Batman: The Killing Joke

Rating:
Summary: An important Batman story
Review: My only complaint about this book is that it's too damn short. Otherwise, this dark and highly disturbing (on par with Moore's OTHER Batman masterpiece Arkham Asylum) is technically amazing. It beautifully delves into the relationship between Batman and the Joker in all its complexity and also features some of the most nefarious and disgusting acts of violence and torture that, to my knowledge, have ever been displayed in a popular comic (and that INCLUDES Preacher). This is a very rich, psychological story featuring great art and a killer story. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Redefined the Joker
Review: Batman: The Killing Joke redefined the relationship between the costumed hero and his archenemy, the Joker. Hypothesising that one bad day lead to his criminal madness, the Joker attempts prove his theory by tormenting a sane man into a lunatic in twenty-four hours. He chooses Gothan's Commissioner Gordon for his experiment. As more about the Joker, his origins, the cycle within he and Batman are trapped, why he commits his colorful crimes and his inability to reform, the reader actually begins to feel sorry for the famous villian. Although it is too short to dig very deep, The Killing Joke paints a convincing portrait of the Joker as a person.

Rating:
Summary: Definative Joker
Review: If anything, the real genius behind this book is that, by the ending, you're still not clear how much of the backstory is real and how much is just another figment of the Joker's derranged mind. This is THE definative work on The Joker as a character, and even if Moore didn't have masterworks like "Watchmen" under his belt, this book would mark him as a comic book genius.

Rating:
Summary: Watch(bat)man Redux
Review: The team of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon, who combined to hit a grand slam with the now seminal graphic novel, Watchman, regrouped shortly after that and produced this examination of Batman. It's shorter, but that's the only real negative here. Moore's take on the Joker emphasizes the cruel nature of the character, and he includes a plot development here, which some of the other reviewers give away but I can't let myself do, that is shocking in how it affects characters.

When I glance at a page of Gibbon art, I'm never that interested in it. It lacks the flash and smoothness of fan-favorites like McFarlane. But it is art that works in conjunction with the text to truly propel the story, and that's what a graphic work is supposed to do.

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Summary: Chilling and Revealing
Review: I find it a rare treat when villains are given as much depth as heroes (although in today's comics and films it is often the reverse). It is even more rare when a villain is drawn so completely that you can feel pity for him. Such is the case in this piece.

Now of course the people responsible for this piece did not create the Joker from scratch, the last few pages were none the less heartbreaking. <SPOILER PERHAPS???> Batman offers to help the Joker and rehabilitate him, and instead of laughing in his face as a one dimensional villain of the week may, he simply said that it was too late for that and that actually the entire situation reminded him of a joke. (A pretty funny one at that.)

In addition to well flushed out characterization there are also some chilling moments which show just how sick the Joker actually is.

Very short, but VERY sweet piece of work here, folks.

Rating:
Summary: Not as good as I expected.....
Review: I have been a Batfan for years and people would give me the same look when they discovered that I did not own "The Killing Joke". After finally purchasing the book, I am overall disappointed. Not because of the mild language, or the shortness, but the lack of a true plot and character development. The Joker remembering his origins was interesting and it was something different seeing the Joker and Batman actually reasoning with each other. If anything, the last 2 pages were worth the 3 stars because I had never seen anything like that in a Batman comic before. Read my review for the "Batman: Aliens" book if you are interested in a well-written Bat-thriller.....

Rating:
Summary: Best Bat Comic Ever
Review: With fantastic writing and art we get a indepth look into the Joker's mind. From his tragic origin to his blatant viciousness we get to see exactlly who the Joker is and why. This is a very dark and disturbing comic and is not for everyone. It is very graphic and doesn't bother trying to dumb things down for the reader. That being said, I do believe that this is the best comic book ever written. It just explains and develops so much. What makes it truely terrifying though is that it makes Joker a very realistic character and makes you wonder just how many real Jokers are out there

Rating:
Summary: Die Laughing, or: Our World in Greasepaint
Review: *Batman: The Killing Joke*, apart from being Tim Burton's favorite comic book, is Alan Moore's most concentrated achievement (working in a shorter format), and, rare amongst adolescent passions, gives me the same pleasure today as it did when I was a wee boy. It is a dark, visual poem, running the gamut from high episodic drama to an interesting attempt at sentimentalism in its (definitive?) portrayal of the Batman/Joker dichotomy. Sure, Moore often falls back on trite phrases and mechanical epithets, but the book's strengths far outweigh my elitist quibbles, both in conception, writing, and visual delivery.

Illustrator Brian Bolland has touched the limits of what can be done in the mainstream comic medium, surpassing even Dave Gibbons in *Watchmen* (that undisputed *Citizen Kane* of graphic novels). I've counted roughly 230 individuated facial expressions in this book's 48 pages, every cameo and minor character penciled, inked, colored, storyboarded into life, the backdrops brimming with nuance and articulated detail, the coloring as lurid and suggestive as Steven Soderbergh's color-coded triple-narrative in *Traffic*. The Joker alone is granted 62 articulated facial expressions (19 during the course of his pre-Joker psychodrama), ranging from bright, sportive lunacy (each facial shot individuated) to an almost genuine grief and sadness towards the end. The spinal-paralytic Barbara Gordon, who appears in only 26 panels, is granted a dramatic reality remarkable given her minor role in the story. The portrait of her staring in bemused horror at the Joker (standing in the hallway with Hawaiian shirt, camera, and revolver), while the scene turns "orange" in anticipation of bloodshed, is the most memorable facial expression I've ever seen rendered in a comic book. As a close runner-up, the Joker's hang-dog look on page 41, as he asks Batman sincerely, "Why aren't you laughing?", is the only *convincing* moment of unfeigned sadness the Joker has ever given us, in any comic book.

The blocking and visual narrative is perfectly tuned, each panel calculated for sleek momentum and smooth dramatic economy. *The Killing Joke* is eye-candy from start to finish, and is over before you know it, leaving one to ponder the perfection of its design. As someone who once aspired to write for comics, I've meditated long and hard on how it might be "one-upped," while remaining in a commercial format, resisting the temptation for self-indulgent surrealist excess (i.e. *Arkham Asylum*). Needless to say, I've yet to come up with a solution.

There is no other comic book that's done so much for the Joker, that's made him as "real," as darkly appealing a figure (almost sentimentally so). The difficulty of representing so hyperbolic a personality, and making him seem refreshingly "human," is a testament to Moore's script and Bolland's incredibly articulated visual style. The duality between Batman and the Joker is a psychodrama I'm always eager to see re-rehearsed, but by 1988, in *The Killing Joke*, the leitmotif may have reached its limit. Even *Arkham Asylum* couldn't overtake it. (And let's face it, *The Dark Knight Returns* just prostituted the Joker for an uninteresting subplot.)

In the mad bacchanalia of our postmedia funhouse-culture, the Batman has become obsolete, an aging revenant that cannot keep up with the Joker's all-too-knowing take on media pathology and American theme-park culture. As Mark Dery points out, the Joker may be (superficially anyhow) Deleuze-Guattari's ideal schizophrenic, a de-centered whirlwind of morbid indulgence who never records "the same event in the same way." As the Joker confesses over the funhouse P.A. system: "Something like that happened to me, you know. I...I'm not exactly sure what it was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another. If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! Ha ha ha!" But now I'm just being cheeky. The reader must decide for himself whether I am "overstating" the Joker's case.

Moore's rough draft for the Joker was Edward Blake (a.k.a. the Comedian) in the aforementioned *Watchmen*. But despite the dramatic achievement of that character appearing drunk in Moloch's bedroom, confessing terror and obsolescence to his old enemy, Moore's Joker is far more chilling, far more suggestive, and as I mentioned, dangerously appealing. The duality between this harlequin in toxic greasepaint and that billionaire-criminologist who "dress[es] up like a flying rat" reminds me of a certain line from Cervantes: "Don Quixote is a madman and we are sane, yet he goes away sound and laughing while your Grace is left here, battered and sorrowful. I wish you would tell me now who is the crazier: the one who is so because he cannot help it, or he who turns crazy of his own free will?" Batman turns crazy to put himself on the wavelength of the villains he tracks and combats, and the consequences for him (and those he protects) are real and immediate.

If Moore's thesis is correct, then it would seem that Batman *needs* the Joker, if not to rehabilitate him, well, then, simply to *contain* him, as a talisman held up in uneasy triumph against the impending waves of fin-de-millennial mass dementia. In one scene, the Joker boasts: "I've demonstrated there's no difference between me and everyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day." John Wayne Gacy would be proud.

*The Killing Joke* succeeds because it is able to cloak its pretentions in a commercial format, allowing us to put our guards down just long enough for Moore and Bolland to hit us hard. It may seem silly to try and "intellectualize" comics, but as the medium develops, a more sophisticated criticism is required to play catch-up with its images and explorations, and Alan Moore has long been a figurehead worth catching up to.

Rating:
Summary: Who's sane ?
Review: Commissioner Gordon gets a real shock-surprise when oneday his doorbell rings and when his daughter, Barbara (Batgirl), opens the door she is imediately shot by the Joker. The Joker kidnaps Gordon, leaving Barbara behind in a puddle of blood, and traps him in his personal circus. He is out to prove to the world that in essence everybody can be driven as mad as he himself is without even having to push very hard. This book is a milestone in the Batman continuity and has left a legacy to every Bat storyline since. Alan Moore is, like always, very up for the job and the great artwork by Brian Bolland isn't exactly awful either. Although I think it's a bit overhyped this book it surely makes for a good read.

Rating:
Summary: A brilliant analysis on the Dark Knight
Review: Many super-heroes came and went through the years, but not one had the staying power that Batman had. Of course, Superman started his career earlier than Batman, and remains the symbol of the super-hero genre; but while in the 80s and 90s Superman gradually became boring and repetitive, Batman reached his peak in the late 80s. Since his first appearence in 1939 Batman constantly changed, taking different forms every decade, and thus in the 80s, the Renaissance of comics, the flexibility of his character enabled every author to make his own Batman. Some of the best and most revolutionary writers and artists in comic art worked with Batman, each giving him something different.

The thing that made Batman so flexible and changable, in my opinion, is the very fact that he and his enemies lack super-powers. Both Batman and his foes are defined not by their powers, their physical strenght or their weapons, but by their personalities, by their MOTIVES. The Joker or Two Face, being purely head cases, are to me far more interesting than any enemy Superman or the Green Lantern ever had; and Batman's own imperfectness and problematic character make him far more interesting than those "super-heroes".

In the late 80s the writers who worked on Batman started studying these subjects more than ever. One of the most fascinating things they realized, is how very similiar - in some ways, at least - Batman was to his enemies. Many works from that period worked on that thin line between Batman's good-guy obsession and his enemies bad-guy insanity, and the unusual relationship between them; most notably Morrison's 'Arkham Asylum', Delano's 'Manbat' and later Alan's Grant 'The Last Arkham'.

Alan Moore, one of the greatest minds in comic book and graphic novel writing, took that idea to its limits. In all of Moore's works, he played on very similiar ideas - basically, the idea of good and evil. Unlike other great writers like Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, Moore makes a point of using very traditional, very mainstream comic book ideas but using them in a very ironic, very criticizing way, exploring the problematic ideas of good-guys and bad-guys. The best example is, of course, 'Watchmen', in which he took the idea of the super-hero to disturbing new places, but his ideas also show in his conception of Jack the Ripper in 'From Hell' and in his approach to the unusual character of the Swamp Thing.

In 'The Killing Joke' Moore studied the characters of Batman and the Joker in an unusual way, which is very disturbing to old bat-fans who are used to the good Batman and the bad Joker. The Killing Joke is a disturbing work indeed, a graphic novel which draws you into it like few others do - especially if you read a lot of earlier Batman stories. Reading it you'll be shocked to find yourself undestanding, even feeling pity for the Joker, not long after he crippled Barbara Gordon, than took pictures of her naked and showed them to her father ( No, it's NOT a book for children. )Strangely and ironically, it presents the Joker more human than ever, and re-defines his personality, his story and the unusual relationship between him and the Batman.

The Killing Joke is a graphic novel, meaning that it stands all by itself as a complete work. It needs no introduction, and it doesn't really matter where it fits in with Batman's history ( well, except for the Barbara Gordon thing ). From the cover to the back cover, it is one perfectly combined masterpiece, complete with beautiful artwork by the excellent Brian Bolland. Along with Miller's 'Dark Knight Returns' and Morrison's 'Arkham Asylum', The Killing Joke is the most brilliant, most ingenious Batman stories ever written, if not one of the best comic books ever made.