The truth no one is ready to hear yet.. Death of the Family and Scott Snyder ruined the Joker by making him this eldritch horror My issue isn't that the Joker shouldn't be horrifying or that he can't work as a horror character. It's that the eldritch horror approach increasingly overshadowed what made him compelling in the first place, his twisted sense of humor, theatricality, unpredictability, and disturbingly human cruelty. He went from being a sadistic criminal clown to an almost supernatural boogeyman who always seems ten steps ahead of everyone and can orchestrate practically anything, this also limited him in the way he could be used within batman comics where when he is used it is for a huge event. The Joker should be terrifying, but there's a difference between a criminal who's frightening because of his intelligence, cruelty, and complete disregard for human life and an all-knowing, seemingly unstoppable force of nature. The latter risks making him less of a character and more of a plot device. Snyder's take has its merits, and Death of the Family has some genuinely effective horror elements, but I think its interpretation of the Joker has had an outsized influence on how writers portray him ever since. Sometimes, making a character more monstrous doesn't make them more compelling. The Joker is at his best when the horror and the clown are equally important, when he is a character just doing shit because he finds it funny.. where he is pulling heists, pulling pranks, and IF he does do something big it feels like a shock because he is UNPREDICTABLE! That is the Joker I love, and that is the Joker that I feel has been lost and become unrecognizable in current comics