The clown prince of crime, / embodiments of Chaos, / vengeance of the knight. ("Batman: Three Jokers")
Hello good readers,
Today's my birthday! I'll be updating the "SM-SARA" pages today between cake and pie and homemade spinach cheese dip.
Still going through #MyYearInBooks with Goodreads, today's book is a birthday special: "Batman: Three Jokers" written by Geoff Johns. This three-part comic book limited-series follows the Bat-family years after the events of "The Killing Joke" by Alan Moore and "A Death in the Family" by Jim Starlin.
I have been on a Batman binge during the pandemic, having read Grant Morrison's (big fan!) Batman saga through "Final Crisis" into "Batman Incorporated", and Scott Snyder's (also a big fan!) New 52 run. This story follows the Jokers' attempts at making a new Joker, and continues some of the key ideas of "Joker" which Moore and Morrison had begun. The idea is that Batman, the symbolic embodiment of Justice, had created his own agent of Chaos by accidentally dropping the original Red Hood criminal-mastermind into a vat at Ace Chemicals (see "Zero Year" by Snyder). Sometime after, a failing comedian is conned into dressing up as the Red Hood, is also spooked by Batman and falls in the vat at Ace (see "The Killing Joke"). Both men went insane and they both became "The Joker."
But where did the third come from? The story does not exactly say. A classic comic trope to set up a future story, I believe it was left unsaid on purpose. The criminal Joker was the one Batman first remembers fighting, while the comedian was the one he fought in "The Killing Joke" and through Snyder's run. I believe that the third Joker, the more golden-age one, was the first result of the criminal and comedian joining forces to try to methodize their accidents. Successful, the three then went off to make Harley Quinn and the Joker-gas whilst continuing to disrupt Batman and Gotham.
After reading the yantra/sigil-filled "Batman Inc", this story was, for me, essentially "Joker Inc".
My Goodreads' 2020 #MyYearInBooks can be seen here: https://www.goodreads.com/user/year_in_books/2020/83965332
Previews of the upcoming "SM-SARA" HaikuPrajna Collection can be found here: https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/p/sm-sara.html
While I pitch my first novel, "Perennial City", the full first chapter along with rough-chapter previews can be found here: https://haikuprajna.blogspot.com/p/perennial-city.html
Thank you for reading.
Until next time,
Allen W. McLean
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Books, art, music, poetry, prompts and a whole lot more from me and April (@electricarmchair)!
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