Batman: The Killing Joke

As its title indicates Batman: The Killing Joke is as much a Joker book as a Batman book. This may not seem particularly noteworthy now, when an entire month’s worth of DC comics can be dedicated to pushing villains to the fore and there are almost as many anti-heroes as there are straight villains. But in the late eighties the approach was still new enough to be a novelty. Even with a big name baddie like Joker. Which was almost certainly a factor when Alan Moore decided he wanted to write it.

The plot is fairly basic. Joker targets Commissioner Gordon with a series of vicious pranks and attacks, his goal bring to prove that anyone can be taken down to their lowest, insane ebb with one bad day. Batman saves the day (natch) by tussling with Joker and saving Gordon from his seemingly overwhelming despair. Along the way we get a look at The Joker before he became The Joker and Barbara ‘Batgirl’ Gordon gets shot.

I'm paraphrasing but that's the basic gist.

The shooting was a rare example of a comic book occurrence that had a long term impact. Barbara remained paralysed until DC’s line-wide reboot in 2011. It wasn’t something cynically dreamt up to create a readership spike, it was something Moore devised to have dramatic impact. It did and does.

As a Batman comic it works. It does something new with established characters without betraying their roots or emotions and captures the gritty feel of Gotham City. As an Alan Moore comic it also works. A bad guy dragging a morally courageous man down to his level just because he can is exactly the sort of thing Alan Moore is known for writing.  

The book is well-written and nicely paced over its dozens of pages. It's entertaining and benefits from some lovely art provided by Brian Bolland (with the deluxe edition currently on bookshelves getting a great recolour job also provided by Bolland). Perhaps most importantly it followed on from the themes that began with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and played into the darkening of the Batman character. That's something we take for granted now as it's been the standard approach for twenty-five years, but it wasn't the guaranteed recipe for success when written that it is now. The approach has been a factor in the character's longevity, and we have Alan Moore (as well as Miller) to thank for that.

Sin City

Considering the nature of comics it’s surprising how often artwork gets overlooked. Good artwork gets pointed out, yes, as does bad artwork. But that’s praising or chastising the quality of someone’s work. It’s not looking at art as something that contributes to the overall feel of a comic. I think this is because all too often artwork doesn’t really add to a comic’s themes. It’s almost always there just to give form to the words of the author.

Take Watchmen, for example. Dave Gibbons deserves, and usually gets, just as much credit for the book’s success as does writer Alan Moore. Without Gibbons Watchmen would not be the book that it is but it would not be as different as it would be without Moore. With another writer it could have succeeded to the same degree. It might even have been better.

The point is that what Dave Gibbons did with Watchmen was sterling work, but he did nothing that couldn’t have been done by somebody else. He worked from a script written by Moore. That could have been done by anyone, professional artist or not. Watchmen’s art is good, but there is nothing about it that cultivates a feeling that Watchmen achieves something no other comic could have. The script may do that. The art does not.

Sin City is different because of its art. Writer-artist Frank Miller makes artistic choices that set the series apart from everything that came before it. The book would have worked just as well had another artist provided the visuals (Dave Gibbons, for example) but had they not made the choices Miller did the books would just be fairly well written crime capers.

So what are these artistic choices? Well, Sin City is drawn almost exclusively in black and white. This allows Miller to achieve a couple of things. Firstly, it evokes the feeling of crime noir films, all clever lighting and moody shadows. Even those who have never sat through a crime noir film will be aware of the visual cues the genre is known for as they’ve become common on film and television. Keeping his pages black and white allows Miller to make easy use of these cues himself.

The second thing working in monochrome (can art be monochrome?) lets Miller do is make clever use of colour. Every so often a character will be drawn partially coloured. In Daddy’s Little Girl it’s the titular girl appearing in pink, helping to establish a sense of femininity and helplessness for the titular girl. Blue Eyes sees streetwalker Delia drawn with blue clothes to match her famed blue eyes. Red is used sparingly in another tale to emphasise the lipstick and slinky dress of an unnamed femme fatale. The most extravagant use comes in Hell and Back where it’s used to depict the hyper reality of an LSD trip. It’s a fantastic approach to drawing a comic that creates a wonderful “feel” for the books.

Of course, looking at the examples in the last paragraph you may notice one of the book’s major downfalls. It’s fairly sexist. Women are depicted as either objects for men to lust after and fight over or battle-hardened Amazonian prostitute warriors. There is no middle ground and it’s noticeable. Male characters are slotted neatly (but less offensively) into camps too. They’re either corrupt officials or hard drinkin’ PIs with women troubles and hearts of gold.

But Sin City saves itself from being a vehicle for Miller’s rampant misogyny and right wing zeal by being a thoroughly good read. The misogyny and zeal are present throughout but they’re made just about acceptable because Miller is, with Sin City, striving to create a world without hope, overrun by greed and ruled with fear. His disturbing world views make him incredibly good at that.

All of Sin City’s seven volumes are set in the titular city. Its full name is Basin City, the B and A having been dropped by the locals when they realised the corruption had set in. Across the various stories Miller creates a fascinating metropolis. Characters reappear throughout, civic leaders are shown, and the various neighbourhoods are shown. Miller is creative when conjuring backstories for these areas and displays a knack for naming them too. He even sketches out the history of Basin City itself. It’s a compelling display of world building.

Characters deliver their internal monologues in short bursts, which helps it to be read in the staccato fashion you’d see in films. As mentioned, every male character seems motivated, in some manner, by his love for a woman. And practically every character a story focuses on is a cop or PI. If they’re not they probably meet one during the course of their yarn. But as repetitive as it is it never gets boring, I suspect because, being comics, they can be read quickly enough to not outstay their welcome.

For all its faults Sin City is a fantastic achievement in the world of comic books. It’s something that established its own visual style while at the same time evoking TV and film and drawing inspiration from comics of the past such as Will Eisner’s The Spirit. A visual style that borrows from film and TV is often taken for granted with modern comics, but it was a far rarer occurrence when Miller started this. If the black and white views on the sexes didn’t match the black and white art Sin City would be about as good as it gets. As it is it comes pretty close.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

I’ve tried to like Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. But I can’t. There’s something about it that stops me from doing so. It could be that it’s grim near-future setting had become played out by the time I came to read it. Which is a little unfair because when DKR was written the theme wasn’t as overplayed as it is now. It’s one of the titles that helped to make it popular.

Another problem could be the artwork. Frank Miller (who wrote the script and drew the book) is a talented artist but the panels here are too cramped and tightly packed. At times it’s hard to decipher what’s supposed to be going on and in what order you’re supposed to track the panels across the page. While that does add (deliberately I would hope) to the book’s sense of claustrophobia it makes enjoyment difficult to come by.

It’s that sense of claustrophobia that the book is often praised for. This near-future setting is a dystopia in which superheroics have been outlawed, replaced on the streets by brutal regiments of riot gear-swaddled police. The last cape standing is, predictably, Superman. He now works for the government (or “the man”, if you prefer) while a bitter (and aged) Bruce ‘Batman’ Wayne has retired.

Bruce’s decision to return to fighting the good fight is the story of Dark Knight Returns. You probably could have guessed that from the title. As the tale begins The Batman hasn’t been seen in Gotham City for a decade, crime levels are rising and Wayne is finding inaction increasingly difficult. Deciding to ignore the injury that caused him to retire in the first place he returns to the streets as ‘The Caped Crusader’ and quickly finds himself in a conflict with Harvey ‘Two-Face’ Dent.

Surprisingly few DC regulars crop up during the lengthy story. Superman and Green Arrow are the only heroes besides Batman with a presence, the latter feeling an odd choice because, nowadays at least, he’s a pretty low profile player. Joker appears as a patient-slash-prisoner at Arkham Asylum, and Catwoman crops up as the owner of an escort business. It’s that sort of a book.

That minimalistic approach is actually one of the book’s best attributes. Were it written today it would likely be a summer crossover event designed to find a place for even the most minor of characters. That Miller was given the freedom to use as many or as few characters as he deemed necessary is pleasing. It also ensures the book has enough time to develop what characters it does use, allowing us insight into what they’re feeling and why they’re doing what they’re doing. There’s little of that in the crossover approach.

Miller is at his best when creating dystopic nightmares. That’s what he’s given us with The Dark Knight Returns. It’s a world without hope and at least one of the points of the story appears to be that the world will always need Batman, which I think readers are supposed to take as the standard “fight for what you believe in” jazz.

It’s no wonder it was cited as a big inspiration the Nolan Bat trilogy: all three films, though particularly the final entry, owe a large debt to the depressing world Miller gives us here.

And yet I still can’t enjoy it, because of that artwork and Miller’s refusal to enliven the pace. The book drags for much of its page count. When it does get going it’s an enjoyable read and one of the best interpretations of Batman there’s ever been. Sadly those points don’t come frequently enough and there isn’t enough else in the book to help carry things when the plot lags.