With the rictus grin of the harlequin of hate plastered across movie posters and website headlines all over the world, maybe it’s time to take a look back at a graphic novel that took a very different look at the Joker with Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo’s “Joker”.
Read on below for a full, spoiler free (even thought it’s eight years old now) review of the graphic novel “Joker” and why it still stands up as a unique interpretation of the character.
Written by Brian Azzarello
Illustrated by Lee Bermejo
Brian Azzarello brings to THE JOKER all the visceral intensity and criminal insight that has made his Vertigo graphic novel series 100 BULLETS one of the most critically acclaimed and award-winning series of all time. This original graphic novel tells the story of one very dark night in Gotham City. The Joker has been mysteriously released from Arkham Asylum, and he’s none too happy about what’s happened to his Gotham City rackets while he’s been “away.” What follows is a harrowing night of revenge, murder and manic crime as only The Joker can deliver it, as he brutally takes back his stolen assets from The Penguin, The Riddler, Two-Face, Killer Croc and, of course, The Batman, and heaven help them all. Told through the eyes of his loyal (but naive) henchman Jonny Frost, JOKER is a true noir crime novel: a harrowing journey into a city of rain-soaked streets, dirty sheets and nothing but bad choices.
There’s been a lot of talk about The Joker this year. Between the controversial reception to the animated film adaptation of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s “The Killing Joke” to the unhinged and yet oddly minimal performance by Jared Leto in the recent Suicide Squad film, the clown prince of crime is the centre of discussion once more. A central part of that discussion is what the Joker even stands for these days, why he even still exists. The character has been portrayed in the extremes from a harmless trickster to a bloodthirsty gangster and everything in the between. He is a villain of infinite flexibility and unparalleled effectiveness as the arch-nemesis of one of the most long standing icons of heroism in comics.
In this discussion of what the character even stands for anymore, I’m often left wondering why so many stories wish to rid the Joker of what makes him the most interesting. In Suicide Squad, Jared Leto portrays the character as an unhinged mob boss with facial tattoos and grills who just happens to be someone who fell into a vat of acid that turned his skin white and his hair green. For a character who is described as the clown prince of crime, there seems to be this need to ground the character and remove all sense of comic book-ness from him. It’s something that usually rubs me the wrong way, but in light of Leto’s performance by way of Dave Chappelle’s Rick James impersonation I’ve found myself returning to the only story that, for my money, has portrayed this grounded, realistic version of the Joker in a way that doesn’t lose any sense of who the character is.
In 2008, at the height of the last big Joker hype singularity, Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo joined forces once again to stamp their mark on one of DC’s biggest villains with their graphic novel simply titled “Joker”. Their previous effort was “Luthor”, which focused on the perspective of Lex Luthor and used his perception of Superman to explore why he feels the perpetual need to destroy the Man Of Steel. In “Joker”, we see that same perspective flip as the story focuses not on Gotham’s Caped Crusader, but on one of his worst enemies. Yet Azzarello and Bermejo never let the audience into the Joker’s head. Smartly, the graphic novel follows one of the Joker’s enforcers, Johnny Frost, as he slowly but surely gains the Joker’s trust only to realise just how far down the rabbit hole that’s taken him.
“Joker” is a gangster story. It’s Goodfellas set in Gotham if Ray Liotta was following around a man in clown makeup. Azzarello’s writing channels the purest aesthetics of a gangster story from the narration to the escalation. This is a story of rising tension; from the moment Joker steps out of Arkham Asylum, he is on the war path and it’s a war path that is set to end in total destruction of everyone involved. By focusing on Johnny Frost, Azzarello is able to use him as an avatar for the audience and give a glimpse of the Joker up close and personal while always keep his true thoughts obfuscated. We see him in his most personal, vulnerable moments, but we never get a sense of what exactly makes him tick and that, perhaps, is what makes him so violently frightening here.
Continued belowThis isn’t the Joker you would usually find in the pages of a Batman comic, but it’s one that’s coloured interpretations of him since. From the tousled hair and the Glasgow smile to the overcoat and leather gloves, he looks almost exactly like Heath Ledger’s Joker and there’s that same wild fire in his eyes thanks to Lee Bermejo. This Joker is unhinged and violent. While he insists that he is no longer crazy anymore, Azzarello and Bermejo clearly present the character with a wildly untreated case of bipolar disorder as he fluctuates on a dime from calm and lucid to entirely destructive. It’s the story of people caught up in the allure of a person’s charisma only to realise too late where their destructive tendencies have lead them.
It’s less of a story about the Joker and more a story about the dangers of being infatuated with a figure like him. All he brings is a chaos and destruction and misery. It’s yet another perfect pairing of character and artist with Lee Bermejo and might just be an even more perfect pairing than Bermejo and Luthor. With “Luthor”, Bermejo’s gritty pencils, graphite washes and harsh inks brought a texture to Metropolis that felt at odds with its usual depiction. Here, Gotham is slum. It’s the worst areas of Chicago, Detroit and Manhattan rolled into one cesspit of a city. From the opening panels, the perpspective of the city is that of gridlocked buildings, rainsoaked bricks and smoke and steam rising to form heavy, ominous clouds above. It is not a nice place to live and yet it’s perfect backdrop for the lives of these horrid people.
Bermejo shares the inking credit with Mick Gray. Bermejo is only credited for the inks on a handful of pages throughout the book, but each page shows Bermejo’s ink washes in effect. It’s a style that is recognisable through Bermejo’s work and it’s an effect like painting with graphite. It gives the same depth as painted art styles while keeping a dark and grimey texture to the image. It stands in sharp contrast here to Gray’s very harsh and very stark inks throughout the rest of the books. It gives these images a larger than life quality as they almost have an extra dimension to them. They feel like important moments and they are almost all linked to the Joker. It elevates his presence beyond a mere gangster to something more and that is perhaps what makes this book feel like more than just a “What if The Joker was a mobster?” style story.
This griminess is brought to the story also by the colours by Patricia Mulvihill. There is no vibrancy between the pages of this book. Everything is muted. Earth tones are raw, cool tones are pastel and even the neon lights to the Grin And Bare It strip club feel desaturated. What’s interesting here is that everything I’ve just described sounds par for the course for DC these days, especially in their films. The griminess, the focus on the harsh realities of crime belaying the feeling of eccentric heroism versus villainy, the muted colours and brutal violence. It’s all here and yet what makes it different is that this never once tries to convince you that this is the main DC Universe. This is not your average Batman story, this story holds its Elseworlds nature firmly on its sleeve.
Perhaps that, at its core, is what makes DC’s current position feel so dour. Where it is taken its inspiration from is not the core stories it has told for years. It is not from the mainline DC Universe that it pilfers it’s style from, but these fringe stories that seek to subvert the aesthetics of these characters. This tale of Gotham’s rogues as mobsters and crime lords works because these are fundamentally what they are not in the core series. The Joker is not someone who cares about money or turf and yet this interpretation posits a version he does as contrast. When your Joker is one who riddles his body with tattoos like the world damaged square on his forehead, you are drawing contrast to every version that does not and when that contrast comes from the main interpretation of the Joker in the movies he will fundamentally not feel like that character.
Continued belowAt the end of the day, though, “Joker” isn’t perfect. In pursuit of feeling like a great crime epic, it stays true to some of the uglier aspects of those stories. Harley Quinn and Johnny’s wife Shelly are the only two women in the story. Shelly fares somewhat better, but she is immediately punished by becoming a damsel in distress after her introduction for daring to want to divorce Johnny. Meanwhile, Harley is shown as entirely subservient to the Joker, his wordless slave to follow his every command while being the burden of his emotional labour.
She is paraded as a sex object, a literal stripper, while having no dialogue at all in the story. She is there to be pretty and do as the Joker says and comfort his weary head at the end of the night. It is an ugly subversion and once that strips her of any agency she gains in a universe where she revokes the influence of the Joker. In telling the story of an ugly and dark world, the gender politics become just as ugly and dark. It’s a trade-off, but not necessarily a great one.
Overall, “Joker” is still a very fascinating graphic novel to return to because it continues to stand as stark and unique interpretation of characters we have become accustomed to. Much like something like “The Dark Knight Returns”, however, it’s effectiveness can become diminished by its legacy. What makes it shocking in its contrast to other Joker stories has lessened more and more over the years because of the way the character has evolved to fit this mould by default. Coming out of Suicide Squad, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a fairly average Batman story. Still, it stands testament to the storytelling from Brian Azzarello, Lee Bermejo, Mick Grey and Patricia Mulvihill that this graphic novel stands up to that legacy and remains an effective exploration of a different kind of Joker.