Well, no wonder you never found them effective! The character you talk about, the Joker you prefer to see, ISN'T THE JOKER AT ALL!
Again, the word I go back to here is "subversive," because if he's actually funny, then the true horror is that we find ourselves actually laughing along *with* the Joker until we realize, holy shit, we're laughing as he's doing horrible, horrible things. The dead family in the backseat wasn't genuinely chilling for you? It was for *me*. Or BATMAN BEYOND: RETURN OF THE JOKER? That flashback sequence had the balance perfectly, going from horror to hilarity and back again.
He's the devil himself, and the devil needs to be charming. If he looks and act like a monster, then he may be more viscerally scary, but he's a far, far less effective villain. It just makes him one among countless of those villains of"this age where crazed maniac killers haunt every medium."
In fact, unless it's a compelling story, he's outright annoying. Nothing is so annoying as someone who laughs at their own jokes if the jokes aren't funny. You prefer that take on the character, which is fine, but it does not jive with the character in canon, nor in his finest appearances.
... all right, then, serious question: when do you think was the last time the Joker was as effective as he was in the Morrison story?
Furthermore, I don't know about you, but I found Heath's Joker to be *hilarious*. I was laughing with him more than once, which is more than I can say for the Joker in that Morrison run.
All right, granted. And yeah, one must indeed take Mark Waid with a pillar of salt. Or something. Regardless, even the worst of COUNTDOWN does not take away from my enjoyment of his Batman work. His work on B:TAS took the very best aspects of Batman stories up to that point and distilled them beautifully into one cohesive vision, and even today, I still find his work to be solid for how it deals with the relationships of characters, particularly the villains. He actually makes them people, rather than flat one-note caricatures like Jeph Loeb does.
Whew, thank god, common ground! Yeah, as with ARKHAM, they need to be doing more on the internal struggle of Harvey, rather than cheesy gimmicky stuff. But that cover looks like the very definition of Harvey doing cheesy gimmicky stuff!
Because honestly, I'd love to see Harvey as Batman. But in that? For one thing, it's not much of a disguise if everyone knows who you are, Harvey! He's not Batman of any kind, he's very clearly Two-Face playing dress-up!
Man, that's in GCS? How disappointing. I'd thought at least Dini was going to avoid that trope. But I can't put the blame on him for it. Ultimately, that blame goes right back to Morrison for his Jervis in ARKHAM, which set the precedent for pedophile!Jervis ever since.
Can't argue with GCS' Catwoman, as I haven't read the issue yet (I wait for the trades), but I wouldn't put it beyond Dini to actually go into this over the next few issues. Although, I imagine you would happily put it beyond him.