Best Batman Villain Arcs That Don't Involve Joker | Screen Rant
The Batman hit theaters and proved that a great Batman story doesn't have to include Joker. There was a hint at the end that Joker is in the world, and was likely in Batman's past already. However, the movie relied on a version of Riddler, Penguin, and Carmine Falcone to prove that Batman has plenty of fantastic rogues to battle without the clown in sight.
DC Comics has often also over-relied on Joker, bringing him into stories just to sell more copies, and making him someone that is almost a crutch to the Caped Crusader. That is despite the fact that there are several great villains in Batman comic books who have character story arcs that rival anything with the Clown Prince of Crime.
Hush arrived in comics in 2003's Batman #609 by Jim Lee and Jeph Loeb. This villain was a face from Bruce Wayne's childhood and the entire storyline played out like a vast mystery, with Batman not knowing it was his childhood friend Thomas Elliot until the end.
The Hush comic book storyline was a great character arc, as Bruce and Thomas were both children of wealthy Gotham City families, but Bruce's parents were loving and caring and Thomas's were abusive and violent. Joker did show up in the story, but he was never part of Hush's main villain arc.
In 2016, Batman and Two-Face left on a road trip together in My Own Worst Enemy. This took place in the pages of All-Star Batman by Scott Snyder during the DC Rebirth era. In this story, Harvey Dent tells Batman there is a cure for this evil side and Batman takes him to find it.
The entire trip is full of detours and obstructions, but the main arc here is Batman trying to help one of his greatest foes, and one-time allies, find a cure to stop his villainy. The end came when Batman learned the cure would kill the Harvey side forever, giving him relief from this life. Batman wouldn't allow his most tragic villain to do this.
When the DC New 52 began, Scott Snyder delivered one of Batman's greatest storylines in The Court of Owls. This introduced brand new villains in Gotham City with the twist being that they were there all along and were why the city was so riddled with crime.
The Court of Owls was the one-percenters in Gotham City who ran everything behind the scenes, and no one outside their club knew they existed. They targeted heroes and villains with the sole goal of keeping the status quo. With their assassins, the Talons, they were almost too much for Batman to handle.
Released in 2012, Penguin got his moment to shine in Penguin: Pain And Prejudice by Gregg Hurwitz and Szymon Kudranski. This was a five-issue series that saw the story go also the way back to Penguin's childhood to show readers how he became the man he is today.
The story in present-day is a take on Batman Returns, where Penguin has found a way to attempt to murder all Gotham City's children. That is not as interesting as the story of his childhood where he would one day grow up and see Batman as the one bully he could never overcome.
The Batman took an idea from a pair of stories with both Year One and The Long Halloween, which were both during Batman's early days in Gotham City as its Dark Knight. While the idea of the rise of supervillains took place in The Long Halloween, the story of Roman Falcone played out in Year One.
What made Year One so interesting was that Batman was a peripheral character. Instead, it is about Jim Gordon's rise to power in the Gotham PD and his main adversary in Gotham's premier crime boss, Roman Falcone.
In 2012, one of Riddler's best story arcs played out in a story by Gerard Jones and Mark Badger. This was Batman: Run, Riddler, Run. This might be the best Riddler story ever written and it starts with Batman stuck in a case he is unprepared to deal with -- homeless squatters and rich people with police helping them.
Riddler is not a key villain here but is a man who is playing his own game on the side. The same woman who is trying to convince Bruce Wayne to help her eliminate homeless people hired Riddler to be her security. However, when she fires Riddler, he ends up working alongside a reluctant Batman in one of the best team-ups ever.
Batman had a very personal enemy in Ra's al Ghul, the father of Talia al Ghul and the grandfather to Bruce Wayne's son Damien. Ra's was as brilliant as Batman ever was, and he had the added immortality that came with the Lazarus Pit. As for his best story arc, that would be Tales of the Demon.
What is most impressive about this story by Denny O'Neil is that it spawned multiple comic book series and stretched on for a decade. This isn't a series of stories about him, but a full overarching character arc that helps build him into one of Batman's best villains.
Joker is in the Knightfall storyline, but he is only part of the story and is just one of many Batman villains to show up here. However, what makes this a great story was that it helped turn Bane into one of Batman's most powerful and dominant villains in history.
Bane has all of Batman's villains attack him, one after the next until Batman is exhausted and weakened. At this time, Bane attacks and breaks Batman's back. This was one of the only times that someone not only beat Batman physically but mentally as well. Knightfall made Bane a true monster.
Batman: Earth One was a Penguin story by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank that changed everything about the diminutive villain. This was part of DC's attempts to release Elseworld-styled books that modernized the origin stories for the company's biggest characters.
One of the best parts of this series was Johns's reimagining Penguin. In this series, Penguin is Gotham City's mayor and might have been responsible for killing Thomas and Martha Wayne. As a newer Batman origin story, this is just as much a great Penguin tale as well.
Batman: Zero Year is what readers might expect from the title. Unlike Year One, which told the story of Batman in his first year in Gotham City, Zero Year was a Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo story that told of Batman getting started altogether.
Batman does fight Red Hood One in this series, the man who becomes Joker later, but the main story was Batman learning the ropes and becoming a hero by stopping Riddler, who had taken control of Gotham City. It was Riddler's origin story, as Edward Nygma took over the power grid and became a tyrant.