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Batman: The Killing Joke

It is extremely, extremely rare that one can say that Alan Moore just didn't get it. With the Killing Joke, he didn't even come close.

Moore is a certified genius. And his handling of Batman-esque characters (Rorschach/Owl in Watchmen, V. in V for Vendetta) is legendary. He routinely explores the fascist/anarchist dynamic of the Bat, and never, ever gives easy answers (un-like Frank Miller, for instance). And then balances that against the joyful Adventurer/Detective paradigm, also inherent in Batman.

Yet when he actually writes Batman, he's flat, flavorless, undeconstructed, unexplored. He's boring, predictable.

But that's just window dressing.

Moore completely misunderstands the Joker in such a profound, extreme way, that it almost feels (horrifyingly) like the man who deconstructed the Bat better than anyone, never picked up a Batman comic book.

His Joker requires a back story. And a silly one at that. Rather than a force of nature, a psychotic assuming the role of Satan with Batman as his God, in a Jobian cataclysmic struggle, he's a failed comic. A bitter little man worried about the A-bomb, revenging the world for a ridiculous turn of fate.

His violence becomes petty, meaningless, inane. He loses every single one of his mythic aspects, all of his horror.

The Joker at his best is Zodiac, Charlie Manson and Son of Sam all roled into one; a totally psychotic visionary playing havoc with the world for reasons only his delusional and hallucinatory mind can comprehend; a man living in a world of magic and monsters, where the only thing that makes sense is the struggle with the Batman.

In the Killing Joke he's Lee Harvey Oswald or Charles Whitman, the half-cracked former Marine who climbed up into the U of T clocktower with a bunch of guns to teach the world a lesson even he didn't understand. He's bitter, puny, completely self-explanatory.

I love Alan Moore, I love Batman and I love the Joker. Which is why I hate this book.


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An excellent and insightful review.

I briefly considered gently needling you about giving full throat to such strong comments, and then still giving it an above average 7 ... but then I remembered the old addage about pizza and sex (re: even when it's bad, it's still pretty good), and the same is perfectly true about Moore's writing.

Nicely done.

I wouldn't even be reviewing it if it weren't worthy of discussion.

It may be a failure, but it's an Alan Moore failure. And not to launch a spolier, but it still radically redfined the role of another Batman character for, well, forever.

It's important, it's well executed, but in the end it is horribly disappointing.

I remember The Killing Joke first coming out.
I was doing an archaeological dig in North Wales, and two of the volunteer diggers were seventeen year old lads called David and Jonathan - which I thought was very funny (referring back to the Bible) while no-one else understood the joke.
They got The Killing Joke and passed it around with huge enthusiasm.
I wasn't a comic reader back then (I'm not much of one now) and I'd never heard of Alan Moore - but I remember how incredibly impressed everyone who read it was, and how different it was from what had gone before (or so they all said - all I knew about was the 1960s TV series).

So it was a comic that made a huge impact when it came out - whether that was a good or a bad thing can really only be seen with hindsight.