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Again, I've seen some of those early Batman stories in reprint, and they were nothing like the dark world of the current Batman with a Ledger Joker.

Is dat so?

1940s
In his initial dozen or so appearances, starting with Batman #1 (1940), the Joker was a straightforward mass murderer, with a bizarre appearance modeled after the symbol of the Joker known from playing cards. He was slated to be killed in his second appearance,[5] but editor Whitney Ellsworth suggested that the character be spared. A hastily drawn panel, demonstrating that the Joker was still alive, was subsequently added to the comic.[6]
For the next several appearances, the Joker often escaped capture but suffered an apparent death (falling off a cliff, being caught in a burning building, etc.), from which his body was not recovered. In these first dozen adventures, the Joker killed close to three dozen people.
[edit]1950s and 1960s
In the 1950s and 1960s, following the imposition of the Comics Code Authority censorship board, the Joker shifted toward becoming a harmless, cackling nuisance. He disappeared from Batman stories almost entirely when Julius Schwartz took over editorship of the Batman comics in 1964.
[edit]1970s-1980s


Batman #251 (Sept. 1973). Art by Neal Adams.
In 1973, the character was revived and profoundly revised in Batman stories by writer Dennis O'Neil and artist Neal Adams. Beginning in Batman #251, with "The Joker's Five Way Revenge", the Joker returns to his roots as a homicidal maniac who casually murders people on a whim, while enjoying battles of wits with Batman.[7] O'Neil said his idea was "simply to take it back to where it started. I went to the DC library and read some of the early stories. I tried to get a sense of what Kane and Finger were after."[8] Writer Steve Englehart and penciler Marshall Rogers, in an acclaimed run in Detective Comics #471-476 (Aug. 1977 - April 1978), which went on to influence the 1989 movie Batman and be adapted for the 1990s animated series,[9] added elements deepening the severity of the Joker's insanity. In the story "The Laughing Fish", the Joker is brazen enough to disfigure fish with a rictus grin, then expect to be granted a federal trademark on them, only to start threatening and attempting to murder bureaucrats who try to explain that obtaining such a claim on a natural resource is a legal impossibility.[10][11]
The Joker had his own nine-issue series during the 1970s in which he faces off against a variety of both superheroes and supervillains. Although he was the protagonist of the series, certain issues feature just as much murder as those in which he was the antagonist; of the nine issues, he commits murder in seven. The development of the Joker as a sociopath continues with the issues "A Death in the Family" (in which readers voted for the character to kill off Jason Todd)[12] and The Killing Joke in 1988, redefining the character for DC's Modern Age after the company wide reboot following Crisis on Infinite Earths.[13][14]








Mirek, over the years I've been lucky to talk extensively with many of the creators who have worked on the Batman series from the beginning to the present concerning Batman and his roots and how the Comics Code Authority neutered the character until the 70s when Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams "brought Batman back to his original conception." It's all documented how dark and grim those early Joker stories were and whatever you THINK you read in them is, well, not in touch with the reality of the evidence nor with the recollections of the people who wrote and drew those stories.