After so much hype I finally got around to reading Batman: The Killing Joke. Honestly, I wasn't a fan.
Yes, I know. Alan Moore, influence to Heath Ledger's portrayal, goes where few other Batman stories have gone, highly cerebral.
I know.
Still: Over-rated. And here's why:
- it was way too rushed. Come on, it's Alan Moore. You can't cram a story written by Alan Fucking Moore into 40-something pages.
- I didn't believe The Joker's whole backstory. Too easy, too crammed, too rational. Really? I'm expected to believe a struggling but sane man has one very very very bad day (his pregnant wife dies, he gets patsied by some mobsters, chased by Batman into a pool of chemical toxins) and emerges as the ultra-psychotic mass-murderer antithesis to Batman. Sorry, but I didn't buy it. Literally, I didn't, I checked it out from the library.
Let the pummeling begin.
2 COMMENTS:
Even Alan Moore agrees that it's overrated, he says as much every time an interviewer mentions the topic (and sometimes even if they don't).
Oh, come on, Not Joel Schneier Dot Com, you'll have to do better than slamming THE KILLING JOKE to get a rise out of us. It is what it is—a perfectly told, unambitious "pop single" from Our Lord God and Savior while he attended to higher matters, like making the sun come up that day or something... Jesus, you want a miracle every minute?
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