have dyed his skin bone-white, his hair green, and stained his lips bright red. The shock of this combined with losing Jeannie, the baby, and witnessing all the memories from his other lives, makes his mind snap and he goes insane, his only consistent memory being the figure in every timeline where he meets this fate: Batman.

Dimension J-511 (Batman: The Animated Series, Batman 1989, The Dark Knight)

In this timeline, Joseph suffers a severe head injury on a deployment overseas shortly after Jack's conception. This damages his brain, turning him into a violent bully. On his return to Bludhaven, he terrorizes and abuses Irene and Michael, the latter of whom disappears. It remains unknown whether he ran away or met with some sort of an "accident" at the hands of his father. Joseph's abuse of Irene makes her go into a traumatic premature labor. Jack is mentally and emotionally disturbed from the beginning, showing little to no empathy or feeling for his family or anyone else around him. He only seems to care for the classic cartoons and comedians he watches on TV.

He turns into a juvenile delinquent, and at age seventeen decides he's had enough of his father's abuse and his mother's drinking. He meets a teenage drifter about his age and size, and commits his first murder by slashing the drifter's throat. Dressing the dead boy in his pajamas and placing him in his own bed, he sets his family's house on fire that night, and his parents die. The drifter is taken for Jack Walsh. The next day Jack Napier starts working as a hitman for Gotham gangster Sal Valestra.

He works for Valestra for several years, until he decides to get a cut of the action from Valestra's rival Carl Grissom on the side. After a few years Grissom finds out about Jack's double-crossing, and also about him fooling around with Grissom's girlfriend Alicia; thus, he sets Jack up as the fall guy for the heist at the chemical plant. The same scene plays out with Batman that played out for the Jack in J-510: he jumps into Rick's chemicals to escape Batman, and suddenly remembers all the timelines that led him here, including one where he was a happily married man. However, like all the other iterations of himself, he pushes this memory away and instead gives over to sadistic insanity, focused -- as always -- on Batman.

Dimension J-512 (Batman: Hush Returns)

This version of Jack is identical to the affable, happily married comedian in Dimension J-510, except this Jack is an even poorer liar: he is unable to hide his criminal plans from Jeannie. More of a realist than her husband, Jeannie talks him into backing out of the arrangement, knowing it will only end badly. However, the couple can't seem to escape tragedy: the criminals get in touch with corrupt cop Oliver Hammett to kidnap Jeannie and hold her hostage until Jack helps them through the chemical plant.

In order to save Jeannie he agrees, but security once again catches them -- and this time, it's Batman who accidentally kicks Jack into the chemicals. However, through the swirl of new memories from the interdimensional compound, Jack is able to hold on long enough to remember Jeannie needs his help. Yet when he makes it back home, he sees the apartment in flames: Jeannie is dead. This is what makes him finally snap and turn into the Joker, although this version has a deeply melancholy bent because of Jeannie's murder. Twelve years later the Riddler approaches him asking for protection, and uses for leverage the fact he witnessed Jeannie's murder from the apartment across the street. He gives Joker the name of Oliver Hammett. Joker grins, anticipating his meeting with Hammett.

Dimension J-513 (Batman: Three Jokers)

This version of Jack's background is quite similar to Jack's in Dimensions J-510 and J-512. He does not discover Joseph's true bigoted nature until he marries Jeannie. Joseph is suspicious of her background when he learns she is of latinx heritage and her parents are from Corto Maltese. When Michael tells Jack Joseph is inquiring into her family's immigration status, he angrily severs ties with his family, although he keeps the surname Walsh. He is devasted when he later learns from the newspaper that Mike was killed in a car accident, and that Jack wasn't invited to the funeral.

While working at the chemical processing plant one day, he discovers Rick's notes and Rick catches him, but doesn't let on. Instead, Rick decides to test his chemicals on Jack, leaking them out through the vent and slipping drops into his coffee. Jack begins to experience visions of himself who also happened to get exposed to the chemicals, including a criminal version of himself similar to J-511 Jack, who is exposed when the Rick in that timeline hires him as protection; and a sadistic, transient clown version of himself (like J-514) who is exposed when he passes out drunk in front of the plant one night and Rick decides to inject him with the serum to gauge his reaction.

J-513 Jack begins to lose control, losing sight of which version of himself he is. It gets to the point where Jeannie fears for her life, and for her unborn child. When Jack refuses to get help for fear of becoming institutionalized, and also refuses to let her leave, she pleads her case to Matelli and Ryan. Batman listens to the conversation through the two-way glass with Jim Gordon. Along with up-and-coming attorney Harvey Dent and the police, Batman (as Bruce Wayne) helps her escape to some Dent family property in Alaska. Matelli and Ryan tell Jack that she died from the same electrical short that really did kill her in Dimension J-510, only this time they do not ask him to identify her at the hospital. Thus he does not learn that she is really alive, and numb from grief and his steadily growing insanity from the chemicals, he meets the same fate as the others, only more savvy about what's causing his multiple choice stream of memories.

He decides to bring the other two versions of himself to life in this timeline. He kidnaps a struggling young clown named Artie and dumps him in the chemicals, brainwashing him and indoctrinating him into becoming the Clown version. He then takes his revenge on Rick Sanchez and turns him into the Criminal. Although all three versions now share the same hatred for Batman, Jack -- calling himself The Comedian -- is still haunted by memories of Jeannie.

Dimension J-514 (Batman: A Death in the Family, Joker, Batman 1966 TV Series)

Joseph Walsh suffered a head injury as in Dimension J-511, but died while Jack was an infant, leaving Irene broke and traumatized from her husband's abuse. She turns more and more to drink, and Michael runs away. She takes turns neglecting and smothering Jack, depending on how drunk she is. This Jack grows up a strange mixture of the sadistic, unempathetic gangster Jack from J-511 with J-510's strong desire to make people laugh. His efforts to support his mother and himself through clowning goes nowhere, and frustrated, he agrees to help the two criminals break into the Ace Chemical Processing Plant. There he meets Batman and falls into the interdimensional chemicals, becoming the most playfully violent and unpredictable Joker. Like the other Jokers, he vaguely recalls happier memories with a woman he loved and who loved him, and these occasional visions drive him to the brink every time.