Scans_Daily

"Yeah, and now we could do justice to that baby, but at the time, 'Okay, you’ve got a homicidal maniac and he has to be the protagonist 12 times a year.' I was never satisfied with the work I did for that. Given the Comics Code there was just no way to make it work. He had to be Hannibal Lecter in order to be consistent and logical and be The Joker, and he couldn’t be that back then. Now with the freedom comics guys have they could probably make it work.

"In terms of good writing, good plotting, it couldn’t be done. It was the same problem that the movie guys had. When I teach writing I use the movie, 'The Bad Seed' as an example of that; where it was adapted from a Broadway play about this angelic little girl who kills people wantonly any time she doesn’t get her way, and the way the play ended, she’s gonna get away with it. 'Oh, my God, she’s going to grow up!' (chuckle.) In the movie, because of that requirement, the last minute she walks to the end of a dock and lightning strikes her dead. So God takes care of it. God handles what the cops couldn’t, and nothing in the story sets that up. It’s not the writer’s fault; I mean they had to do it that way. So that was the problem with The Joker, you couldn’t be logical and consistent and do that character as a protagonist." -- Denny O'Neil

( Scans under the cut... )