Writer: Tom King / Penciller / Colour Artist: Mitch Gerads / Letterer: Clayton Cowles / Editors: Ben Abernathy, Chris Rosa, Dave Wielgosz / Collects: ‘The Winning Card’ from Batman: Brave and The Bold #1- #2, #5 & #9 / TP / DC Comics
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Review by Paul Dunne
5th April 2024 (Released: 3rd April 2024)
The Pitch: Prepare yourself for a shockingly brutal retelling of the first bloody clash between The Joker and the Batman! Detective Jim Gordon must call on the mysterious Dark Knight to help investigate the latest string of murder and mayhem terrorizing Gotham City. But what will it take to find the culprit behind these darkly comedic antics, and what will the repercussions be for everyone involved? The Eisner Award-winning team of Tom King and Mitch Gerads reunite to give life to what may be the most frightening Joker story in a generation!
As I continue to maintain, nobody likes the middle in comics. We're all curious, dare I say fascinated, with what happens at the end. And my God, do we love the start. But no one cares about the middle. About those years when things have clicked into place and you're just coasting. So it's no surprise that with this new short TP by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, we find ourselves in Year One territory. Back to the start. Back to a time we haven't visited since Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke's The Man Who Laughs one-shot. Back to the first meeting between The Batman and Mister J. Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. Restarts can be cleansing. But... We have to be aware that we're party to a rewrite of history. Even if that history is fictional, not backed up by carbon dating or archaeology. Essentially, fictional histories are pasts we don't have to accept happened. And because creators keep delving into this period, this period especially, there’s a lot you can take or leave.
In that regard, I'm not sure how I feel about this. Take or leave. Don’t they all want to be part of an ongoing legend? Do these additions to the legend sit with existing lore? For this, we're edged into much darker places than even Brubaker took us. King and Gerads present the Joker as a mystery to be solved, which is how we like him best. With all the steps to give him a past and an identity over the last few years, I think people forget that he works best as a force of nature. Here, he's elevated above that, becoming a kind of demon, operating at the stroke of midnight, slipping into Gothic houses undetected and making ghosts of people his sickly white fingers point to, then slipping away into the night to haunt the streets, committing minor localised atrocities there, too. But he's not the only dark figure out there. Of grimmer countenance but equally frightening is The Batman, on his mission, to rid the streets of criminals. They've never encountered the other before. Although a meeting seems on the (playing) cards, it's the newly-minted Captain Jim Gordon who asks for Batman's help, retroactively marking the beginning of their uneasy working relationship. There's a sense of dislocation in all this. King orientates us geographically to an almost unnerving degree. But emotionally? There's a remove. It took me a while to understand why we were placed at this... Distance from the story, but eventually I think I happened upon the reason for it: King doesn't want you to read Batman.
He wants you to be Batman.
He wants to put you in the calculated, ahead-of-the-game headspace. But this is Year One, and Batman isn't there yet. He hasn't even begun to understand the limits The Joker will go to, so how can we compute? We can't. And so we retreat back as all Batman creators must retreat back to Year One, we must go back to the place where we are afraid. Where painted faces leer at us with rictus grins. A place where we first meet true evil. The Joker doesn't even speak to us. Clowns and balloons go together like eggs and ham, but there are no word balloons for The Joker. Instead, his sentences are hung in Clayton Cowles articulate type, like title cards in silent movies, his voice, as Gordon puts it "Like someone chewing styrofoam", just appears in the wet air of Gotham. Breathed in, poisoning your lungs.
King writes in halted moments and rising horror. I feel like he was itching for this to break the confines of this format and be a graphic novel all its own. Stylistically, the closest thing he's done would be the One Bad Day entry featuring The Riddler. Gerad's art puts rain and fluorescents in your eyes, making you squint. What's that coming out of the darkness at you? Do you really want to know? His colours offer distressed realism that works on an almost photographic level, cementing my wish that this should have been an OGN. I've already spoken about Cowles' letters and rest assured, the work he does on the other characters is every bit as good as work he does on The Joker. Taken next to The Man Who Laughs, this is a dark companion piece that earns its place on the shelf. If you could go back and rewrite history, would you kill the Joker? Which pieces of Batman history would you keep? Which would you lose? And which wouldn’t let you cut them loose?
You can buy Batman comics here and browse other DC Characters here.
