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Even though the two are literally universes apart, the Joker has claimed to have a similarity to Marvel’s Spider-Man…and he may be right.
On the surface, the idea that DC’s Joker and Marvel’s Spider-Man have anything in common might sound absurd. While the Joker stalks the shadowed streets of Gotham City in search of his next victim, Spider-Man swings through the open skies of New York looking for people to help. Their differences also extend to their personal beliefs, as Spider-Man’s timeless motto of “with great power comes great responsibility” flies in the face of the Joker’s nihilistic insistence that the world is a meaningless joke and deserves to be treated as such.
However, Spider-Man and the Joker do share one common element; they were both the product of a single bad day. Before they became the Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and the Clown Prince of Crime, Peter Parker and the man who would become the Joker were both ordinary people whose lives were turned inside out by tragedy. Neither of them felt an innate desire to do good or evil before the events that made them into a hero or villain, and both of them have embraced the fact that anyone could become just like them under the right circumstances.
Before he became Spider-Man, Peter Parker was a normal high school student defined only by his above-average intelligence and social awkwardness. Likewise, the version of the Joker’s backstory presented in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke paints him as a down-on-his-luck man trying to provide for his pregnant wife while failing to make it as a stand-up comedian. Neither of them is shown to be inherently good or evil, and neither of them has any aspirations of becoming a hero or a villain.
Likewise, the events that transform Peter and the comedian into Spider-Man and the Joker aren’t in any way related to them. There were many people in the room when Peter was bitten by the radioactive spider that gave him his powers, and the criminals who recruited the comedian for the job that ultimately ended with his transformation into the Joker could have just as easily recruited anyone. At the end of the day, the Joker and Spider-Man are the products of pure happenstance, and it’s safe to say that anyone could have become them if things had gone a little bit differently.
However, this shared element of their backstories is also where the character’s profound differences make themselves known. To Peter, the opportunity to become Spider-Man was a gift, and the fact that it was his unwillingness to stop a burglar got his beloved Uncle Ben killed has served as a constant reminder that anyone can save a life with a simple act of responsibility. At his core, Peter believes that there’s no difference between what he does as Spider-Man and what anyone who pursues a career as a doctor, firefighter, or police officer does, and he believes that everyone has the potential to use their unique skills and talents to serve the greater good. This is a lesson that Spider-Man often gives to the citizens he saves from everyday accidents or criminal encounters, instilling almost everyone he meets with the belief that they too can be a hero.
In contrast, the Joker has always viewed what happened to him as proof that people are powerless against the random nature of the world. To Joker, it doesn’t matter who you are as a person because all it takes is “one bad day” to bring out the monster inside. Unlike Spider-Man, the Joker wasn’t strong enough to accept what happened to him and make something good out of it, and he’s instead dedicated his life to “proving” that there is no reason in anything that happens to anyone.
In the end, the Joker and Spider-Man are just two people who had a bad day. However, while Spider-Man used his tragedy to inspire good in others, the Joker used his as an excuse to take his anger out on the world around him.
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