The Joker Just Became Pregnant, See The Unbelievable Images
In DC Comics' The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #4, the titular clown prince becomes pregnant because of a spell cast by Zatanna.
Well, if you had “Batman‘s Greatest Villain Gets A Baby Bump” on your 2023 Bingo card, congratulations! In The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #4, which DC Comics released on Tuesday, the Joker becomes pregnant and brings his strange spawn to term. His condition is caused unintentionally by a spell cast by the sexy sorceress Zatanna.
The main story of the series revolves around two Jokers, each of whom is convinced they are the true Joker and that the other is a fake. Each issue also contains a darkly humorous back-up story — written by Matthew Rosenberg with gorgeous art by Francesco Francavilla — which in this case involves Joker approaching the superhero Zatanna in the hopes of starting a family. Zatanna is understandably disgusted at Joker’s ideas of coupling with her, leading to her turning him pregnant (though not on purpose).
Zatanna is not only unfriendly to the idea of starting a family with the clown herself, but of Joker ever getting any woman pregnant. So, using her usual spellcasting method of speaking backwards, Zatanna casts a spell to stop anyone else from having the Clown Prince of Crime‘s baby.
As magic often does, it follows the caster’s commands but with a twist. “No one else” has the villain‘s baby, but instead Joker wakes up the next morning to discover he’s pregnant. With Joker’s goons’ medical knowledge predictably limited, another supervillain — Doctor Phosphorous — is called in to help, and Joker has lots of fun confusing him with other DC characters.
With the male Joker not benefiting from the same anatomy as a pregnant woman, his “child” instead exits his mouth and forms on the ground in what appears to be a pile of mud. That mud forms into a grotesque creature and leads Joker, Doctor Phosphorous, and Joker’s goons on a chase which ultimately leads to Jackanapes accidentally mowing down Phosphorous and Gaggy. Joker and his surviving thug lower their weapons once the misshapen mud morphs into a Joker mini-me.
The story ends with Joker revealing to Zatanna that she had made him pregnant, and he introduces her to who he calls their son.
Of course, anyone worrying that this means the Joker was canonically pregnant and how this could impact his continuity can probably relax. The back-up stories in The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing are clearly non-canonical, and don’t even adhere to their own crazy continuity. For example, the previous chapter ends with Professor Pyg attaching a monstrous bottom half to Joker’s body (after he’s ripped in half on train tracks), and the more recent story doesn’t reference that at all.
