We’re used to the great Alan Moore disavowing the movie adaptations of his work, no matter their quality (which ranges from dreadful in the cases of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell to half-decent in V For Vendetta and Watchmen). Moore’s view of his own comics is usually more positive, but there is one story beloved by critics and fans that he has come to dislike over time – Batman: The Killing Joke.
Written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Brian Bolland, The Killing Joke was first published in 1988. Bolland had provided the impetus for the 48-page one-shot after discussions with DC Comics. He said: “I thought about it in terms of who’s my favourite writer at the moment, what hero I would really love to do, and which villain? I basically came up with Alan, Batman and the Joker”.
In the story, the perennial villain escapes from Arkham Asylum and sets out to prove that anyone can become like him if they have one bad day. The Joker kidnaps Commissioner Gordon, subjecting him to psychological torture. These scenes are intercut with what appears to be the origin of the Joker himself as a failed comedian turned to a life of crime to support his family within a dismal, systemically collapsed Gotham City.
Harrowing events ensue, but ultimately, as Batman saves Gordon, we see that despite his hardest attempts to make someone else see his viewpoint, the Joker really is alone. Perhaps out of sympathy, Batman offers him a way out, yet in the end all they can do is share a laugh.
Despite the comic being well-received by fans and critics alike – it won best graphic novel at the Eisner Awards – the enthusiasm was not shared by its creators. Bolland disliked the “garish… hideous glowing purples and pinks” used by colourist John Higgins, which rub up and perhaps seem to trivialise the pitch-black subject matter, and later corrected them for reissues. But Moore’s objections were not so easily put right. In an interview with the LA Times, he said, “I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it puts far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it.”
Moore is referring to the plot he gave to Barbara Gordon (aka Batgirl), who is shot and paralysed by the Joker before being exploited in violent, sexualised imagery in order to bring her father to his breaking point. Initially hailed as a dynamic and well executed scene, in modern times this sequence and its place within the greater Batman franchise has received criticism for its use of Barbara Gordon, and women’s suffering in general as an easy source of shock value.
Among those critics would be Moore himself, referring to the work as “too nasty” and “too physically violent”. These conversations would be brought back into the mainstream comic industry in 2015, due to a limited edition cover of the Batgirl comic referencing The Killing Joke, with The Joker posed next to a terrified, crying Batgirl. While many online fans were quick to point out that it was only a reference and compared the eventual removal of the comic cover after vocal outrage to censorship, whether it is ethical for the comic industry to parade women’s suffering as a marketing push is a very real conversation that needs to be had. This draws back to a much maligned narrative trope found throughout the history of comics known as “women in refrigerators”, in which female leads and love interests are intentionally harmed in order to give some form of lesson to the main protagonists.
Moore’s dislike of The Killing Joke also stems from his overall disenchantment with the comic book industry. In an interview with The Guardian, Moore said, “They’ve lost a lot of their original innocence, and they can’t get that back. And, they’re stuck, it seems, in this kind of depressive ghetto of grimness and psychosis. I’m not too proud of being the
Moore’s disappointment with the industry as a whole seems to have coloured his view of The Killing Joke. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Moore branded the whole project as trivial, saying “The Killing Joke is a story about Batman and the Joker; it isn’t about anything that you’re ever going to encounter in real life, because Batman and the Joker are not like any human beings that have ever lived. So there’s no important human information being imparted…Yeah, it was something that I thought was clumsy, misjudged and had no real human importance. It was just about a couple of licensed DC characters that didn’t really relate to the real world in any way.”
The interview sparked fierce debate within online communities, with many arguing against Moore’s rather cynical assessment, citing the interpersonal relationship between Batman and the Joker as being representative of debates about disenfranchisement as well as invoking the classic argument of nature vs nurture.
The Joker’s thesis is that while he is evil, he is that way due to the environment that created him – at least in his fabricated account of his origin. Batman refutes this, saying “I heard it before, and it wasn’t funny the first time”. Not only is this a refutation of the often perverse nihilism found in the Joker, it also paints Batman as an equally callous authoritarian figure, uninterested in what makes the clock tick as much as he is simply smashing it.
Admittedly, this theme has become rather common in more modern depictions of Batman as writers struggle to make a character who avidly supports law enforcement despite being acutely aware of its corruption into a protagonist without having to massively simplify or outright ignore the social commentary inherent within the franchise. It is easy to point at Batman as a moral grey, though when you do so within an entire industry of moral greys you inevitably begin to question what further there is really anything to say about Batman, just as Moore himself believes there isn’t.