DRE: Have they given or asked you to read certain comics?
HL: The Killing Joke was the one that was handed to me. I think it’s going to be the beginning of The Joker. I guess that book explains a little bit of where he’s from but not too much. From what I’ve gathered, there isn’t a lot of information about The Joker and it’s left that way.
— From an interview with Newsarama's Daniel Robert Epstein.
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The Killing Joke was published as a one-shot comic book by DC Comics in 1988. It was also published as a graphic novel edition in 1995, and reprinted in DC Universe: The stories of Alan Moore in 2006.
It was written by Alan Moore, drawn by Brian Bolland and colored by John Higgins. The comic had a huge impact on the Batman universe and is regarded by many to be the greatest Joker story ever told. Events such as the paralysis of Barbara Gordon were incorporated into Batman stories by other artists.
The comic gave the Joker a human story and fleshed out the duality of his perpetual conflict with Batman. It was a published at a time when the issue of censorship was an ongoing controversy in every facet of the media. It was considered a boldly dark exploration of the thin line between comedy and tragedy when warning stickers were being slapped on music, video games and comic books.
The themes outlined in the book are expressed through words and symmetry; the panels are often mirror images of the others and the comic begins and ends with identical panels of a purple and black rain puddle.
The Author
Alan Moore was born November 18, 1953 in Northampton, England. He was influenced by the industrial town in which he was raised. His family lived in poverty, and Moore was permanently expelled from school. Moore worked on a variety of publishing projects as a cartoonist, but decided that he was a better writer than an artist. Moore's ability to create stunningly original statements about the nature of man and his societies brought comics to a literary plane. The visuals of his work never suffered at the expense of the words, as evidenced by the fact that some his novels were adapted into films, including V for Vendetta, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Moore lives in Northampton, England and would like to become a magician.
The Artist
Brian Bolland was born in Lincolnshire, England in 1951. His most famous work has been for the comic 2000 AD, and he has drawn dozens of covers for DC and Marvel Comics. He started drawing at the age of ten was formally trained as an artist. Much of Bolland's work is eye-popping, most notably the iconic image of the Joker holding his head, dripping with toxic waste and surrounded by the "H" and "A" letters of his own laughter.
The Story
There were these two guys in a lunatic asylum...
The story begins across 18 equally sized panels showing Batman coming to visit Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane on a dark, wet night. He’s come to see inmate #0801, Name Unknown. But once we get a look inside the grim cell, we see that we know #0801 all too well.
The Joker is sitting under a spotlight playing a card game for one, and paying little attention to his late-night visitor. Batman has a proposition for The Joker:
Hello. I came to talk. I’ve been thinking lately. About you and me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me. Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner. Perhaps later. I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.
When this unexpected proposal fails to earn a reaction of any kind from the Joker, Batman becomes agitated and grabs the Joker's hand, smearing white stage make-up onto his glove.
Batman struggles to control his rage when he realizes that the Joker has escaped, and that he has confided his innermost thoughts to a decoy.
Meanwhile, the Joker is in the midst of a real estate venture, an amusement park that isn't likely to amuse anyone who doesn't share the Joker's sense of the macabre. It's a carnival in decay, the rides are unsafe, the buildings are dilapidated and the park is still populated by the ghoulish remnants of a circus sideshow. The Joker feels right at home (naturally) and assures the seller that money is no object.
The Joker has amassed his own fortune from plotting and stealing, but he recalls another time at this point in the story, a time when his needs were greater than his means.
The next two pages begin an ongoing flashback which gives us an origin of the Joker unlike any we’ve ever seen. We meet a young Joker, no white skin, no green hair, and still, no name. He lives in a run-down apartment with his pregnant wife Jeannie. The ceilings are strung with laundry and their view is of a brick wall. He’s an unsuccessful stand-up comic who is very worried about how he will provide for his family. Jeannie reassures him that they will find a way, and laughs at one of his jokes.
The next section of the book introduces one of the main plots in the story. The Joker pays a visit to the Gordon residence where Barbara is serving her father cocoa and Commissioner Gordon is pouring over his superhero scrapbooks, trying to recall the year when the Joker and Batman first met.
The past crashes into the present when the Joker appears at the front door, dressed as an American tourist, complete with Hawaiian shirt and 35 mm camera. Without warning, he shoots Barbara Gordon in the pelvis at close range. The Joker cruelly taunts Gordon as his daughter bleeds; helping himself to a drink from a bottle marked “Plaisant Farceur,” the French translation for “Joker.” Before the Joker leaves with Gordon as his prisoner, he takes some pictures of Barbara, detailing the brutality of his own crime scene.
The scenes of what happens to Gordon are interspersed with more information about how the Joker comes into being. The Joker sits with two shady characters at a dodgy seafood bar, talking over a possible heist. Before quitting his day job to become a comedian, the Joker was a lab assistant at a chemical plant. The criminals are looking to hit the playing card company next door to the plant, and explain to the Joker that they need him to help duck security because he knows the lay of the land.
It becomes clear to the reader that the shockingly naive Joker is just a patsy in their scheme when the criminals hand him a suitcase containing his disguise for the job; a red hood. The Red Hood is a master thief whose true identity is unknown. In the Killing Joke universe, many people have worn the red helmet and cape; anyone wearing this disguise would be apprehended and presumed guilty.
In the middle of planning the crime, two police officers approach the Joker with terrible news. His wife Jeannie has died during a freak accident; she was electrocuted while testing a baby bottle heater. The Joker is frantic with grief and tries to back out of the robbery. The pair of criminals will have none of it, and the Joker is forced to go along with the plan. The best he can hope for is to make enough money to give Jeannie and his unborn child a proper burial.
The panels of the Joker’s birth illustrate how the plans go awry when security at Ace Chemical Processing Inc. is tighter than he remembered. Batman arrives on the scene and recognizes the Red Hood from earlier encounters. The Joker panics and leaps into a pool of chemical waste, not knowing the true scope of the consequences until he’s washed up on a muddy bank from the plant’s drainage pipe. He removes the red helmet and catches sight of his new face in a rain puddle. Upon seeing the condition of his skin and hair, the Joker erupts into a fit of hysterical laughter that never seems to end.
Back in the present, the Joker kidnaps Gordon and forces him to be a captive audience on his inaugural funhouse ride. The ride is serenaded by a deranged song of the Joker’s:
Just go Loo-oo-oony, like an acid casualty or a moo-oo-nie or a preacher on T.V. When the human race wears an anxious face, when the bomb hangs overhead, when your kid turns blue it won’t worry you, you can smile and nod instead!
Stripped naked except for a leash, studded collar and harness, Gordon surveys his surroundings in horror as images of Barbara take shape on the funhouse walls; naked, pleading, dying.
The center ring of the Joker’s demented circus stars Commissioner Gordon as The Average Man. The Joker pontificates on the human condition while his band of tormented misfits gawk and point at Gordon through the bars of his cage.
The Joker’s Sickest Show on Earth is interrupted by the arrival of a very angry Batman who has just left the recovering but paralyzed Gordon at the hospital.
Batman immediately assaults the Joker while repeating his speech from the beginning of the comic. Batman chases the Joker into the funhouse as the Joker explains the purpose for his latest spree of bad behavior: to prove a point. The Joker believes that the world is lost and beyond saving, that the atrocities of reality outweigh any fantasy of hope that we try to impose on it. He mocks Batman for pretending that what he does makes any difference.
The Joker believes that Batman knows the truth as well as he does, that there is no point to the struggle that they are locked in. He builds his argument around the concept of “one bad day,” a trope that can be found in a variety of Batman iterations. The Joker shot Barbara and tortured her father to prove that any man can be driven insane by having one bad day.
The Joker seems desperate to prove another, more subtle point: that he’s not alone. He reaches for an affinity with Batman, to show that they are more the same than different. The Joker claims that Batman himself had one bad day, and went crazy, but just won’t admit it. Batman asks the Joker what made him this way, what happened that set his life on this course. The Joker provides an intriguing and provocative response:
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!
We know what happened on Bruce Wayne’s bad day, but can we trust the Joker to tell us the truth about his own bad day? The Joker would insist that the details don’t matter, only that it drove him insane, which in his estimation, is the only sane response.
Batman tries to continue the vein in which he began, which is to come to some sort of understanding with the Joker. He attempts to appeal to the Joker’s unique brand of logic. Batman tells him that his experiment has failed. Gordon was not driven insane by his ordeal, he will recover. Perhaps there is hope for the Joker’s sanity? The Joker seems momentarily affected by Batman’s offer to try and rehabilitate him, but he ultimately refuses:
No. I’m sorry but...It’s too late for that. Far too late.
The Joker believes Batman to be his mirror image, and therefore incapable of helping him. How can the insane help the insane? The question brings the Joker to the joke that started at the beginning on the comic:
See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum…and one night…one night they decide they don’t like living in an asylum any more. They decide they’re going to escape! So like they get up on to the roof, and there, just across the narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in moon light…stretching away to freedom.
Now the first guy he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend daren’t make the leap. Y’see he’s afraid of falling… So then the first guy has an idea. He says “Hey! I have my flash light with me. I will shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk across the beam and join me.” B-But the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says …he says “What you think I am crazy? You would turn it off when I was half way across.
Batman gets the joke, and the two share a maniacal laugh.
The joke itself serves to shed more light on who the Joker really is, which is something that Batman discusses with Alfred earlier in the comic. How can Batman predict and capture a person that he doesn’t even know? The Joker sees himself and Batman in the context of the joke. They are both trapped in the insane asylum of Gotham, both bound to the place for different reasons. The first inmate represents Batman, the crazy person who takes a leap while staring the consequences of failure in the face. The second inmate represents The Joker, who trusted people unworthy of trust, and was brought to his own end/beginning by way of that betrayal.
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