The darkness of Joker

The long-awaited Joker directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix focuses on a failed comedian who becomes a criminal. The movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion for best film. The plot is completely original, but the idea of the Joker being a failed and misunderstood ex stand-up comedian is borrowed from The Killing Joke, the 1988 graphic novel written by Alan Moore and drawn by Brian Bolland.

The Italian trailer for Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019)

The two works share the same psychological approach as they focus on an exploration of the character’s motivation rather than simply creating action sequences. Moore himself has often said that he doesn’t think this story is one of his best works (too raw and too divorced from real life), but The Killing Joke is nevertheless an important episode because it uses the comic format itself - not just the plot and dialogues, but also the frame layout, drawings and colours - to create a highly original take on the relationship between Batman and the Joker.

Moore and Bolland’s goal was to show that the two enemies are not antithetical but specular, and in a certain sense suffering from the same disease and animated by the same rage. This concept was communicated mainly through the illustrations, which were directly dependent on Moore’s highly detailed frame by frame script.

In one of the first pages, the affinity between the hero and his nemesis is suggested by the lighting. Batman asks to meet the Joker in the Arkham Asylum, Gotham City’s institute for the criminally insane. When he arrives, he finds his enemy sitting at a table in semi- darkness, playing solitaire with a pack of cards. He sits down opposite him and the two begin to talk. The table is illuminated by a light bulb that leaves the faces of the two characters almost completely in shadow. This detail is not particularly realistic, but it does allow the authors to indicate that both Batman and Joker are creatures of darkness. In this case, though, the dichotomy between good and evil does not correspond to the classic dichotomy between light and shadow, but to a more original formula. As the comic progresses, the reader realises that Batman and Joker share the experience of having had a “terrible day” on which fate chose them to become masked vigilantes. One witnessed his parents being killed in cold blood by a robber and the other became a criminal after losing his entire family and being horribly disfigured. The darkness they have in common is the unquenchable rage that drives them: one to combat society and the other to combat those who threaten its peace.

Special relationships between people are not simply the sum of their personalities. Every time they are reactivated, they create the personalities that act out the relationship. The relationship between Batman and Joker is special too. In just a few frames, in fact, Batman and the reader discover that the man who says he is the Joker is not actually the Joker at all. And as it is no longer his double he is talking to, Batman can go back to behaving like a vigilante. In fact, he immediately drags the imposter into the light to find out what has happened to his nemesis.

Highlighting the fact that Batman is a hero with a dark side may seem banal. But it isn’t, especially if you consider that between the 1950s and the early 1980s, DC Comics had toned down Batman’s character by providing him with a gaudy, squeaky-clean sidekick, Robin and a series of cheesy enemies. This was done to stay within censorship boundaries and to satisfy the tastes of a public who had grown up with these censorship laws.

There are three narrative threads in The Killing Joke. One follows the Joker as he implements his evil plan, a second follows Batman as he follows the Joker and the third is a series of flashbacks that reconstructs the events which led to a failed and frustrated comedian becoming the most dangerous criminal in the entire history of Gotham. As they skip from one thread to the next, Moore and Bolland nearly always create a clear link between the last frame in a page and the first frame on the following one. This creates a firm relationship, or better a strong analogy between the different events.

The Killing Joke is also bookended graphically, as the first frame on the first page and the last frame on the last page both depict drops of rain in a black puddle. The image is gloomy and melancholic, but the fact that it is repeated suggests that - like many stories with a circular plot - the dynamic of the story is both eternal and inevitable. In other words, Batman and Joker are destined to resemble and fight each other forever, unless one of them kills the other.

In 2008, when The Killing Joke was reissued, Brian Bolland personally recoloured his drawings and added a graphic element that adds to the story’s sense of fate. In the black and white flashbacks, he coloured only certain objects red to prefigure the scene in which the young Joker, wearing a red hood, is so humiliated, he loses his mind once and for all.

Bolland asked to recolour his illustrations, because he had never been happy with the original version, coloured by John Higgins. Higgins had even ignored some of his explicit instructions. For example, he had coloured the flashbacks rather than leaving them in black and white, and instead of the “soft autumnal colours” Bolland had asked for, the pages alternate between garish yellows and purples (click here to see certain page comparisons).

The colours in the new version – which are the frames shown in this article – are much more realistic and make the story a lot creepier. In a sense, Moore & Bolland took the character of the Joker and did the same thing with it that Todd Phillips has done now. They turned him into a human being with a past, a man that readers and viewers can understand and empathise with, on account of his misfortunes, even if they can’t justify his actions. At the same time, they are disturbed by the idea that anyone can become a danger to the public and that social outcasts can return, full of hate and a desire to take revenge on society.

The cover of the Italian edition of The Killing Joke. © & TM DC Comics 2019 All Rights Reserved