The Batman Who Laughs

A nightmarish fusion of Batman and the Joker from a dark alternate Earth, the Batman Who Laughs was created when Bruce Wayne was exposed to a deadly Joker toxin, transforming him into a merciless, chaos-driven predator who retains Batman's tactical genius alongside the Joker's savage madness.

Few villains to emerge from the Modern Age have burrowed under readers' skin quite like The Batman Who Laughs — a nightmare concept made flesh, debuting in Nightwing #29 in 2017 courtesy of Tim Seeley and Paul Pelletier. This DC creation has since haunted the pages of Detective Comics, Batman/Superman, and Justice League of America, sharing those dark corners of the DC Universe with titans like Bruce Wayne, Superman, Clark Kent, and Wonder Woman. In just a handful of years he's racked up appearances that speak to an outsized impact on modern DC storytelling, the kind of figure whose presence signals that the stakes have been raised to their most unsettling extreme. If you want to understand where DC's darkest creative imagination has been pushing since 2017, this is the character you need to know.