September 21, 2010
Posted by Danny
Alan Moore’s Bad Joke…?
A little over ten years ago, I conducted my first interview with Alan Moore. It was a particularly big deal for me, not only because he was – and remains – far and away my favourite Comics writer, but, back then, his granting of interviews was particularly rare, so I was exceedingly aware just how lucky I was.
Over the course of our two hour-plus phone conversation – that’s the great thing about interviews with The (very talkative) Great Mage of Northampton: he gives you loads of material, all of it fascinating, erudite, witty and insightful – the one particularly startling piece of commentary that came out of that first chat was Moore’s admission that he didn’t have much regard for The Killing Joke, his 1988 Batman tale which boasted ultra-meticulous art from fellow British creator Brian Bolland and is now routinely regarded by fans as one of the single best Batman stories ever produced.
Really?
Yes, really. “Too brutal” he said, adding that, with his story, he felt he attempted to heap too much psychological weight on characters who, in his opinion, were simply not capable of bearing it. He quickly added that he meant no disrespect to Bolland’s artwork, which was masterful and beautiful, but, ultimately, he felt he didn’t craft a story that matched it. As a Batman fan who absolutely adored The Killing Joke, I found this admission as surprising as it was highly intriguing.
In the years since, I’ve read other interviews with Moore where he has reiterated this view on his landmark Batman tale and, while far be it for me to disagree with an artist’s view on their own work, I do feel that his comparatively low opinion of The Killing Joke is perhaps a little unjust. Indeed, I’ve often thought that his opinion is partly informed by his retrospective discomfort at having co-initiated, with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, the so-called “grim n’ gritty” era of superhero comics with Watchmen – of which The Killing Joke undoubtedly made a incredibly pointed contribution to – as well as his infamously rancorous relationship with DC Comics.
Granted, The Killing Joke does not possess any of the virtuoso, crystalline storytelling that informed the aforementioned Watchmen or his stunning metaphysical take on the Jack The Ripper myth, From Hell, but, as well as being an engaging tale, I firmly believe that The Killing Jokemade a exceedingly valuable contribution to the Batman mythos. Firstly, it firmly reiterated that “The Clown Prince of Crime” was a psychopath… and a terrifyingly brutal one at that. His abrupt shooting of Commissioner Gordon’s daughter Barbara, paralysing her permanently and therefore ending her secret career as Batgirl, remains one of the truly shocking moments in Batman comics. Later that year, The Joker would make a further devastating blow on Batman, killing the second Robin, Jason Todd, by beating him to death with a crowbar in the controversial A Death In The Family. Reading both these stories, aged 14, it perfectly underlined why The Joker really was the Batman’s worst enemy.
Yet beyond underlining The Joker’s essential grimness, what I particularly liked about The Killing Joke is that we see The Batman, a ruthless and implacable persona that allows Bruce Wayne to simultaneously be more andless than human, ultimately defer to the innate humanity of the man beneath the cowl, as he strives to answer the confounding question at the core of his perverse relationship with his nemesis: “How can two people hate so much without even knowing each other?“
Hence the gripping subdued drama of the tale’s climax, where Batman, having beaten his quarry into submission, attempts to make some – any – kind of connection with his nemesis, in a last-ditch attempt to try and understand the nature of their twisted and dynamic and, perhaps, avert the seemingly grim inevitability of one killing the other. While Moore’s striking version of The Joker is just plain vicious and whose insanity is both declamatory and cold, there’s something truly unnerving about the moment immediately following Batman’s offer of help and rehabilitation: pausing in the rain and glancing at his arch-enemy, The Joker pinches the ridge of his nose and, in a normal voice, says: “No. I’m sorry, but… No. It’s too late for that. Far too late.”The monster shows a small shred of Humanity – and rejects it. Frighteningly, the failed, struggling comedian who was forever altered by One Bad Day realises that, whatever he became, it’s better than going back to that life. It’s a fantastic moment.
Consequently, there’s a cathartic nature to the almost-surreal ending, as the pair of mortal enemies giggle effusively over The Joker’s (not that funny) gag, their laughter ultimately drowned out by the wail of Police car sirens and, finally, the heavy patter of rainfall. Their curious dance to the death continues – but at least there was one brief moment of connection, failed though it was.
As enjoyable as I’ve always found them, the relationships between superheroes and their corresponding villains are inherently rote. Back in 1988, as I do now, I appreciated the fact that, with The Killing Joke, Moore anchored his story on the attempt to break a destructive cycle, which a coldly logical personality like The Batman would undoubtedly try to do – if for nothing else because it presents a constant danger. I agree with Moore’s assertion that superheroes are not really designed to take on weighty psychological themes, but Batman and The Joker are hardly crumbling under the weight Moore places on them here. Indeed, it accentuates them both vividly, bringing an engaging and highly dramatic humanisation of these larger-than-life characters. So, while The Killing Joke may not appear on Alan Moore’s list of favourite works, it still unquestionably deserves its vaunted reputation as a great Batman story which enriches the character.
Now, about Brian Bolland’s revised colouring job in The Deluxe Edition…
16 Comments
April 1, 2012
You wanna comment? OK I’ll give you a comment. You won’t like it..
Sites/blogs like these are an occasional reminder to me (I try not to hang around them) why I don’t like fanboys. They are ass-kissing and pretty much divorced from reality.
I’m not going to say precisely why I despise Batman: The Killing Joke (&I pretty much always have) here. Suffice it to say that it is an overblown, pretentious little melodrama, with one-dimensional characters who in the words of Moore in another interview “they aren’t even fictional characters who have any bearing on anyone you’re likely to meet in reality.” NB not just “not likely to meet” but “have NO bearing” therefore are admittedly TOTALLY unrealistic, albeit also in Moore’s own words, “very, very nasty.”
One thing which he HASN’T so far admitted but which has been pointed out by feminists, of which I am one, is that this work is ALSO a complete piece of misogynistic trash!! There is a quote on Wikipedia right now calling it “pure sadism”. Which it is. Trash.
April 1, 2012
Like Hostel, only more misogynistic.
It has become ever more apparent to thinking people on both sides of the political spectrum (mine would be *genuine* leftist, ie socialist) that pop culture, and indeed mainstream cultural product, has become ever more dependent on torture porn or “porno-sadism” as time goes on. (Check out some of the views of my fellow socialists on http://www.wsws.org for movie reviews that will give you their opinions of similar!) TKJ is just another, slightly earlier symptom of a failing capitalistic society at the end of its ideological &conceptual rope.
Do you expect me to see it as anything BETTER??
Though, I must admit, when I first read it the beginning at least was moderately gripping.. unlike Miller’s lugubrious DKR. “Returns from WHERE?” I kept asking myself, as a university student..
I might have liked TKJ better, if the flashbacks hadn’t been so “whiny”; and if it hadn’t taken what was for me a COMPLETELY unexpected turn into MISOGYNISTIC TORTURE PORN.
Okay? Because THAT sort..
April 1, 2012
..of thing ISN’T OK, with me. And – you DO know, Moore never intended it to be canonical, right?
(But DC obviously had other ideas *all along* – which is why they dovetailed it into that ridiculous piece of propaganda A Death in the Family later in the year. Which must have been commissioned around the same time.)
That whole poll they did – all comics companies are thoroughly dishonest, if that’s anything to go by!
Oh my goodness. THAT WHOLE THING – and all mainstream US comics, DC’s Batman as an arch-example, are such gianormous FAILS.. yet irritating fanboys persist in liking the trash.. *sigh*
April 1, 2012
& Alan Moore isn’t a “mage” but a literary charlatan, in my view: though these days he tends to be more honest than the companies who’ve sponsored him.
NOW. I’m going to take a different tack than any you might expect! (&I’m doing this from a mobile phone btw, hence the limits on post length.) I’m not going to pursue the feminist anti-misogyny-and-pointless-violence-against-female-characters line – though I could and how! But women-in-refrigerators has already been done! Oh yes!
No: I shall do it from an angle you do not expect and you will not understand why! – unless you check out my Twitter and get to know me on there. Briefly: I propose to speak for the Joker!
April 1, 2012
Now. WHAT evidence, genuine canon have you from the ORIGINAL comics – those by Kane and Finger, you know, the oft-overlooked guys who actually INVENTED these stories, albeit with a lot of help &inspiration from old pulps, silent movies etc.. What evidence have *you* from the 40s, 50s comics, whenever, that the Joker was “a terrifyingly brutal psychopath” rather than.. a theatrical, performance-art-addicted gangster??
What evidence is there? (Other than a bit of typically-melodramatic-for-that-era-but-in-a-good-way pulp-villain-style behaviour?)
Particularly: What evidence was there that Joker *hated* Batman – or Robin, or Commissioner Gordon, or certainly his daughter – *who he does not know is Batgirl* – in any way, approaching the “personal”?
He never hated them as people: certainly not as much as I hate Frank Miller: who seems to have invented this Joker-is-as-evil-as-Satan trope! I wonder which churches this arch-conservative comics scribbler was visiting in the 1980s?!?
April 1, 2012
For you know, the.. “and it’s personal” line, particularly in the “HE’S BACK.. AND THIS TIME IT’S *PERSONAL*” tagline was a favourite in the 1980s.. I noticed it appearing ad nauseam.. usually in the context of action heroes, to excite the public – I think they use it still in WWF??
Whereas, in previous crime fiction, the bad guys almost always used to say: “Not’ing personal – just bid’ness!” Which trope Kane and Finger I am sure would have been more familiar with! 🙂
Ron Goulart, the American comics and pop culture historian, in The Encyclopedia Of American Comics or whatever with a similar title I read in the 1990s, said of The Dark Knight Returns that it was a “revisionist” version of Batman. Ah: at least one person who has Frank Miller’s number, *I* thought! The entry doesn’t say modern Batman is a complete con – but it’s a start! 🙂
Goulart also furnished the quote, pretty sure it was him, which I liked so remembered – that the Joker was “a blend of Groucho Marx and Fu Manchu”.
April 1, 2012
Ie, an old-style, mannered, old-fashioned pulp villain! With like his own rules, you know.. Like Conan Doyle’s Moriarty. (But with a better sense of humour, and a bigger sense of theatricality.) The Joker might not exactly have been the nicest person around in Gotham.. but he had style, and was not a pervert bent on making pointless “points”. A genuine joke is not a “point”.
I think that modern American society is rotten and vilifies people who are different. The way it has developed is that now it pretends it *isn’t* racist or anything: whereas in previous times it just ignored racism. In many ways it’s now more racist than ever – Trayvon Martin, anyone? THAT’s why it has an increasing not decreasing desire for monochrome “heroes” and “villains” and “the criminal is evil” type stories. A religious, superstitious view of morality: little better than the persecution of “witches” or albinos in Africa. That’s your country.
And having a white villain who is disabled or disfigured – or mentally ill come to that
April 1, 2012
– is no better than vilifying blacks! And don’t get me started on homophobia – actually many modern portrayals of the Joker (only not this one, where he isn’t gay) are distinctly homophobic.
I just get fed up with all the barely disguised prejudice and Manichaean morality that there is in supposedly “with-it” fiction. And the unrelieved – and likewise tiresome – meanness. As if there were no-one who is good-natured – or optimistic and confident – in modern Comic-Book-Land/ Gotham City – least of all the scowling, pompous yet incompetent – as in TKJ and TDK – heroes! They WERE in Depression-era movies/comics – why not now???
US = on the way out. There must be Chinese comics that are better.
I DO think that Alan Moore was cynically pandering to all your prejudices: rather than countering them. (But then, ppl who tell others to grow up aren’t universally liked/accepted: one reason MICHAEL Moore doesn’t have fanboys!)
If ALAN Moore were trying harder, he’d’ve made the Joker *genuinely* sympathetic..
April 1, 2012
..that is to say, a *genuinely* tragic grotesque, who may have a change of heart, such as Gaston LeRoux’s Phantom Of The Opera..
Moore has never created a genuinely moving or tragic character like that.
Moore is an idiot! In TKJ, he insults everyone, including other “different” people, such as dwarfs and circus folk! As one Amazon reviewer said, why would they be accomplices to such a scheme?!
The ONLY person Moore sanctifies in that entire book – is guess who, the police Commissioner! Who, as another reviewer said, has an attitude that is “Pollyannaish”. If you want to vilify anyone/be controversial, why not say it is the cop who has done something to the villain, that is so mind-deranging that the villain wants revenge against him, at all costs?
Just an idea!
Anyway.. I shake my head over this prejudice-promoting, QUITE THE OPPOSITE OF LIBERAL, book.
April 1, 2012
Hmm: and I see you first read AM’s Bat-trash aged 14.. hmm.. no wonder you believed it then.. though I think I was more of a skeptic aged about 12.. girls often are: their minds mature faster: and despite the way they are so often pressurized to conform, they don’t always believe what adults tell/sell them! *Which is why misogynistic trash pulp masquerading as something literary shouldn’t be marketed to minor teen boys*!
This is just the sort of thing which would badly influence a developing male mind: I don’t think I want to look to see what else you like.. (Women with machine pistols mud-wrestling? Saw movies? Don’t tell me..)
I’m not inspired by this post, Dan. (I found it Googling for Alan Moore interviews, btw.) Erk.. Well, while I’m still waiting for your reply (and I hope you will) I might go further into the detail I never planned to go into..
Well: at least Alan Moore has in later years been more honest about his shoddier earlier work..
When he says “too brutal” I think he’s really admitting..
April 1, 2012
..euphemistically, that he went too far with TKJ, and was gratuitously violent/cruel, in a pornographic manner. I don’t think he always admits when he has written porn: he has admitted it once to date: Lost Girls, which is about.. grown-up children’s characters, being raped.
Do you see why in a more socially-constructed world, it would be people like him being carted to the funny farm??
And I think when he told you “I put too much psychological weight onto these characters, that they’re not constructed to bear”, I think he was really admitting: “I’ve been a tit with kids-lit characters again”..
For of course, all comics were “for kids” in the old days.. That was who they were primarily marketed to.. Of course, some comics, esp. newspaper strips, eg Mutt and Jeff, Krazy Kat, early gained adult acclaim. And I suppose you could say that “crime comics” had teen appeal.. Though of course, adults read all these.. newspaper strips especially. They were perceived as entertainment.. not deadly serious psychological
April 1, 2012
comment.. Why shouldn’t comics be ENTERTAINING, once more? Who are they trying to convince, with their protesteth-too-much uber-seriousness? Dealing with *nothing really serious at all: ie, where is the political/social message*? 70s comics had more of this!! In the old Joker backstory, which any reader of old (pre-fucked-up comics) should know – (actually, the Batman I movie script got it a bit closer!) the Joker.. well basically, the Joker/Red Hood, whoever he may have been previously, was the victim of an (albeit after-hours) industrial accident: due to escaping through a polluted vat which discharged into a river! Which meant there were some Gotham capitalists who were discharging something very nasty into a river: being arch-polluters! The original (1951) origins story made that very clear! Sadly, the original writers didn’t explore that very far.. editorial pressure? And I think the old story went off at a bit of a tangent from that! Nowadays, Hollywood etc let you do “evil polluting Big Corp” stories:
April 1, 2012
Silkwood etc: *so it wouldn’t have been a big sell for Moore to say: “Why shouldn’t we make this story more about the REAL villains.. the big CORPORATIONS?? I know: the Joker does something crazy again, &at first the Batman thinks he is just doing this out of vanity to get attention.. but he realizes that J is trying to say something, deaf-mute like, that he cannot really articulate: THAT gets the Batman interested again, and he opens up this old case, that the Joker can only reference obliquely, due to trauma. Bats does what he should have done 20 years ago and investigates Monarch Inc. He really does his job for once and finds plenty of dirt. 10 executives go to jail. Joker however remains mad: but both hero and rogue are satisfied – and so would be THIS reader! But NO! Alan Moore can’t do anything even REMOTELY like that!! Which is why he is not MICHAEL Moore – tragically!! 🙁
I call TKJ lazy writing: without the drive of a Raymond Chandler, or even an average silver screen noir or gangster movie.
April 1, 2012
And these things now are all so BORING! Torture porn /= entertainment OR seriousness. How can anyone say it does?
I think you *could* do something “grown-up” with old comics characters. Just like Angela Carter – or for that matter, William Goldman or Gregory Maguire did with old/more modern fairy tale tropes. AND that wouldn’t necessarily be something DEVOID of humour: the latter two writers aren’t!
Genuine humour I mean! I think everything written by Alan Moore in his story about our two adversaries was so PHONEY: even a fair sprinkling on amazon.com seem to see that’s just not how humans in any universe behave! WHO believes the ending of that story – that it is how the hero in particular would behave, after his friends had been harmed? Who believes the villain would do all that, without giving himself a secure escape route?
&IF the villain pinches the bridge of his nose when the hero is actually offering truce, it means the villain is LAUGHING at him, &there is no real “rapport” between them at all!!
April 1, 2012
SHEESH! Is all of this just proof that comics are written by people with an autistic level of social skills?! OR is it proof, likelier it seems to me, that bad fiction is written when authors grimly try to force characters into certain moulds: in the belief that that’s what the punters want to see.. a type of blaxploitation fiction without the blacks, then? (Nah: Shaft was better than that!)
Alan Moore is prejudiced about characters simply based on labels: “villain” etc. He sees evil everywhere but where he should look: inside himself.
That stuff, incidentally, of the hero & villain “being mirror images of each other” is as old and as corny as the hills with maize fields on top!
AND don’t make me explain why I think Bolland’s cover art for KJ, though technically competent, is the most specious, hypocritical, misleading image ever.. Let’s put it this way: if MOST people knew what the subject was looking AT (there is no way to tell w/o reading it) they would not buy the thing:especially not if they had kids!
April 24, 2012
I love the mention of Raymond Chandler in the posts. I’m studying him for a literature presentation and was using TKJ as a point to make. Agreed, not the best writing ever, but it seems as if it’s meant to be a contemporary extension of the modernist writing period. In that lit there are no redeeming values of any kind and everyone is pretty much screwed. The Joker appears as an even more ridiculously over the top “bad guy” than in any detective fiction. Just seems Moore was making a logical conclusion on the whole genre. Ridiculous world with extreme good and bad ie Guy in Bat costume and pyschopath dressed like a clown. It’s comparable. Did anyone ever read Maggie A girl of the Streets. Totally vicious representation of the world. That’s what the point of the joke at the end of TKJ means. It’s not funny on the paper. It’s a hysterical jab at the ridiculousness of the genre itself. My opinion.
Leave a comment