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Comics Oddities

Reals, take 2: Man dressed as the Joker shot dead by police

Now this is a macabre follow-up to my last post, about people dressing up as “real” superheroes:

A man dressed as Batman villain the Joker has been shot dead by police in America after pointing a loaded shotgun at them.

The dead man, who was said to be obsessed with the character, was wearing full costume and makeup when he was challenged by officers in a national park in Virginia, according to legal documents.

The FBI named him as army specialist Christopher Lanum, who was wanted as a suspect over the stabbing of a fellow soldier at Fort Eustis, a major army base in the state, several hours before. Lanum’s girlfriend, Patsy Ann Marie Montowski, who was with him when he was shot, told investigators that the soldier idolised the Joker…

[ via Warren Ellis]

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Comics Resources

And We Laughed And Laughed

Via Rob Macdougall, a link to a Livejournal community of historical interest called Were they hot or not?, which could become the go-to place for finding good-looking dead people.

One of the entries there is for the actor Conrad Veidt, who played the title role in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs. Based on a Victor Hugo melodrama, Roger Ebert described it as “so steeped in Expressionist gloom that it plays like a horror film”. The film was the inspiration for the Batman villain the Joker, and frankly, doesn’t this guy look scarier than Jack Nicholson with prosthetic cheeks?

The Man Who Laughs