Three Critics, Three Jokers, One Really Ill-Advised Kiss

One Joker down, two to go. Batman, Batgirl and Red Hood are on a collision course with each other and the remaining two Jokers, and fresh wounds will be laid over their scars in Batman: Three Jokers #2 from Geoff Johns, Jason Fabok and Brad Anderson.

Matt Lazorwitz: So we’re back to the second issue of this, and I felt about it like I feel watching anything to do with modern politics: vaguely angry and it’s not going to change the opinion of anyone who went in with even the vaguest of feelings about it. I sat back and read it, and did my best to remove my Batman super-fan hat, to not nitpick all the continuity issues, since it is technically a Black Label book, although one that started in continuity, and just read the story Johns and Fabok are telling, but I walked out feeling the same empty, confused feelings I felt at the end of issue one.

Robert Secundus: Somehow I think this is the book of our time, the book that most closely speaks to our lives; tale told by an idiot, sound and fury, etc etc. 

Andrea Ayres: It is the comic book equivalent of “I don’t know what I was expecting.” I don’t think I was confused so much as I felt a weary resignation. It was predictable and not in a fun way.

Who Made Who?

ML: So, the Criminal Joker, during his interrogation of Jason Todd, says that “Before Batman… I ran Gotham.” And then there’s his obsession with Gotham’s mobsters and the abduction of Joe Chill at the end of the issue, and that final line about, “Why did you really kill Thomas and Martha Wayne?” 

I’m beginning to get the vibe that the Criminal is, in fact, some forgotten Gotham mobster who is somehow responsible for the death of the Waynes. And I. Hate. That. I’m against any version of the Wayne murder that isn’t happenstance, because, if Batman can exact his revenge on one criminal or syndicate, versus the idea of crime itself, then he doesn’t need to be Batman. Batman is an idea: the idea that he is a force that defends those who can’t defend themselves and will stop anyone from feeling what he felt. 

Making the death of the Waynes a part of something so small as a hit cheapens that. And revealing a Joker was a part of that is the worst kind of retcon, one that does nothing but feel clever, and is entirely derivative of the “Batman” film from Tim Burton, so it doesn’t even have novelty going for it.

AA: I’m really glad you brought up the happenstance with respect to the Wayne murder. So often we ask ourselves, why us? Why me? Why now? How much suffering do we put ourselves through trying to pinpoint the exact moment something went wrong? It’s about that unyielding search for closure. There’s a sense that if we know, we’ll be able to move past the event. Sometimes, however, we’ll never know and our pursuit of closure keeps us locked in a battle with the past we’ll never win. That’s the anguish of Batman. It is living with the pain, battling that pain and trying (as you say) to stop anyone else from feeling it. Our collective pain is often experienced in the unknown. If we put too fine a point on it, as I think you hint at, Matt, the universality of the story is diminished in my eyes. 

RS: The weirdest thing to me is that this issue sometimes seems to try to acknowledge that, Andrea. So much of this issue is focused on Jason (apparently for the first time) recognizing Barbara’s pain. He sees her struggle, he figures out that he is not the only person living with the pain. But one of the most frustrating things about this series is that it so routinely undermines its own attempts to say something. In one aspect we find one approach to trauma, and in another, we find something entirely contradictory. Worst of all to my mind isn’t how it treats Bruce, though, and reduces his pain to something resolvable — it’s how it treats the Joker. The Joker here isn’t someone who had one very bad day; you don’t become the Joker by choosing to embrace evil, cruelty and nihilism in response to suffering (in contrast to Batman who chooses the opposite in response to the same). No, you become the Joker when you get soaked in Joker Juice. The end. It seems like the book wants to engage with The Killing Joke, and then focuses on reducing the Joker’s origin to any other Generic Science Accident.

ML: So, basically, it’s treating the Joker as a Spider-Man villain instead of a Batman one? 

RS: I think even that would be better — Spider-Man villains still have some level of agency. They have accidents that mirror Peter’s, or have genius inventions that mirror Peter’s, and they choose to use their gifts irresponsibly. The implication here is that there’s no choice. You don’t get any powers when you’re thrown in that vat — you just become a bad person.

AA: I totally see what you are saying, Rob. I think the problem with this series trying to engage with The Killing Joke is that it feels like it doesn’t really know what it wants to say about it. It feels like it’s aware enough to recognize there were problematic elements to The Killing Joke but isn’t brave enough to really engage with it. If I may be cynical for a moment, perhaps it wants to give enough of a nod to appease one group of people but not enough to cause another part of the fandom to become angry. 

This issue is clearly trying to do something with the Joker Juice and how it turns people into zombie-like creatures. I think there is something to be said for people beginning down a path they never imagined themselves taking. When we are unquestioning or when we do not interrogate our own actions or behaviors until it is too late, but perhaps that is too charitable a reading. Then again, I am not really here for making it seem that people do not have agency in deciding to do evil or engage in harmful acts.

The Kiss

AA: I wish a tender moment could have existed between Barbara and Jason without the kiss. It feels like a moment from every soap opera I have ever watched. “You have experienced pain too then?” Don’t get me wrong, I love me some soap operas, but I didn’t need this scene. The kiss doesn’t add anything to the reader’s understanding of trauma. If anything it cheapens both of their experiences in a way? 

ML: OK, I’m gonna be up front here: I don’t ship many characters, never been my thing, but one of the few ships I hardcore ship is Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon, so there is an inherent bias when I see either of them with anyone else.

Removing that, though, I agree with you, Andrea. The kiss makes sense for Jason, maybe, as he is emotionally stunted and (this version, anyway) has never recovered from his death at the hands of the Joker, and this is how a teenager would react to trauma. Barbara, though, has dealt with her trauma. I’m not saying she’s over it, as I don’t think we ever really escape true trauma, but she has processed it, and I’m not sure this story gives her the credit she deserves for that, even if they give it the lip service of a stack of books. 

RS: I don’t really engage with stuff via “ships” typically, and if I ever have any, it’s Emma Watsonian Ships, which is to say, I think characters should lean a bit more on “self-partnership,” should focus on working on themselves for a while, because “Will they stay together or break up?! The strains of being in a relationship with a superhero is too much for this relationship!” was old before I was born. I’m with you both here; the Ostensibly Non-Romantic Comforting Makeout undermines everything in that scene leading up to it, and undermines what has been established about both characters. It also muddles nearly everything this issue tries to establish between these characters. Barbara is routinely contrasted with Bruce. At the start, she’s worried about Jason’s murder and he (even though he is Batman, who wars against all crime) doesn’t seem to be. He leaves to patrol, she stays with Jason. He wasn’t there for Jason when Jason was in pain; she’s there for him now. There is something broken in the way this Batman engages with his family, and Barbara has something that can help fix it. To cap that character arc in this issue with a kiss — what do we take from that? Is the thing Bruce couldn’t give Jason sexual pleasure? Romance? Is Jason’s problem that he needed a gf? All the gender dynamics here seem juvenile in the worst ways common in nerd shit, and it tiptoes near incel or manosphere territory. 

AA: The moment when Barbara touches Jason on the back (page 40) and he turns around? That facial expression was really a powerful moment for me. I think that is what is so frustrating for me about Three Jokers. There are flashes like this, but then something will happen right after to totally undermine it. I feel like the kiss could have maybe worked if it didn’t feel like such a throwaway moment. There is certainly something to be said for feeling moments of connection with people who have experienced trauma, perhaps even a longing to connect with people in a gratifying sexual way to experience release? Whatever their reason, I’m not here to judge people, but do I think that Barbara being who she is as a character would do this? No. I’m not buying it, and because the kiss is discarded as quickly as it happened, it is clear it’s there for shock value, to get people talking, and that’s exhausting and annoying. 

ML: Credit where it’s due, Fabok draws the hell out of this issue, especially Jason. Throughout the arduous treatment he gets, Fabok really sells Jason’s pain and rage in a way that the script doesn’t always, or when it does it often feels more like petulance. Jason is kind of this book’s Anakin Skywalker circa Attack of the Clones in a lot of this issue; there needs to be a more subtle and steady hand to get what the creator is intending from the character.

AA: Also wanted to take time to note the way Fabok and Anderson work together to create moments of horror in a pretty seamless fashion (Page 8). When I’m not getting heated by Johns’ writing, I’m really able to sink into the pretty stellar work of the rest of the creative team.

Smile for the Camera?

AA: Everyone is watching someone. The motif of the lens is used repeatedly throughout the issue. There are a few ways the idea of the camera and voyeurism in particular make themselves known. The close-up of the human eye on Pages 34 and 40 is an obvious evocation of the camera lens. Then there is the routine appearance of screens in particular at the end of the issue. Then we have the coloring of images to invoke a photographic effect. For example, Bruce recalling the murder of his parents, the apperance of images in black and white (or sepia) as a way to denote the past.

Each of the aforementioned elements appears to be a suggestion of the camera, more specifically of our focus and frame. I can’t help but read into the way the recollection of the night his parents were killed is rendered in sepia. It’s an indication of being stuck in time, but also the limits of memory. It may be convenient to think of memory as a concrete thing, but it is elastic. Our memory changes over time, as does our recollection of events. More emotionally salient elements tend to become pronounced as other facets fade away. Each time we recall a memory, especially a traumatic memory, the encoding of the most resonant details becomes that much more pronounced. That is true even in instances where we are incorrect about the details. 

Then there is the element of voyeurism which is inescapable. Windows, framing of subjects, screens, the angles with which we look on or view certain panels and scenes … and of course the final page of issue #2. It’s all emblematic of getting us to question perspective. We are told to question perspective repeatedly in both explicit and implicit ways. Barbara referring to the zombified Jokers as victims, Jason seeing Barbara’s calendar and books about chronic pain. The audience is being told quite obviously that we’re not getting the full picture and whatever information we have been able to glean so far is through the lens of someone else. The reader is not omniscient, though they may have more insight than any one character because of our vantage.

ML: This definitely is one of the book’s attempts to draw a parallel with The Killing Joke. Even more than the first issue, this one feels like it’s trying to make readers remember that issue, down to Joker’s stripping Jason naked before torturing him, as he does to both Barbara and Jim Gordon in that story. The fetishization of The Killing Joke in other Joker stories is a topic we could spend many hours discussing, but this one is very intentionally drawing parallels, and I feel like that last page is a game of escalation: “You had a still camera and one Joker? We have a movie camera and three Jokers!”

By the way, and apropos of very little short of Andrea mentioning the flashback, I will give this book credit for one thing: The flashback to the death of the Waynes does not have those damn pearls clattering to the alley. That chestnut has worn thin, and more than that, as my wife points out every time we see it, real strings of expensive pearls are knotted between each pearl, so unless those are cheap knockoffs, there’s no way they would scatter like that. So that’s one point in this book’s favor.

RS: Another detail, possibly relevant: the four-panel grids are gone? The first issue seemed to be doing… something with the structures of the pages as it alternated between types of grids. But we’ve got all nine all the time here. The switch in page layout had something to do with Bruce and his trauma last time, though I wasn’t sure what. Are the layouts meant to emphasize something? Build connections? Does the frame of the panel have anything to do with the camera frame motif? Is it at all significant that a type of framing appeared in the first issue but not in the second? I have no idea. 

ML: I think the answer to that is going to come in issue three, if we see a different structure there. I wonder if this is the creators just trying out different styles and layouts for each issue because they can. But, well, “Prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong.”

Bat-miscellany

• There’s something in the current zeitgeist about large numbers of Joker zombies attacking Batman. It happened in a recent issue of Batman, and it’s happening again here. (There’s interesting research into moments of cultural anxiety and zombies.)
• I have no doubt that when cons come back, we are going to see at least a few cosplays of Red Hood with a broken helmet and Joker smile. How many will have the verisimilitude to wear that and nothing else remains to be seen.
• Missing Criminals. Missing Clowns. Will live in infamy.
• WHY NO MISSING COMEDIANS FOLDER?

[Ed. note: Hey, kids, you like the Batman? Because starting next week, Xavier Files’ resident Bat-expert, Matthew Lazorwitz, and Mouth of the South Will Nevin will be teaming up to cover the main Batman title in a biweekly feature called BAT CHAT WITH MATT (AND WILL!).]

Andrea Ayres

Andrea Ayres is a freelance writer and pop culture journalist.

Matthew Lazorwitz

Matt Lazorwitz read his first comic at the age of 5. It was Who's Who in the DC Universe #2, featuring characters whose names begin with B, which explains so much about his Batman obsession. He writes about comics he loves, and co-hosts the podcasts BatChat with Matt & Will and The ComicsXF Interview Podcast.

Rob Secundus

Robert Secundus is an amateur-angelologist-for-hire.