Suicide Squad: Get Joker! #3

[cyberghostface]

Comments

[donnblake]

Hmm. Getting a little meta there, Joker. I'm almost surprised he didn't bring up that infamous vote...

[blues32]

I feel like Jason would have shot him just as he finished saying, "When you kill me, what's next?" Then say, "Let's find out."

[janegray]

Yep.

[tinygaylaura]

How this scene would actually go

Joker: Shoot me if....

Jason: *Shoots him*

*Faces absolutely no consequences because

A: It's the Joker

B: He is the son of a billionaire and laws are for poor people*

[huntleyhaverstock]

Honestly, you could have stopped at A, in this case.

I am really, really, really tired of the Joker and his plot armor. Yes, he's a good, interesting character in his own right. But he's played out and overused, and each excuse for why you can't or shouldn't kill this unrepentant mass murderer, who is entirely aware of what he's doing and is doing it intentionally, gets thinner than the last. Kill him, leave him dead, and come up with something new.

[cyberghostface]

Thing is that applies to the overwhelming majority of Batman's villains. Almost all of them, even Harley Quinn, would qualify as mass murderers or serial killers. It's like saying "Well you should kill Ted Bundy but Richard Ramirez deserves a second chance". It's not like Spider-Man where you have thugs like Sandman and Rhino who will rob a bank but generally don't kill innocent people for funsies.

Also Joker is not fully aware of what he's doing because he's insane. When he was made aware (that is, he was given a conscience) the weight of his crimes caused him to go into a catatonic state:

[janegray]

Not really. They are all murderers, but it has been noted multiple times that the Joker's bodycount is massive and far outstrips their own. The only one who rivals him is Ra's, who has his own excuse for staying alive.

Mind you, one murdered innocent person is one too many.

But they explicitly say that Joker has single-handedly filled entire cemeteries.

Also, the other villains occasionally do good. Like how Poison Ivy took care of orphans and helped feed civilians in No Man's Land.

[janegray]

Really, the solution would be simple. Have the editors do their damn job and stop edgy writers from writing stuff like "I boiled a baby alive and forced the father to drink the soup."

The reason Joker is always brought up in discussions about Batman's no-kill rule, instead of any of the other villains, is that the writers obsessively compete to write the most all-edge-no-point takes on the character and have him commit more and more atrocities to more and more ludicrous levels of cruelty.

Go back to portraying him as a lethal criminal who can nonetheless go five minutes without setting a family on fire.

[blues32]

Joker used to be about fun. "Host a game show at gun point. Not a lethal game show, just a game show." "Go to Metropolis and get Superman's attention because why not?" "Decide to become a director and make a movie...against people's will."

Fun. Now it's just a self competition to see how horrible a person he can be.

[tinygaylaura]

I miss when writers tried to think how to make a Joker story funny instead of thinking how to make the Joker the most evulz he can be :(

[lego_joker]

Also - and I think this is the point that really grates on people - most of the other villains don't just stand there and expect to be spared. They may also be mass murderers, but when someone's got them outgunned they at least know to act like dying is a possibility.

The real sticking point with Joker's plot armor is that he seems to know it exists when nobody else does, which completely destroys the stakes of any story he's in. Plot armor may be inevitable in a long-running series like Batman, but good writers know it should be hidden, not something the story constantly pokes at.

[cyberghostface]

Joker might be worse but Riddler is still killing children, Ivy is feeding innocent people to her plants for fun and Penguin is decapitating women so he can steal their necklaces or driving random men to suicide over perceived slights. If you're going to ask "Why hasn't anyone killed this unrepentant murderer" then you should ask the same for his other rogues.

[janegray]

But my question isn't "why hasn't anyone killed this unrepentant murderer," it's "why hasn't anybody killed this guy who is single-handedly responsible for more deaths than natural calamities?"

Numbers do matter to me. You can disagree, but I personally do see a difference between killing a couple dozens and killing dozens of thousands.

Also, that story where Ivy feeds people to plants is no longer canon because writers have been going out of their way to soften her history, while going out of their way to make his more horrific. After Rebirth they have retconned a bunch of things to massively scale down Ivy's crimes.

[deh_tommy]

That’s something I’ve rather liked about James Tynion’s post-Rebirth work, in that not only does Batman decide he’s had enough and decide not to personally save Joker, but people actually do finally go “screw it” and decide to kill Joker themselves. Not that I endorse such actions as a person, but from a narrative sense it’s been a really long time coming.

On the other end of the whole edgy Joker spectrum, I think the whitewashing of Poison Ivy really stinks. Batman’s rogues can be sympathetic and still have done terrible things (see Killer Croc, Two-Face, Clayface, etc.) and it kind of takes away from her complexity as a character when it turns out she was never actually all that villainous in the first place.

[janegray]

To be fair, Ivy's case is complicated by the fact that, as it becomes more and more clear that Corporations and climate catastrophe are going to MASSIVELY fuck over humanity within a generation or two, it becomes harder and harder to blame her.

Like "you know what, she is right, the like dozen or so billionaires that are dooming our children so they can buy the 46th yacht should be used as fertiliser!"

It's the Magneto Effect.

[arilou_skiff]

I think those are different things. Magneto and Ivy becoming more sympatethic in doing their extreme actions because the other guys look more and mroe monstrous is different from trying to retcon them doing these things.

Like, having Ivy kill a CEO for pollution and going "Totally worth it." is different from having that be done by her clone or whatever.

[tinygaylaura]

I mean generally I always root for Ivy and Magneto in any given story

One's a bad ass bisexual being bi and doing crimes which is my jam

The other is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who kills racists and fascists.

Add a Transgender hero who melts transphobes with their eye beams and a black hero who hunts down and assasinates Klansmen and you'd have my idea of the perfect superhero team

[windleopard2]

Granted, Ivy also follows a brand of environmentalism that ignores humans as also being part of the ecosystem. Hence, her attempts to wipeout humanity as a whole. Though I think she's also stopped doing that.

[blues32]

I remember when Riddler expressed horror about that. "Joker is killing people, for god sake!"

[cyberghostface]

Yeah Riddler at least is a character who I think would work better if he wasn't killing people. Now it's like he's a cross between Jigsaw and the Zodiac Killer per recent media.

[deh_tommy]

I don’t mind Riddler killing people too much, just as long as he doesn’t overdo it like what’s become of Joker. I really liked the almost SAW-like deathtraps he had in the Arkham games (and briefly in the original The Batman cartoon).

[blues32]

Traps like that are fine for people Riddler has a grudge against, but he seems to just go with anyone for the purpose of putting Batman through his paces. Then again, he's been written with a comically huge superiority complex so he has a grudge against a lot of people.

[tinygaylaura]

Writers need to get a sense of scale and realise that we can understand a character is a threat without them blowing up cities and eating puppies

[tinygaylaura]

Batman: The Animated Series was the take on Riddler that I think got the character absolutely pitch perfect

[lbd_nytetrayn]

In fairness, it did that for most characters, often better than the comics since... even Batman himself.

[blues32]

They're the quintessential versions. Special note goes to Mr. Freeze. The kid's cartoon took a joke of a character and made him something tragic.

[blues32]

True, but it was such a difficult task coming up with stories for Riddler. The riddles had to be be solid but not impossible for someone without the script in hand to figure out. As a result, they could only really do three episodes with him as the main villain.

[tinygaylaura]

Yeah but I'd rather have the Riddler be used sparingly in good stories than used over and over in stories that either treat him as a mean spirited joke or turn him into a guy who murders children with poison kites to show that he's Dark And Edgy Now

The Batman had a decent middle ground between the Riddler I like and the darker comics version as he was portrayed as very fucked up and scary but he was also shown as very cerebral and he wasn't just a 90's Edgelord

[tinygaylaura]

Tho in the case of Ivy I can forgive her and I think she should get a pass because

A) She's a hot green bisexual bad ass

and

B) My opinion of most of her "Victims" is

Well

Actually I'll let the six merry murderesses of the Cell Block Tango sum it up for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c2bKZMxEQg

[windleopard2]

Also Joker is not fully aware of what he's doing because he's insane. When he was made aware (that is, he was given a conscience) the weight of his crimes caused him to go into a catatonic state:

This has been your daily reminder that most superhero writers have no clue how mental illness works.

[tinygaylaura]

Well I think we've all known that for a while now

They think D.I.D works by you flipping a coin to decide which alter is in control

[deh_tommy]

Holy crap, what happened to this book? Why did this take so long to come out?

[cyberghostface]

IDK but I think it's something to do with DC internally. A number of their titles were delayed recently.

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/suicide-squad-get-joker-3-now-7-months-late-and-more-dc-lateness

[tinygaylaura]

It's happened to a few Marvel titles too

I seem to recall Newsarama saying something about their being issues with getting the comics to print/getting them shipped due to Covid

[donnblake]

The general case of whether or not it's appropriate to shoot the Joker aside, it feels awfully odd for Jason, the shootiest of Batman's sons, in particular, to struggle with the question.

[nyadnar17]

I agree 100%.

Jason would unload the clip. If he did anything before sleeping like a baby that night it would be burning the corpses or hiding it so no one could try to Rez Joker.

[beyondthefringe]

Raise your hand, anyone who actually thinks that given the choice, Jason Todd would shoot himself rather than the Joker.
Anyone... anyone...
Especially in the context of this story, which has already proven to be grim, gritty, and cynical.
Nah, JT shoots the Joker, calls it a day. Then he and Harley grab drinks.

[tinygaylaura]

"Why does Jason, the most shooty of all this books characters, not shoot all the others?"

"Perhaps they are saving that for the Annual"

[deepspaceartist]

The thing is that Jason has a documented history of not being able to just shoot the Joker. He insists on being super dramatic about it, Batman has to be there, he has to set things up so that Batman has to kill Jason to save the Joker, so on and so forth. It has to be a whole production for Jason. If it was just about killing the Joker then Jason could just have snuck into Arkham and put a a magazine of bullets between the Joker's eyes before Bruce ever even heard of Jason's version of Red Hood.

But it's not about killing the Joker. It's about Jason proving to Bruce the HE should have killed the Joker years ago.

(Presumably no one has told Jason that Bruce 100% went after the Joker and attempted to kill him after Jason died. He only failed due to the universal villain power of 'surviving fiery helicopter crashes that don't leave a body'.)

Magnum PI Reference

[kuratowa]

The whole scene is an homage to the Magnum PI episode "Did You See the Sunrise." In that two parter, Magnum tracks down the Russian intelligence officer that tortured him, T.C., and Rick back in Vietnam. The officer, now a diplomatic attache, has diplomatic immunity, and is about to leave Hawaii after killing a friend of Magnum's with a car bomb. The last thing that Magnum's friend said to him before dying was how much we was looking forward to seeing the sunrise.

Artistically, this is a great shoutout to the shock ending of that episode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1ArtYDOAIw

Re: Magnum PI Reference

[windleopard2]

Being a reference to another, better work of fiction doesn't make it well written.

Re: Magnum PI Reference

[scelestus]

Holy SHIT, I thought this was vaguely familiar. Great catch!!!

Re: Magnum PI Reference

[tinygaylaura]

Holy shit so that's what Archer was referencing in the episode where he goes on a rampage against the crime boss who was messing with cancer drugs which caused a sweet old lady he'd got to know while he was getting treatment for his cancer to die

Damn

I always thought of Magnum P.I as a pretty light hearted show. More in the vein of Murder She Wrote. Seeing the main character just cold bloodedly put a motherfucker in the ground like that was unexpected