The upcoming Joker origin film that will be directed by Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix has revealed the "real name" of the man who would become Joker. The name that they are using is Arthur Fleck. This is notable, of course, as the Joker, generally speaking is famous for how he does not have a "real" name. Heck, the comic books have made it clear to avoid giving Joker an "official" origin at all.

However, Arthur Fleck is not the first time that somebody came up with a "real name" for the Joker. This would be the name that, until now, had been the only other "official name" ever associated with the Joker. That name is "Jack Napier."

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The reason behind the creation of the Jack Napier name is because of how Tim Burton decided to handle the Joker's origin in 1989's Batman. They went with an actual defined origin for the villain. He was a mobster who was having an affair with the girlfriend of the head of the mob, Carl Grissom. Therefore, if you are going to have a guy be a well-established member of the mob, he can't very well not have a name. So Burton came up with Jack Napier, which was a dual tribute -- Jack for Jack Nicholson, who played the Joker in the film and Napier for Alan Napier, who played Alfred Pennyworth in the 1960s Batman TV series.

Grissom learned of the affair and conspired to have Napier assassinated at a job at ACME Chemicals. Instead of dying, though, Napier instead falls into a vat of chemicals and is transformed into the Joker. He gets his revenge on Grissom and almost poisons all of Gotham City before being dying in battle with Batman.

As Napier dies, we discover that it was actually a young Napier that killed Bruce Wayne's parents in that fateful alley in Gotham when Bruce was a boy...

The film was a smash success, so the name Jack Napier was now forever associated with the Joker, but what is interesting is that the comic books still stayed away from giving the Joker any sort of real name. Interestingly, the first possible origin for the Joker was given just a year before Batman was released, with Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, which suggested a possible origin for the Joker was that he was a failed stand-up comedian who agreed to play the role of a costumed villain, the Red Hood, for a score that went horribly wrong. The idea is that one bad day could conceivably transform a person's entire life and turn a normal person into a villain. The Red Hood identity, by the way, was the only aspect of Joker's past that had ever been confirmed before. It was revealed in a 1951 Detective Comics story that the Joker had, at one time, gone by the identity of the Red Hood.

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Batman: The Animated Series handled the "Jack Napier" thing brilliantly (like they did with most things. It was a really good show).

In the first three seasons, the show was more heavily patterned after the so-called "Burtonverse," as the TV show launched at the same time as the second Tim Burton Batman film, Batman Returns. After three seasons of that style, though, the show went in its own direction more and tended to follow the comic books a bit more.

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In terms of Jack Napier, the show depicted the Joker's past as Jack in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm...

but they did not have him actually referred to as Jack in that film. His name was just never used (just like how Moore and Bolland handled it in Batman: The Killing Joke). However, the Joker's "real name" was provided by a few psychiatrists and in a dossier on the Joker.

Things changed, though, in Season 4 of the show, when it was revealed that "Jack Napier" was simply one of a number of aliases that the Joker has used over the years. This brought the animated universe in line with the comic book depiction of Joker, which is that there is no one, true name of the villain.

The first two comic book references to the name occurred in 2001's Batman: Gotham Noir (by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips), which was an Elseworlds story that was set in the 1940s. There, Jack Napier is a lackey for the crooked mayor of Gotham who is then tortured, disfigured and left for dead...but he didn't die...

and then, ten years later, Scott Lobdell and Pascal Alixe used the name in Red Hood and the Outlaws #14, as a weatherman disguise that the Joker used to get a message to Jason Todd...

In the Christopher Nolan film, The Dark Knight, he did not choose to go with a "real name" for his version of the Joker.

The most recent usage of Jack Napier in the comics is probably also its most notable one. In 2017, Sean Gordon Murphy wrote and drew an eight-issue limited series called Batman: White Knight, which saw the Joker's sanity returned through the use of special medication. Murphy received permission to have the Joker's real name revealed as Jack Napier.

The now-cured Napier decides that he will be the hero that Gotham City truly deserves. As he notes, "I love Gotham, and it's time I paid her back for the debt owed by the Joker. The city deserved better than you, better than the Joker and better than the Dark Knight. So I'm going to be her White Knight."

Throughout the series, though, the medication begins to falter and Napier begins to revert to his Joker persona, while there is a new Joker out there wreaking havoc. Ultimately, Napier and Batman have to team up to take down the new Joker and perhaps, in the process, put an end to their seemingly unending cycle of drama between them.

The Jack Napier name is now even more firmly ensconced in the Joker mythos, so it will be interesting to see if Arthur Fleck ends up unseating it in the future.