The next several days were spent holding the former Black Mask captive and torturing him to reveal every detail about himself. The Joker kept Sionis alive to access the bio-metric locks of the Gotham Merchant's Bank and take the fall, if Joker didn't feel like killing him first. Black Mask chose the latter and the Joker dragged the struggling crime lord out with him. The Joker then used a Molotov cocktail to eliminate evidence and tortured Black Mask by giving him a choice: watch Tiffany burn to death or shoot her to put her out of her misery. The real Black Mask then rushed from behind and tackled the Joker straight through his props, but the Joker rallied, overpowering Black Mask and restraining him. The Joker, waiting at a table, casually shot the double through the heart on sight. Just as Tiffany messaged Roman about the identity of her stalker, whom he dismissed as "No one important", and begged him to come over, the Joker violently smashed her head into a counter and tied her to a chandelier.Įver paranoid, Black Mask had a body double enter the safe house as a diversion while he snuck in via the adjacent balcony. Unfortunately for Black Mask and his lover the Joker was waiting when Tiffany returned from grocery shopping. Roman placed a spooked Tiffany in his safe house at Lacey Towers. Joker raised the stakes by stalking (one of) Roman's girlfriend(s), Tiffany Ambrose. Joker started his plans by stealing chemicals from Sionis' mill to manufacture explosives, attracting enough of the crime lord's attention to have him followed.
At some point Joker even acquired such a site by poisoning a real estate agent with a palm pin when they shook hands on the deal. He may also have chosen Black Mask because of Sionis Steel's reputation for shady theme park construction appealing to his twisted sense of humor. The crime lord's trademark mask would make for the perfect disguise and his steel mill, a front to manufacture drugs, came with all the resources needed to cook up deadly toxins and explosives. Seeking to carve a name for himself in the Gotham underworld he began targeting Roman Sionis, AKA Black Mask. Shortly after his transformation the Joker began scheming. Incident Reports Before Arkham Origins Incident However, only a true madman could find humor in the tragedies the Joker did and he at least once suffered intense visual hallucinations, visualizing Batman as a huge, winged monster during his second defeat at the hero's hands at Blackgate. He may not have actually been insane, simply the purest kind of human evil. The Red Hood persona, the Ace Chemical break in and Batman's presence seem to be the only consistent events in each retelling the details of whether Batman threw the Red Hood into the vat, failed to prevent him from falling in or if the criminal jumped in to escape justice seemed to depend on Joker's mood at the time.Įven the Joker's own insanity may be called into question, as it never impeded his intelligence, ruthlessness and ambition or prevented him from mastering chemistry to produce his various toxins and gases. Penelope Young, included being born in a small fishing village with thwarted aspirations of joining the circus and being the son of a police officer who was slain by the mob. Joker admitted that even he didn't remember what happened and that the various stories were inspired by a friend who once told him: "if you're gonna have an origin story, it may as well be multiple choice." It was entirely possible that this too was a lie. Strange refuted this story however, claiming the Joker had probably fabricated it to avoid taking responsibility for whatever his actual actions had been and noting the clown had told at least ten different origin stories during his career.
Driven insane by this series of events he embraced it, believing that the greatest joke of all is that humanity is only "one bad day" away from total insanity. Washed out of the plant he removed his disguise to find they had disfigured his entire body, giving him chalk white skin, green hair and his face a clown like appearance.
Batman interrupted the heist, resulting in the would-be criminal falling into a vat of unidentified chemicals. They died just before the night that he helped a gang of thieves from The Falcone Crime Family break into the Ace Chemicals plant, disguised as the infamous Red Hood. Harleen Quinzel in Arkham Originsand to Professor Hugo Strange in Arkham City: once he had been a failed stand-up comedian who worked night shifts at Ace Chemicals in a feeble attempt to support his sickly wife and their unborn child. The Joker's exact origin is a mystery, barring that Batman was somehow involved.