Valentine's Day 2018: Batman and Joker

[cyberghostface]

From 'The Killing Joke' (obviously).

Comments

[beyondthefringe]

And then Batman strangled the Joker with his bare hands, realizing that there never was, nor ever would be, any hope for the mass murdering clown, and this had all been an elaborate cry for help and for an ending to his tormented existence. The Joker laughed until he had no more breath, and died with a smile on his face.

Batman attempted to surrender to the police, even going so far as to unmask in front of Commissioner Gordon... but one and all, they refused to look, and refused to arrest him. The Joker died by accident, they said, and there was nothing anyone could do, and the Batman was never here. They cremated the body in secret and scattered the ashes to the wind in a dozen locations... just to be certain.

And Bruce realized that no one would ever punish him for this, at least no more than he'd punish himself, and so he went home and slept soundly for the first time since his parents were murdered, all those years ago. When he awoke, he was full of ideas on how to use his money to make Gotham better without dressing up like a bat and hitting people.

The funny thing is, after the Joker vanished that night, the other Gotham rogues grew uneasy, and just a little scared, and one by one they left town, stayed in Arkham, or retired. Because if the rumors were true and Batman -had- killed the Joker, who's to say they might not be next, and was it really worth it?

And so Gotham slowly became the place Bruce Wayne had only dreamed of... thus ends the Final Joker Story.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I like it.

[scelestus]

This is now canon, as far as I'm concerned.

[alicemacher]

Thirding the likes. Everyone gets a happy ending... even, in a dark, contrarian way, the Joker.

In the prose anthology The Further Adventures of the Joker, there was a story, "Best of All," in which, after Joker murders an orphanage full of children (and tries, unsuccessfully, to take out Leslie Hopkins with them), Batman finally decides he has to kill him. However, unwilling to live with the guilt of being his executioner, he does so by setting off a timed self-destruct mechanism in the Batcave, so they'll both die. (Of course, he doesn't go through with it in the end.)

[goattoucher]

Wouldn't that be nice? They give a villain a proper send off and then -stick to it-. They don't let some big name bring them back later because they have an "important" story to tell with that character that invariably proves to be not as good as they thought?

Give Skurge his Gjallerbru, man...

[zachbeacon]

Still think Gordon should kill the Joker while "resisting arrest". Or any Gotham cop, really. Bullick once helped make a guy vanish for shooting Jim and Harvey is one of the "good" ones (by GCPD standards anyway).

[zylly]

I highly approve of this ending.

[alicemacher]

Yes, very amusing. But while there's room for debate as to the wisdom of Batman keeping the Joker alive, much less trying to reform him, it's a giant leap to say it's because he loves him. Even in stories which strongly suggest Joker has a homoerotic obsession with Bats, that obsession is entirely one-sided. Batman after all is too occupied with obsessing over (pick one or more): his dead parents, the angry Bat-God inside him, Gotham (perhaps his truest love), and of course whichever criminal or case is currently giving him the most grief.

[cyberghostface]

I wouldn’t argue that Bruce has canonical feelings but I do think there’s some foe yay going on that Batman doesn’t have with his other villains.

Obviously it’s a parody but the Lego Batman Movie was on-point with their depiction of the relationship.

(Spoilers)

https://youtu.be/HHXwi5Mz7ug

[alicemacher]

Heehee, "You had me at 'Shut up!'"

Gotta watch this sometime.

[oakie620]

Sigh... Batman, if you were doing it by the book, you'd be a cop instead of a vigilante playing dress up.

[daningram.insanejournal.com]

Yeah, I have to wonder what book Batman is referring to. Maybe he's just not gonna cave Joker's ribs in?

[cyberghostface]

He's referring to Gordon who tells Batman to take him in by the book.

[donnblake]

Yeah. As I recall, it's an important point because Gordon, despite Joker's best attempts to break him (to prove that, just like him, anyone can become a monster if they have one bad day), refuses to compromise his principles.

[lego_joker]

Honestly, I was always confused as to what those "principles" were supposed to be. The Joker violently attacked him (and his daughter), abducted him, and spent the entire story being a clear and present danger to everyone around him (including his henchmen, really). And if I remember right, at this point Batman was still an official police deputy... "the book" allows those to put down clear-and-present dangers by any means necessary, does it not?

The big irony I find is that despite Moore treating "Batman never kills" as the founding pillar of the mythos, it wasn't really codified until this story. Right around the time this came out, Mike W. Barr was having Batman use thugs as human shields left and right (and his memorable 1983 annual had Batman straight-up disintegrating Ra's). Even The Dark Knight Returns, for all its "Rubber bullets, honest"-ness, had Batman try to meet the "have you considered, I dunno, killing him?" thing halfway by severing Joker's spine.

[une_croix]

"severing Joker's spine"

Joker does that himself.

[cyberghostface]

Batman is the one who twists Joker's neck, he just can't bring himself to go any further so Joker does it for him so Batman will be implicated.

[commodus]

I still think this whole story is ridiculous. The Joker's not mentally ill, not when he's doing elaborate song and dance numbers about how wonderful it is to be "crazy". He knows what he's doing is evil and doesn't give a damn, so this whole cheap ploy for sympathy falls completely flat.

A character like Mad Hatter or Professor Pyg, who are COMPLETELY divorced from reality, are more in line with what Moore is trying to portray The Joker as. But, like most writers, he just ends up making him seem more like an angsty teenager who's trying too hard.

[cyberghostface]

He’s mentally ill in that on the number of occasions when someone or something is able to fix his mind he’s usually horrified at what he’s committed.

[alicemacher]

Yeah. It's an axiom of nearly all Joker stories, from "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge"* to the present day, that he's severely mentally ill. We're meant to accept it as a given, full stop. That his disorder bears little (if any) resemblance to the way severe mental illnesses work in real life, is entirely beside the point.

Very occasionally a story will question this axiom. Like Morrison's Arkham Asylum, in which a psychiatrist raises the possibility that Joker is in fact "super-sane," i.e. better than the average person at processing today's rapid-fire pace of information. Or the Black and White short in which Arkham staff discover an old, detailed "he's faking it" hypothesis in a file, only to discount it because its author was Dr. Harleen Quinzel. Or Devil's Advocate, in which a court finds him, for the first time in the Modern Age, mentally competent to stand trial and thus, if convicted, eligible for the death penalty. Overall, though, the modern-day Batman mythos takes it as a given that Joker is psychotic.

*The Joker wasn't in fact originally portrayed as mentally ill, at least not anything close to consistently. One Golden Age story (don't recall which) even had him feign insanity as a gambit for one of his capers.

[lego_joker]

I believe it's "The Crazy Crime Clown" from Batman #74, though it's from the '50s, so it might qualify more as Silver Age.

Ironically, that story actually ended with Batman doing a gambit that drove Joker crazy for real, at least "for a few days".

I'll try posting it tonight or tomorrow... I don't think it's ever been around scans_daily before.

[bradygirl_12]

Is the Joker mentally ill? Sometimes people are just evil, plain and simple.

[cyberghostface]

He is.