Rather of course than go straight, however, Joker enacts a campaign to take back his criminal enterprises that were scooped up while he was imprisoned. But in contrast to Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke or even Geoff Johns' Batman: The Three Jokers, Joker did not for me so much complicate the Joker - add mystique to his origin, plumb his insanity - as it did present him as more scrutable than normal - given to flights of whimsy, expressing his emotions through violence, but not insane, unless simply choosing to do bad is insanity.Īt Joker’s outset, the villain has been released from Arkham - under mysterious circumstances, but released nonetheless. Not that the book is simplistic it’s well-written, and if you gauge maturity by carnage and gore, it has that in spades. To this, I’d venture, intensity yes, complexity no. This deluxe edition offers that the book delivers “new levels of complexity and intensity” for the Joker. That said, I still feel Damned’s ending comes on awful quick and without sufficient explanation having read Joker, I feel more confidently that Damned’s ending is a letdown, and knowledge of the connection to Joker doesn’t mitigate that. And yes, everything makes more sense now, Damned both beginning and ending where Joker ends, and John Constantine in the role in Damned for Batman that Jonny Frost plays for Joker here. So indeed DC piqued my curiosity enough with Batman: Damned that I went ahead and picked up the Joker deluxe edition. The Joker is a “prince of crime” in this book, but hardly a “clown.”

Brutal, frightening - if you want Joker horror, here it is. Moreover, Azzarello and Bermejo’s Joker is shockingly “real” - not a mythical cackling devil, but a mortal man whose erraticness might be partially explained by all the drugs he’s shown doing here. To my eye, this Joker is not so much insane as he is just sadistic and impulsive, and with a strict (if self-serving) moral system - valuing loyalty, abohorring weakness, punishing without mercy. Given the long runway that both comics and movies have before arriving in the world, it’s hard to say if either Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s Joker or Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, released the same year, had any influence on one another, or if each was just reflecting the same cultural zeitgeist.Įither way, there’s considerable reflection of the late Heath Ledger’s performance in Azzarello and Bermejo’s baggy-pantsed, scar-faced, mob boss Joker.

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