10 Shocking Batman Plans You Won’t Believe Almost Happened
1. Joker Almost Died After His First Appearance
The constant battle between Batman and the Joker is one of the most iconic rivalries ever. The two are like night and day and multiple comics have highlighted the fact that one is completely lost without the other.
It's completely insane then (although that's pretty fitting for the character we're talking about) that the Joker was almost permanently killed off in his first appearance.
Back in Batman's earliest days, he wasn't averse to a bit of killing. Thanks to that, his rogue's gallery mainly consisted of a bunch of ordinary gangsters who would find themselves pushed out a window or impaled on a sword by the end of their debut.
When the grinning serial killer known only as the Joker appeared in Batman #1, he was designed by artist Jerry Robinson to act as a recurring villain. However, writers Bill Finger and Bob Kane decided that the Joker escaping justice would make Batman look incompetent and so wrote an ending in which he was stabbed in the heart and died.
Thankfully, editor Whitney Ellsworth overruled them and a new final panel was hastily added to explain that the Joker survived his stabbing.
It was both the beginning of one of the world's greatest villains and that villain's habit of implausibly surviving fatal injuries.