Batman's Gotham is a city with more villains than police, and three of them come up most. The Joker is a clown-faced killer with no fixed origin. Harley Quinn is the Arkham psychiatrist who fell for him. Clayface is a name that has belonged to at least four different people, most of them shape-shifting mud. The Killing Joke is the comic in which the Joker tries to prove that one bad day is all it takes to drive anyone mad.
Below, the comics come first, with the films, the 1990s cartoon and the games named where they change things. Batman and his rogues are on the Batman shelf.
The Joker and The Killing Joke explained
The Joker has been Batman's opposite since 1940: a killer who laughs, with chalk-white skin, green hair and a red grin. The comics have never fixed his past. The most-cited version comes from The Killing Joke (1988), and even there he admits he remembers it differently from one telling to the next.
In its flashbacks he is a failed comedian with a pregnant wife, who agrees to guide two criminals through the chemical plant where he once worked. They make him wear a red hood. His wife dies in an accident that same day, the robbery goes wrong, Batman arrives, and the man in the hood escapes him by jumping into the plant's chemical waste. He comes out bleached, green-haired and laughing.
In the present day, he shoots Barbara Gordon, who used to be Batgirl, through the spine, and kidnaps her father, Commissioner Gordon, to prove that one bad day can break any sane man. Gordon does not break. Batman catches the Joker and offers, one more time, to help him. The Joker answers with a joke about two inmates escaping an asylum, and both of them laugh. The last panels are left open, and readers still argue about what happens in them.
One more story fixed the Joker's place: A Death in the Family (1988), in which he beats the second Robin, Jason Todd, with a crowbar and leaves him to die in an explosion, after readers voted by phone on whether the boy should live. Ha Ha Ha takes its name from the laugh.
Harley Quinn's origin
Harley Quinn began on television, not in a comic. She was created for Batman: The Animated Series and first appeared in 1992 as one of the Joker's gang. The comics took her in, and the 1994 comic Mad Love gave her the origin most versions still use.
Dr Harleen Quinzel is a psychiatrist at Arkham Asylum who picks the Joker as her patient. Over their sessions he tells her sad stories about his childhood, and she falls for him, helps him escape and puts on a harlequin's costume. Her name was always the joke: Harleen Quinzel, Harley Quinn, harlequin. In DC's 2011 relaunch the Joker pushes her into the same chemicals that made him, bleaching her skin; the 2016 Suicide Squad film has her jump in by choice.
She has since walked away from him. Since the 2010s she has mostly been an antihero, with her own books, her own crew and a close bond with Poison Ivy, and her oversized mallet has followed her through most versions. Mallet is named for it.
Clayface: the main versions
Clayface is not one villain but a title, and each holder works differently.
The first, Basil Karlo (1940), is a horror-film actor who murders the cast of a remake of his best-known film while wearing the mask of its monster, Clayface. He has no powers at all; decades later the comics give him shape-shifting clay to match the name.
The second, Matt Hagen (1961), is a treasure hunter who finds a pool of strange protoplasm in a cave. Soaking in it turns him into a mass of clay that can take any shape, but only for a while at a time, so he keeps going back. He is the first Clayface with the powers most people picture.
The third, Preston Payne (1978), is a scientist whose experimental cure for his own condition leaves his body so unstable that he lives inside a containment suit. He cannot reshape himself; instead his touch melts other people. The fourth, Sondra Fuller, known as Lady Clay, is a full shape-shifter who later teams up with Karlo and Payne as the Mud Pack.
The 1990s cartoon blends them. Its Clayface is Matt Hagen, but recast as an actor, scarred in an accident and hooked on a cream that reshapes his face, until a massive dose turns his whole body to clay. The comics have also tried redemption: in the 2016 Detective Comics run, Basil Karlo joins a team Batman puts together, as a man trying to go straight. Mudslide is the shelf's Clayface.
Arkham Asylum
Arkham Asylum, in full the Elizabeth Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane, is the psychiatric hospital where Gotham sends the villains judged too ill to stand trial; ordinary criminals go to Blackgate Penitentiary. In the comics it was founded by Amadeus Arkham and named after his mother, and its founder ended up locked inside it as a patient.
Its security is famously poor, and that is the point: villains go in at the end of one story and break out at the start of the next. Harley Quinn's career begins there, and the Joker treats it as home. The 2009 game Batman: Arkham Asylum made it a setting in its own right, with the Joker taking over the whole island facility and Batman locked in with him, and the series that followed carried the name into Arkham City and Arkham Knight.
The Bat-family
The Bat-family is the circle of allies around Batman, Bruce Wayne. Alfred Pennyworth, the family butler, raised him after his parents were murdered; Commissioner James Gordon is his ally inside the police. Then come the Robins, in order: Dick Grayson, who grew up to become Nightwing; Jason Todd, killed by the Joker and later back as the Red Hood; Tim Drake, who worked out Batman's identity on his own and later became Red Robin; Stephanie Brown, the Spoiler, briefly; and Damian Wayne, Bruce's son with Talia al Ghul.
Barbara Gordon is the Batgirl most people know. After The Killing Joke left her paralysed she became Oracle, the team's hacker and information hub, for more than twenty years of comics, until DC's 2011 relaunch put her back in the cowl. Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown have also been Batgirl, and Batwoman, Kate Kane, works the same city. Gargoyle Watch and Night Leap put the man at the centre of it all on the shelf.
On the shelf
On the back of a tee
Batman, the Joker, Harley Quinn and Clayface are on the Batman shelf, drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why it works on the back: Gotham was drawn for contrast, a black cape against a pale moon, a white face with a red grin, and shapes that simple still read from the far end of a room.
Read next: Spider-Man's rogues gallery explained (the other great gallery of villains) and Spawn explained: Al Simmons, necroplasm and the Hellspawn deal.
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