Would Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth Work on the Joker?

Today, we look at whether Wonder Woman's famous Lasso of Truth would have an effect upon the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker!

In Comic Book Questions Answered, I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

Reader Joe B. wrote in to ask whether Joker's madness was so strong that it would overpower Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth. Let's take a look!

First off, revisiting a topic I addressed a few years ago, Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth was not always a Lasso of Truth. In fact, when Wonder Woman debuted, she didn't have a lasso at all! When she took her first bow in 1941's All-Star Comics #8 (in a short story by William Marston and H.G. Peter to preview her then-upcoming lead role in a new superhero anthology series, Sensation Comics), her bullet-deflecting bracelets were the only weaponry that she had with her when she first put on her costume (she got her invisible plane in the first issue of the aforementioned Sensation Comics).

THE LASSO ENTERS THE PICTURE, BUT IT WASN'T A LASSO OF TRUTH

It was not until the sixth issue of Sensation Comics that Wonder Woman finally received her lasso, but the introduction of the lasso was much different than you might expect. Queen Hippolyta had her craftswomen take her magic girdle and remove some of the chain links within it and turn them into a powerful, unbreakable lasso. After giving it to her daughter, Wonder Woman then prayed to Aphrodite and Athena and they then visit her and reveal that they have given her lasso a special property - anyone bound by it must obey Wonder Woman!

Naturally, this almost certainly tied in with a number of William Marston's personal beliefs. First off, he believed in the ultimate superiority of women and he felt that the world would be better if women were in charge, so therefore, it men were forced to obey women, things might turn out for the better. Secondly, though, Marston was clearly just into bondage period. It is not a coincidence that Wonder Woman's biggest weakness at the time was that if you bound her wrist, she lost her powers. That made it clear, then, that Wonder Woman would have to be bound all the time, for the same reason why Thor's hammer was constantly out of his grip for more than 60 seconds or why Superman always runs into criminals who have pieces of kryptonite. Wonder Woman ended up tied up in chains so many times in the early years of the series that National Comics literally had to tell Marston to stop chaining her up so much (amusingly enough, they were not objecting to her being tied up so much as the redundancy of him using chains all the time).

Soon after the lasso was introduced, Wonder Woman got her own feature series (while still starring in Sensation Comics, as well. She was really popular at the time), and Marston and Peter re-told Wonder Woman's origin in Wonder Woman #1, but they made a few slight changes, and this included working the magic lasso into the origin. Now, the lasso WAS used to make people tell Wonder Woman the truth, of course, but only in terms of them being forced to obey her and so if she told them to tell her the truth, that's exactly what they would do, like this scene in Sensation Comics #7.

That was not, though, the main function of the lasso. While Wonder Woman obviously would often use the lasso to make people tell her the truth (as a means of acquiring actionable intelligence, there's few things better than forcing your enemies to tell you everything that you want to know and in terms of comic book exposition, it helps in that regard, as well), the main idea was that she imposed her will on other people, like this sequence from Wonder Woman #4 where she uses her lasso to make a bad guy untie a woman with his teeth...

HOW DID JOKER REACT TO THE PRE-CRISIS LASSO OF TRUTH

We don't know for sure how Joker would deal with Wonder Woman's lasso, since she never used it on him in an official comic book, but we have about as close as you can get to an "official" comics, which is an unreleased issue of Joker's ongoing series (Joker #10 by Martin Pasko and Irv Novick), where we see that the Joker WAS too much for Wonder Woman...

(And yes, the Joker does, in fact, then hang Wonder Woman with her own lasso. It's kind of twisted). The problem is that this is the story according to the Joker. He is very much an unreliable narrator and the next issue was never created, so we don't know if this was all lies made up by the Joker. Still, it is at least a HINT that the Joker would have been too much for Wonder Woman's Pre-Crisis magic lasso.

WOULD JOKER BE TOO MUCH FOR THE POST-CRISIS LASSO OF TRUTH?

The POST-Crisis Lasso of Truth (which it now officially became), however, was a good deal more powerful, which George Perez detailed very early on in Wonder Woman #6 (by Perez, Len Wein and Bruce Patterson), when Wonder Woman used her Lasso of Truth on Ares to show him that his plan to drive the world to war was madness.

This demonstrated two important aspects of the Lasso. One, it was powerful enough to even work on GODS and two, it is so powerful that it cured the madness of a god.

Therefore, logically, the lasso should do the same for the Joker, so it would theoretically cut right through the Joker's insanity.

It is worth noting, though, that in the alternate reality of Injustice, Batman argued that Wonder Woman's Lasso of Truth WOULDN'T work on the Joker. However, I think that it is probably just a bit of a case of "power creep," where the Joker has to be some super super special villain and what would work for the literal god of war wouldn't be able to handle him...