{"id":1736,"date":"2009-09-02T13:07:05","date_gmt":"2009-09-02T18:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=1736"},"modified":"2009-09-02T13:11:12","modified_gmt":"2009-09-02T18:11:12","slug":"the-killing-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2009\/09\/02\/the-killing-joke\/","title":{"rendered":"The Killing Joke"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nIn retrospect, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.postmodernbarney.com\/2009\/09\/audience-requests-comics-opinions\/\">Dorian Wright doesn&#8217;t like<\/a> <cite>The Killing Joke<\/cite>:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nIn the long run, it was probably a mistake. While it\u2019s still a masterfully crafted story, and Brian Bolland\u2019s art is exceptional, the overall trend towards \u201cdarkening\u201d Batman did serious damage, I feel, to the character and the comics industry as a whole. It was an attempt to chase a post-adolescent audience\u2019s brief, media-driven flirtation with comics, but it froze out younger and more casual audiences. The audiences comics really needed to grow as a medium. It\u2019s only lately, with the <cite>The Brave and The Bold<\/cite> cartoon and Grant Morrison\u2019s Batman work, that a serious attempt to rehabilitate Batman from the brooding, angsty loner with mommy issues has been made.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\nHear, hear.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<cite>Killing Joke<\/cite> always felt cynical to me, an attempt by Moore and DC to cash in on his surface reputation as a mature superhero writer, where mature equals R-rated sex and violence, for those readers who thought the nudity and brutality in <cite>Watchmen<\/cite> and <cite>Miracle Man<\/cite> were &#8220;deep&#8221; and missed anything more subtle.  Even Moore at his most cynical offers glimmers of interest so it&#8217;s not completely bad, certainly not as bad as the glut of post-<cite>Watchmen<\/cite>, post-<cite>Dark Knight<\/cite> &#8220;mature&#8221; superhero titles that crowded the shelves in the late eighties\/early nineties.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nand yet it&#8217;s still awfully superficial and glib in its philisophy, the loveingly and lingering depiction of the the crippling and implied rape of Barbara &#8220;Batgirl&#8221; Gordon as a device to &#8220;break&#8221; Batman not that different from any such seen in a revenge movie like the &#8220;Deathwish&#8221; series, a device to propel the hero into action but only seen as an affront to the hero&#8217;s honour rather than as what it does to the victim, just a broken toy in this context. The ending where supposed hero and supposed villain meet in the middle and laugh it all off is annoying as well, as is its trite message, that all it can take is one bad day for a normal man to become a monster.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBut the Bolland art is gorgeous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In retrospect, Dorian Wright doesn&#8217;t like The Killing Joke: In the long run, it was probably a mistake. While it\u2019s still a masterfully crafted story, and Brian Bolland\u2019s art is exceptional, the overall trend towards \u201cdarkening\u201d Batman did serious damage, I feel, to the character and the comics industry as a whole. It was an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[230,7],"tags":[68,846,847],"class_list":["post-1736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-comix","tag-alan-moore","tag-brian-bolland","tag-the-killing-joke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1736"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1738,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions\/1738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}