Joker and Harley Quinn are the most iconic duo in comic book history, but that doesn’t mean that the two have only ever had eyes for each other. Recently, a new significant other has taken Harley’s place at the Joker’s side, and her name is Punchline. In the recently released comic The Joker 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular (quite a mouthful, I know), the horrid details of the character’s origins are revealed.
Celebrating 80 years of the Clown Prince of Crime, the comic book features several short stories related to the Joker, and the one about Punchline is titled ‘What Comes After A Joke?’ and is written and illustrated by James Tynion IV and Mike Janin. It opens with the Dean of Students at Snyder College outside of Gotham City, arguing with student Alexis who wore Joker merchandise to the school’s ‘Dress Like Your Hero Day’ event. He yells at her that such a statement not only goes against the ethos of the campus, but human decency in general. She retorts claiming that the dean only cares about his reputation before blowing a puff of cigarette smoke in his face, which we quickly discover to be laughing gas, as the dean falls to the ground and begins to uncontrollably laugh. In his last moments, as he’s suffocating on his own pained howls, Alexis lectures him on how his generation handed hers a broken world, and as she’s changing into her Punchline outfit, tells him that she wants to create her own world instead, even if she has to hurt people to achieve it. The dean dies quickly after and Punchline tells the Joker, who has been hiding in her closet, that she hopes he now has proof that she wasn’t “just another creepy fangirl”.
So it seems like the Clown Prince of Crime’s new sidekick is such an entitled Millenial college girl that she’s willing to work for the most notorious supervillian in Gotham just to do whatever she wants. Hardly the most compelling backstory for a DC character, but she hasn’t had much of a presence in the comics as of yet, so I’m willing to see her get developed more as we near the upcoming ‘Joker War’ storyline.