JimK:  I thought I would take a closer look at some of the stand-alone comics that inspire and inform Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.  I know that many people who love the movies do not read the comics, and I thought it might be interesting to show where some of this material comes from.  This is the first part of what I hope will be a multi-part series.

Batman: The Killing Joke was a one-shot book released in 1988.  It was written by comic author extraordinaire Alan Moore and drawn by Brian Bolland, who pretty much only did covers after this.  It is, in my opinion, the entire basis for the psychology of the Joker in The Dark Knight.  I suppose that a spoiler warning is in order, even though this is a 20 year old comic we’re discussing…so…SPOILER WARNING!  Elements of The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight may be spoiled in this post!

The story begins with Batman making an effort to communicate with Joker, hopefully to stop what seems like the inevitable outcome of their dance.

Needless to say it doesn’t work out.  That isn’t even the Joker, it’s just a guy Joker got to pose as him…Joker’s gone, baby, escaped again and off on another bender.  This pisses Batman off, obviously.  While this guy ain’t Joker, if you saw The Dark Knight you will recognize this:

* That guy just wants his phone call.  I think the entire scene in TDK where Batman damn near takes Joker’s head off in the interrogation room is inspired by that panel.

From here we get a series of current and flashback scenes where the Joker sets up his plan in current time and we learn *a* backstory for him in the flashbacks.  I emphasize it that way on purpose…there is no way for us, or Batman, to know if this is the true origin of the Joker.  More on that in a bit.

Real-time: Joker’s plan is to break Gordon, thereby breaking Batman and in turn Gotham City, one assumes.  Crush Gordon’s will, break his spirit, drive him nuts and force him to do something Gordon would normally consider over the line.  Sound familiar?  Joker shoots Barbara (the daughter, not the wife) Gordon in the hip, setting up a scenario that gets used later to turn her into Oracle in the Birds of Prey books.  Some other stuff happens that I won’t spoil.  Joker takes Gordon to a deserted carnival grounds he recently purchased and does some stuff to drive Gordon crazy, including stripping him naked and keeping him in a cage.

There are amazing panels throughout this book, like this one:

Joker puts Gordon through something, again a thing I will not spoil other than to tell you it’s part of why this is “Suggested for Mature Readers.”  It’s fairly horrible and very psychologically sadistic.  Eventually we get to a point where Joker feels like he has won over Gordon, that Joker’s plan has worked and Gordon is broken. 

Joker does a lot of talking, not surprisingly, and his warped view of the world is well examined.

Meanwhile Bats has been doing his detective thing and is now on his way to save Gordon.  I am short-changing this story immensely, by the way.  I’m glossing over huge swaths of intensely dramatic events because 1. there is no way I can recap this and do the writing justice, and 2. I really want you to buy the thing and read it the way it was meant to be seen. 

* What I will tell you is the idea that anyone can be made to act against their better judgment, to do things that are abhorrent to them…this is the core of the Nolan/Ledger Joker.  It’s the motivation (if you can call it a motive) for why Joker targets Rachel, Dent, the people of Gotham and through all of them, ultimately Batman himself.  Joker believes this, both in Killing Joke and in The Dark Knight.  He believes in the idea that life is chaos, that things are random, there is no meaning to anything and he thinks he can turn anyone into a monster.  In KJ he’s going to prove it with Gordon.

So Batman shows up.  This is what the Joker wanted all along.  This is where he * proves thinks he will prove he was right about Gordon, about Batman and about humanity in general. 

* I think this sequence directly influenced the hospital scene in TDK where Joker basically talks Dent into being a bad guy.  The Nolan film version of Joker talks about chaos and the fruitlessness of plans and schemes, where this Killing Joke version delivers a similar speech to Batman.  One imagines that Joker delivers a version of this speech, modified to best affect whomever he intends, to freaking everyone.

It’s also the moment we learn that Joker’s flashback origin tale may…or may not…be the truth.

Well now.  That’s familiar to TDK viewers.  * One of my (many) favorite things about the film is that the Nolan Joker lies about the scars.  I really could have used more of that and less of the Hong Kong extraction sequence, if I’m being honest.  What I like is the idea that Joker himself might not know what the truth is.  he may in fact be so far gone and so self-deluded - as a man who dresses like a demented clown would have to be - that he has no idea what made him this way.  Whatever story he thinks up becomes his truth, until he thinks up another one.

I’m not going to tell you about the flashback origin other than to say it’s well done, and the art is vaguely period to the vague noir timeframe in which most Bat comics take place.  It’s also properly colored in the Deluxe Edition that was recently published.  If this were Joker’s actual origin, it would make as much sense as anything else.  It’s an easy story to believe, a dramatic tale that paints him as sympathetic.  Makes sense that he would see himself as a tragic hero.

I think my single favorite panel in this book is from the same page…It’s one that illustrates the confusion the Joker feels when the world simply doesn’t see things the way he does.  Most of the time this confusion fuels his hatred of everyone and everything, his need to, as Alfred puts it in The Dark Knight, “Watch the world burn.”  This panel illustrates there is more to Joker than the madness.  He truly believes what he says and cannot understand why you do not.  It’s well-written, and I love the art.  It captures the emotion of the moment so perfectly.

This ties directly into The Dark Knight...Joker needs to make Batman understand.  He needs Batman to see what he sees.  He believes that he holds the only real truth in the world, that it is all chaos and order means nothing.  He is truly confused by the fact that Batman doesn’t agree.  He cannot understand why Batman doesn’t come over to his side.  What Joker fails to realize is that whatever it is that broke his spirit, he let it consume him completely and what he believes is this great universal truth that only he knows?  It’s completely backward.

Unfortunately for Joker, like the ferry scene in The Dark Knight proves, Joker is wrong about humanity.  Again.  He’s wrong about Gordon.  Jim is not broken.  In fact, he makes Batman swear to bring the Joker in alive, in order to prove that the law and reason and civilization has real meaning and that Gordon’s way is the right way.  This is illustrative of the idea that people are inherently good when given a choice.  Or rather, as long as men like Jim Gordon and Batman exist, men who draw a moral line in the sand and refuse - no matter how catastrophic and horrible the circumstances, to cross it- as long as men like this exist, there is hope.  In the middle of this dark and desperate tale of misery, sadism, torture and physical violence…Alan Moore wants you to know that there is hope.

Batman takes the opportunity to rub it in Joker’s face.

And now you see specifically why the ferry scene was necessary in The Dark knight.  It was the illustration that some people don’t crack, that sometimes those you expect to break do not, and men you think are unbreakable - like Harvey Dent - can be snapped like twigs.  Joker cannot accept this.  Joker get mad.  Joker get stabby when Joker get mad!

Knives.  Up close and personal.  Sound familiar?  Another element that inspired the psychology of The Dark Knight version of the Joker.

The book ends with Joker, through a joke, explaining to Batman why Joker cannot accept the idea of peace between them.  He simply doesn’t have the mechanism any more that would allow him to trust Batman…or anyone else for that matter.  It’s a brilliant page, and one you should see for yourself, so buy the book already.

Lastly, I want to make it clear that I do not feel like the Nolans just picked things out of the comics and put them on the screen.  I feel like they read these books and really took them in.  They tried to understand why the characters acted this way, and wrote their script with the intent of keeping the spirit alive, even if they mapped certain things to other characters or created new ones out of whole cloth.  For example, that first panel I put up, where batman wants to talk?  I think that inspires the line from TDK where Joker tells Batman that “We are destined to do this forever, you and I.”  The Nolans used these materials to inspire, not as a blueprint.

With The Killing Joke to use as a template, they easily could have lifted the idea of Joker’s imagined origins.  They could have lifted his dialogue wholesale and 99% of the world would never have known, much less complained.  Even the fanboys would have thought it was an homage to the comic.  Take for example Alan Moore’s masterpiece Watchmen.  The director has promised to be extremely faithful to the comics, and that is a good thing.  Watchmen fans are excited about it.  I am one of them.  I’m not saying that simply transposing what you can of a comic to the big screen is a bad thing.  It’s just that Batman’s world is fairly odd and can easily turn cartoonish.  Miller, Moore and others have attempted at times to ground Batman in a more realistic, less colorful, less cartoonish universe and that has resonated with fans all over the world for years.  With Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, the Nolan brothers truly paid homage by taking in the darker, edgier material and using it to inform and inspire a new creation, and Heath Ledger took that script and made it real.  The new mythology squares just fine with the old, IMHO.  It’s a little different here and there, but it all somehow feels like Batman, and that’s the important thing.

More posts about this stuff in the future….