OneMetal.com book ARTICLE:
Must Read: Batman: The Killing Joke

In the latest of our ongoing series, Dean Reilly continues his look at some of the best comic books and graphic novels ever made. Next in the Must Read spotlight is Batman: The Killing Joke.

In Short:

Marking his second appearance in a row on the Must Read list, author Alan Moore delivers this character study of Batman, the Joker, and the idea that one bad day can drive anyone crazy.

Why Is It So Good?

The Killing Joke would make it onto the Must Read list if only because of the stunning final frames that sees the relationship between Batman and the Joker take a surprising twist. It’s a dramatic, risky and unexpected ending – more on that later – but there’s much more to rave about in this graphic novel than the perfect closing moments.

Batman making a deal with the Devil

As far as action goes, there’s a few key events that impact on the wider DC Universe. We see the Joker brutally and in cold blood gunning down Commisioner Gordon’s daughter, Barbara, by shooting her through the spine. The injuries she sustains in Killing Joke lead to her permanent paralysis, and meant that she could no longer fulfill the role of Gotham City’s Batgirl. As the story unfolds in a disused fairground, Joker also spends much of the book torturing the Commissioner himself, stripping the old man naked and taunting him about how his daughter was abused after being shot. Gordon is tormented, beaten and shown photos of Barabara in various stages of undress (sparking some fan speculation that the Joker had raped her), all in an attempt to drive the Commissioner mad and prove that anyone, even the paragon-like police chief could be tipped over the edge by one very bad day.

There’s also a messy, brutal and very realistic face-off between Batman and Joker that has more of an air of a brawl outside a bar than a clash of two larger than life characters. Yet there’s something about the fight, something about the way that Batman seems to forget all the training, martial arts practice and discipline he’s imposed on himself, that makes you feel the moment when they do finally start beating one another up, neither really have the heart for it. The pub brawl analogy holds true: they’re almost drunk in the moment of it all.

Yet as far as action goes, that’s pretty much it. The rest of the novel expands cleverly on the origin of Joker, and focuses on the mind-games that he plays with Batman. This is a psychological war first, with blood shed as a consequence, not the other way around. The realisation both characters make that, inevitably, their relationship will see one of them – or maybe even both – dead is a key theme throughout Killing Joke, with Batman’s attempt to break the cycle that their conflict sees them repeating over and over handled brilliantly. To paraphrase Ozzy Osbourne, Batman seems to hope that he and Joker aren’t too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate. Yet it’s never a surrender, more of a humane appeal to any sane part of the Joker that’s left – and the villian’s hesitation and reluctant refusal does more to develop the Joker character in a couple of frames than most Batman books manage to do in years.

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Then there’s that ending, which I can’t go near without risking spoilers, so if you don’t want to know, you’d better skip this paragraph. Catching his breath after being beaten and broken by Batman, Joker starts to tell Bats a joke about two lunatics trying to escape from an asylum. It’s telling that his tale about two crazed characters trying to get out of their shared prison is something of a rebuttal to Batman’s olive-branch like attempt at offering the Joker a truce. As you might expect, Joker starts to giggle, almost in a child-like way. Then the unexpected happens. Batman starts to laugh too. The giggles are subtle and restrained at first, then get more and more out of control, until both are laughing out loud and holding the other up for support. It’s amazing to watch these two bloodied and beaten iconic characters (one of which, let’s face it, isn’t exactly known for his sense of humour) completely break down and share a joke with their nemesis. It’s a bizarre, unexpected and surprisingly human moment for two characters that have, to some degree or other, been stripped of their humanity by the life they’ve been leading. It really shouldn’t work as an ending for a Batman / Joker story, but it really, really does.

Spoilers over. Welcome back. It’d be easy to focus just on the writing and forget about the art, but that would be overlooking another of the major strengths of Killing Joke. Credit has to go to artist Brian Bolland, whose work breathed life into the characters. Having grown up seeing much of Bolland’s work in British comic 2000AD, it was great to see his detailed style cross over into one of DC’s biggest franchises. It was his cover of a maniacally smililng Joker pointing a camera towards the reader that caught my eye in the first place, and turned a casual and infrequent Batman reader into a fully fledged fan. There are frames in this novel that really capture the manic nature of the Joker who, let’s make no mistake about it here, is the fully fledged star of this particular show.

Joker philosophy rule #1

The Legacy

Outside of the comicbook world, Killing Joke also directly impacted on how the Joker was represented on the big screen not once but twice, with Tim Burton expressing that Killing Joke was the one Batman book that made sense to him, whilst Heath Ledger referenced the novel as the only Batman book he was given to help him develop the Joker character. The influence of Killing Joke, along with novels like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One can clearly be seen in the two most recent Batman movies, and also in the darker tone that some superhero movies have adopted over the last few years.

Alan Moore himself isn’t quite as eager to praise Killing Joke, however, saying in an interview in 2000 that “I don’t think it’s a very good book. It’s not saying anything very interesting”. Yet for Batman fans and followers of comic books in general, Killing Joke fleshes out two iconic figures, suggests that underneath the two-dimensional pages, there’s a heart and soul to these characters, and a reason for them to do the things they do, a motivation that drives them, and an inevitability that there’s little they can do to control how their lives are going to unfold – which in turn gives the reader many more reasons to care, and plenty more reasons to keep on watching it happen.