The latest chapter in the Joker’s nefarious story arc may be the DC Comics arch villain’s most unusual yet: He becomes pregnant.

In the latest issue of DC Comics’ series, “The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing,” Batman’s nemesis actually carries and gives birth to a child. 

If that sounds strange, that’s the way the graphic novel company intended it. On its website, DC Comics advertised the issue as containing Joker’s “most bizarre caper yet.”

Readers may be tempted to think this is part of DC’s attempt to do some woke, LGBTQ-inclusive storytelling with The Joker being a transgender man undergoing a typical pregnancy, though it’s not quite that simple.

In this volume, created by Matthew Rosenberg and Carmine Di Giandomenico, the “Clown prince of Crime” becomes pregnant by some unnatural curse and gives birth in a vomit-inducing way, literally. 

Backstory on this latest issue detailed how Joker wanted to pursue an heir in a more traditional way, by courting the super-heroine Zatanna into starting a family with him. Though his advances are rebuffed, and the tables are turned on Joker in a surprisingly disturbing manner.

In DC’s universe, Zatanna is a magic user who can bringing can cast spells by speaking in reverse. Disturbed by the Joker’s attempt to court her, she casts a spell on him to ensure that “no one else will ever have [the Joker’s] baby,” the comic reads.

Though as with many magic spells in fiction, the hex doesn’t work as envisioned. Rather than turning Joker into female-repellant as one would expect, the spell makes it so that the villain himself becomes pregnant and has his own baby. 

The manner in which this happens during the issue may be one of the strangest DC Comics moments in recent memory. Joker gives birth by vomiting a sort of brown goo that, upon leaving his body, forms into a young boy that looks just like Joker.