I remember all the hype surrounding it and actually driving over to my local comic shop the day it was released and buying a copy and yeah the story seemed really cool and awesome back then. Of course I was 17, so what else is new.
However, the story doesn’t age very well at all.
There’s nothing new to it, aside from Joker’s shooting Barbara Gordon, which while it may have been shocking, wasn’t out of character for the Joker.
But the rest of it—Meh.
It was like there was this huge buildup and it ends with Batman and the Joker laughing their asses off together?
Please.
Gee, Batman runs through a carnival funhouse/deathtrap while the Joker spouts inanities about what really caused World War II.
That’s really great. :rolleyes:
The man himself, Alan Moore said in a recent interview about his various comic works that The Killing Joke is pretty much crap as far as the plot and story are concerned.
He does like Brian Bolland’s art, and who wouldn’t, but it can’t even begin to save the rest of the book from it’s bad writing/plotting/story.
I love this comic. Jesus, my dad loves this comic. It’s a damned good story. One of the best Batman comics ever made.
What makes it so great? Well, there’s this huge intense build-up, and then, in the end, Batman and Joker just end up standing together in the rain, laughing. How cool is that? Totally cool, that’s how cool!
And before that, Batman runs through a carnival funhouse/deathtrap, while the Joker goes on with this totally insane idea about what started the second World War. I read that, and I was in awe! It was awesome!
And I don’t care what Moore says about it. His job is to draw the comic. It’s the reader’s job to decide if it’s any good. Besides, Moore hates superheros: he’s probably trashing his own book out of reflexive hatred of all things Batman.
I don’t know. The over all story isn’t the greatest but I found the back story very compelling. The idea as The Joker puts it (Paraphrasing here) “The only difference between sane and in sane is one really bad day” actually worked and you still aren’t sure if those are true memories or not.
Considering the bad writing at the time at least they didn’t have him being the guy who shot Wayne’s parents. Oh wait that would be Joe Chill… (of course if I understand it correctly Post crisis Batman never found out who did it)
I see. You would have preferred the Joker building a giant death machine to kill the Dark Knight and have it all explode in a really cool splash page that looks just like every other generic supervillain’s attempt at Doing Something Evil.
The book is wonderful because it shows just who the Joker is: He doesn’t want to kill Batman, or even Commisioner Gordon. He just wants to show the world - and Batman - that he’s right. The REAL conflict isn’t between Batman and the Joker, and you’re a fool if you thought so… it was between Gordon and the Joker, and Gordon won by holding onto his sanity.
The ending was a sharp twist, and again, not the one you’re expecting: Whereas Gordon not going out of his nut would show that the Joker’s point is wrong, Batman’s very existence proves it right. The ultimate point of the story is to show that Good and Evil can’t be clearly delineated… just another way of demonstrating the shades of gray that exist in life. Batman and the Joker both went “insane” because of one Really Bad Day, thus the two are identical, and the Joker is right… but at the same time, the two wound up being insane in very different ways, the Joker with his compelling urge to show the world for the crazy place it is, Batman with his compelling urge to eliminate the craziness in the world, and thus the Joker was wrong.
It’s kinda like the showdown 'tween Vizzini and Wesley in The Princess Bride in that regard…
I always interpreted it as Moore saying that in the end, no matter what happens in superhero comics, no matter how dark or cataclysmic the events are, in the end everything has to revert back to the status quo, there can be no lasting changes to any major characters because they’re just company trademarks caught up in stories that have to continue forever.
This time, the Joker went too far, crippling Barbara (and the debate still rages as to whether or not he raped her) and trying to drive Commissioner Gordon mad. Batman would have been justified in killing the Joker this time, after all the horrible things he did to people very close to Batman, but in the end, nothing really changed. They had a chase, they had a fight, Batman caught Joker and sent him back to Arkham Asylum. And they shared a joke and had a laugh together like two old friends, because everything will be back to normal when they meet again. Sure, it proved they’re both crazy, both driven over the edge by one bad day, but it also proved that there can never be a final battle between them, no matter how heinous the Joker’s latest scheme is, no matter how much he deserves to die. They need each other, sick as that sounds. And it’s not like DC Comics would ever let one kill the other anyway.
Of course, Suicide Squad writer John Ostrander turned wheelchair-bound Barbara Gordon into the super-genius hacker Oracle, so Killing Joke affected her character in the end. But not Batman or Joker, really.
“…the number of telegraph poles that Germany owed its war debt creditors,” if I remember his line right.
I find the cinematic transitions fascinating: the image of Barbara clinging on to Batman’s robe-lapels versus the demon-imps clinging to Gordon’s shirt-lapels, for instance, or the smiling image of the Joker’s pregnant wife cross-cut with the picture of the circus fat lady. It seems to suggest that The One Bad Day has played out many times, to many people, but the results aren’t always the same. It emphasizes the similarities between Bats and the Joker instead of their go-for-the-throat contrasts. And, at the end, they can recognize that things have gone too far to turn back and still share a laugh at the craziness of the world.
It was the first comic book I’d read in quite a while that really humanized the characters to such a degree, instead of just painting larger-than-life hero icons against a flat background. (Bolland was just the one to illustrate it properly, too. And I should mention the inking, too, but I can’t remember the guy’s name.)
As for the cinematic transitions, the same thing was being done in Watchmen, so it wasn’t all that big a deal to me, in fact I thought, “Christ, that’s been done to death in Watchmen already.”