Batman
1988
- comic books, strips
- batman (fictitious character)
- fiction
- violent offenders
- mentally ill offenders
- joker (fictitious character)
- nyt:hardcover_graphic_books=2009-03-29
- nyt:hardcover_graphic_books=2009-11-21
- comics & graphic novels, superheroes
- batman (fictitious character), fiction
The story
A NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller! Presented for the first time with stark, stunning new coloring by Brian Bolland, BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE is Alan Moore's unforgettable meditation on the razor-thin line between sanity and insanity, heroism and villainy, comedy and tragedy. According to the grinning engine of madness and mayhem known as the Joker, that's all that separates the sane from the psychotic. Freed once again from the confines of Arkham Asylum, he's out to prove his deranged point. And he's going to use Gotham City's top cop, Commissioner Jim Gordon, and the Commissioner's brilliant and beautiful daughter Barbara to do it.
What it’s like
Painterly, hard-edged panels in a palette of rain-slick greys, sickly greens and blood red, with the 2008 recolouring making the page look stark and glossy rather than muddy. Rooftops, dim interiors and a fairground funhouse carry the unease: the art leans on deep shadow, distorted perspective and reflections in water and glass, and the Joker's face is rendered with unsettling, almost cheerful stillness. Moore's captions read like a dark, sardonic monologue, and the pacing lurches between quiet, nearly sitting-still conversations and sudden jarring bursts. It is a late-night, one-sitting read, the kind that stays with you on a cold evening. Vibe: bleak, cynical, claustrophobic, with a faint thread of humanity. Violence is brief but brutal: a shooting, a graphic beating, and a sustained sequence of psychological torment with sexual menace that lands uncomfortably rather than as spectacle. Not gentle. For readers drawn to the Joker as a figure of pure menace and to graphic novels that treat madness and cruelty seriously.
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