'Three Jokers' coming in June

[cyberghostface]

Three years since it was teased 'Three Jokers' will premiere this summer. There's a lengthy interview with Geoff Johns and Jason Fabok at Entertainment Weekly although there's not a lot of new information. Much like Doomsday Clock was cribbing off the composition and style of Watchmen, Three Jokers will be emulating the style of (you guessed it) The Killing Joke. So you know, insert commentary about Geoff Johns and Alan Moore here.







And in case you're wondering who they represent:

Comments

[thanekos]

Jason Fabok: " Just like how Gary [Frank] in Doomsday Clock took a lot of his beats from Dave Gibbons, I’m kind of doing the same with Brian Bolland. Fans who have read The Killing Joke, you’re gonna see some familiar panels, you’re gonna see some familiar-looking things.. The Killing Joke has sat next to my desk for the last two years. I've been constantly referencing it, and even following a lot of the rules of how he laid out his panels in that book. "

It's something to see a book where the writer and the artist each admit " We're being derivative. "

[reveen]

I think that the original Golden Age conception of the Joker as just a cold, ruthless criminal mastermind would be really interesting to see used in a modern work. And it would be fun to see how Batman would interact with that character. Otherwise, eh.

[icon_uk]

Yup, Golden Age Joker was ruthless, smart and unsettling. He'd be great to see again.

[reveen]

One thing that would be cool is if Batman reversed the usual Joker relationship with GO Joker. Where he's acting the trollish trickster as a ploy to beat him.

[crinos]

So can we just have Joker 2 be the one who does wacky avant garde crimes like he did in the silver age and keep the body count to a minimum?

[shakalooloo]

Nah, looks like he is defined by 'I killed Jason Todd', in the same way that Bolland Joker is 'I crippled Barbara Gordon'. Sixties in look, eighties in action.

[leahandillyana]

That's extremely disappointing.

[crinos]

Oh for fucks sake.

You know Geoff, there's no real point in having three of these idiots if they're all functionally THE SAME CHARACTER.

I mean if one was a creepy Poe esque murderer, the second was an over the top performance artist, and the third was Hannibal Lecter in grease paint, then I might be on board. But this just feels like a waste.

[tripodeca113]

Well at least it doesn't include Cut Off My Face And Wear It Joker.

[silverhammerman]

Back when Geoff Johns was (for better or worse) redefining books like Green Lantern and the Flash do you think he’d hoped to eventually end up doing morally bankrupt “sequels” to Alan Moore comics in a transparently desperate attempt to appeal to dudes who had only ever paid attention to those two comics because they were accepted as being “adult?”

I suppose this isn’t as odious as Doomsday Clock was in concept, so that’s something. Honestly though I consider the Killing Joke a bit overrated and wouldn’t rush to personally recommend it to anyone, and that’s before even getting to the fact that Alan Moore has distanced himself from the book. Brian Bolland’s art was great though, at least before that inexplicable recolour which he himself did, so there are worse guides for an artist to follow, though the same can’t be said about the writing.

I’m still confused by the fact that the world of the Three Jokers doesn’t seem entirely connected to the present, with the three versions coming from the 40’s, 60’s, and 80’s, and leaving four full decades on the table. I think I remember hearing that this originally involved Snyder and Capullo’s Joker, which would at least have made this feel like less of an artifact specifically manufactured to appeal to dudes whose knowledge of comics is primarily gleaned from having read lists of “The Edgiest Comics for Cool Grownups” circa 2005.

Not feeling it. Hopefully this ends up better than I expect and some people enjoy it.

[cyberghostface]

FWIW one of the reasons why Moore doesn't like 'The Killing Joke' is because he thinks it doesn't have much to say in the grander scheme of things:

"But at the end of the day, Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker – and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they’re just two comic book characters. " (Source)

And I get what he's saying but that line of thinking just comes off to me as dismissive towards the superhero genre as a whole. Not everything needs to be as dense as Watchmen. A story about Batman and the Joker doesn't have to be more than a story about Batman and the Joker.

[tcampbell1000]

"WHAT backlash?"

[lordultimus]

Y'know, considering how DC keeps trying to make the fanbase think Oracle was a bad thing, you'd think they'd stop trying to put The Killing Joke on a pedestal.

[cyberghostface]

I don’t see why they would given it’s at minimum one of the top five most iconic Batman stories.

At minimum it would be comparable to the Dark Phoenix saga given how Marvel retconned that.

[thenicochan]

Hey GF, curious--what would you consider the other four? Hush or Under the Red Hood, Mad Love maybe? I realize I failed when my first thought was "Mask of the Phantasm!!" and then I was like "right, that was a movie. Whoops."

[cyberghostface]

I’d probably put The Dark Knight Returns and Year One in the top two spots. They seem to be the ones that had the biggest impact. Even the Joker film referenced Miller and that generally made a point to ignore the comics.

Not sure what I’d put in the other two spots. Maybe Knightfall and A Death in the Family? These aren’t my faves fwiw — I haven’t read Knightfall and I thought ADitF was crap. But they seem to be ones that are specifically referenced and played off the most.

[shakalooloo]

It's an iconic JOKER story, sure, but it's not the best showcase of Batman himself.

[cyberghostface]

I won't argue that it doesn't do more for Joker than it does for Batman but it's still cited as one of the definitive Batman stories after Miller's work.

[lego_joker]

In a way, I think that's why it's an iconic Batman story: it communicated to a generation of following writers that you can have Batman utterly fail to accomplish anything crimefighting-wise and still come off as satisfactory as long as he does enough navel-gazing.

I'm not even bitter (okay, not especially bitter) about this. Moore was perhaps the first writer to hit on the fact that Batman, being mortal, could be forgiven for his limitations in a way Superman or Wonder Woman never could, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't see "what can't Batman do?" as one of the richest driving engines of Batman stories.

OTOH, I also don't feel wrong in saying "look for Joker at the abandoned carnival first" should be within the aforementioned limitations, and TKJ's Batman couldn't even cross that.

[crinos]

The fact they put a story where a female super hero gets thoughtlessly crippled and assaulted in order to motivate male heroes connected to her, while shitting a character concept that lifted that female super hero back up, empowered her, and made her more of a powerful force for good than she ever was when she was Batgirl, should tell you all you need to know about the people running comics right now.

[scorntx]

All I can think of is that bit from 'Deep Space Homer'.
"We have a mathematician, a different kind of mathematician, and a statistician."

And talk about timely, given absolutely no-one else at DC seemed to care about this concept at all.

[alicemacher]

The poet Carl Sandburg wrote of actors, "They all want to play Hamlet." So too, when it comes to the Joker, it seems all writers want to be Moore and all artists want to be Bolland. Thus we get story after story in which the writer tries to outdo Moore in portraying a brutally nihilistic Joker, while the artist tries to outdo Bolland in portraying an intensely terrifying Joker.

In both cases, they miss the point. Moore's innovation (for good or ill) in The Killing Joke wasn't to make the Joker's crimes deadlier (in fact only one person, a minor character, dies in the book), but to make them more visceral, personal and cruelly life-altering. Bolland's innovation wasn't merely to make the Joker look scarier (though he sure does look that way in many a panel). It was to give him a full emotional range, showing him not only at his most frightening and monstrous, but also at his saddest, most pathetic and, yes, sympathetic.

[cyberghostface]

Well-stated. I think a lot of people forget how tragic the Joker is there and writers just try to one-up it just by making the Joker more awful.

[kurenai_tenka]

A while ago, I resolved to write more positive comments on s_d (or less negative ones, anyway).

So I guess this is my moment, as I am apparently the only person tentatively looking forward to this (despite how silly the concept is and my disdain for Joker)!