Brave and the Bold Cover, Jim Aparo Artwork, 1974
"Death Has the Last Laugh"
The Joker had been a relatively benign "goon" for a long time in the Batman comics from the 1950s onward. The Jerry Robinson characterization of the character as an unsympathetically sick and dangerous psychopath (as in the noir-like 1940s issues of Batman) had come back in the 1970s.
Though a somewhat cheerier attitude would come back to Brave and the Bold by the late 1970s, for a brief time an urban-corruption and cultural malaise hit the Batman scripts of DC Comics.
