Batman #17

SPOILERS

Yes, I'm back to reviewing, mainly because the few intelligent readers on this site deserve to read something from a Bat-fan who actually knows what they're talking about.

First of all, the art is decent. Nothing incredible, occasionally painful for the eyes, but mostly solid. Anyway, onto what matters; the story.

It's no secret that Scott Snyder's Batman run is pathetically derivative. Every issue reads like Snyder has just finished another, better work and just decided to rip it off. This week, he delivers a Magnum Opus of mediocrity. First thing's first, the Batman family have all been captured by the Joker. They're tied up and the Joker, his face attached to his scalp with staples, begins to taunt them. This may sound familiar, a mentally deranged person with a makeshift-face taunting someone bound to a chair. Oh that's right, in 1974 Tobe Hooper did the exact same thing with the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This scene is so wrenchingly derivative that after approximately two pages, it devolves into the kind of nonsense one reads from a fan-fic writer obsessed with the an overabundance of gore.

There is, of course, always a case for the aesthetisation of violence in the media, something like Se7en being a prime example of that. But there is no need for this new deformed Joker. The concept of a deteriorating face does not truly urge the Joker to do anything of particular merit. He plots a scheme that is the same as many he's done before. The only issue is that now he's extra motivated (though that's clearly not the case, as I'll talk about later). It's a kind of false drama, where the audience is tricked into believing something is of grave importance simply because the story is framed that way. The story is called "Death of the Family", but there was no such death. And I don't mean that in a literal sense either, in this story, the Family "dies" because they get slightly distrustful of Batman for reasons that make no sense. It has been obscenely clear for many years that the Joker knows who Batman is. He famously asked "his name was Jason, right?" while beating Nightwing and braggin about the murder of the second Robin. He journeyed to Wayne Manor to confront the Black Glove and the returning Batman. He was asked flat out by Robin if (as Oberon Sexton) he was Bruce Wayne. If the Joker didn't know who Bruce was, he's thicker than the Bat-Family apparently is. Despite all of these occurrences, the Family still doesn't realise that the Joker knows who they are? Are they mentally handicapped?

Painfully obvious plothole aside, this issue offered nothing new. To anyone. At all. There's a scene where Batman tells the Joker that there is nothing he hates more than him, which is grossly incorrect anyway. The Joker is Batman's antithesis, but Batman does not hate his opposite most. He hates the fact he lives in a world where an eight year old can watch his parents killed in front of him. In the far superior "Joker" by Brian Azzarello, the Joker is referred to as a disease without a cure, and that the Batman was the only defence. This worked excellently for that standalone story, but the reality is that the Joker is a symptom of disease. The Joker is a symptom of evil and crime. Those are what Batman hates. Those are why Batman exists.

Instead of examining the Joker's fascination with Batman and the way that Bruce truly views Joker as nothing but another criminal. More insane, yes. Done worse things, of course. But the fact is that the Joker is nothing special to Batman, and that is what drives Joker's obsession. A fan on another website said that when Batman confronts the Joker about his true identity, and the Joker goes (even more) rabid, the revelation should have been that Batman simply said that the Joker "was, and is, nobody". The Joker's pride is his fundamental flaw, and this is what spurns his latest master-work of criminality (his face, his trademark is vanishing). But Synder doesn't really focus on this, he's far more interested in Joker cutting people's faces off. This could have worked as a kind of symbolic idea, that by separating the mask from the face of a superhero, he too has stolen their trademark, but that's not what happens. What happens is that Joker just creates false faces to screw with the heroes. It's a joke. Get it? And while there's nothing inherently wrong with this concept, one has to wonder, if the Joker's pride meant so much to him, if the idea of his identity fading away was so important to him, would he have really made a bad joke at the end? He beat the Butler and drugged the heroes. But he always does that.

There was nothing new on offer, from the Joker or from a story stand point. The Joker had to kill someone here, not because it was publicised, but because if his entire plan was to have any merit, someone had to die. The joke of this story is that people spent $18 on a fundamentally pointless story. There was no hidden meaning here. The Batman/Joker dichotomy was not shown in any particularly fresh way. Instead, Snyder simply rips off ideas used in The Dark Knight Returns and Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. The Joker is obsessed with Batman, the others do not matter. The reason that he killed Jason Todd was because it was funny, not because he cared specifically about Robin, or even getting rid of a Robin. Jason was killed because life is funny and beating a kid to death with a crowbar is bloody hilarious. But here, the Joker wants to mess with the family, he wants to torture all of them, but as he says later to his "darling", he wants to remove them so that it can return to just he and Batman. The problem here is that if this was truly the Joker's motivation, his driving force, then why hasn't he killed them all? Why drag this out? The Joker is not the type to pointlessly filibuster. His mania belies a kind of insane brilliance and clarity of purpose. Here, there is no purpose, he's just making dumb jokes. And they're clear jokes. The kinds of jokes that the reader says "oh, he was joking" to. What the Joker finds funny is not clear. His jokes are absurd, violently mad, they are things that defy what is funny, what is serious, what is a joke. They are laced with a kind of complex irony that makes him giggle, but others stare at with horrified eyes.

There is no complexity or depth to this issue, there is only a shallow plot with meaningless character confrontation. The truth of this comic is that if you were to cut its face off, there is nothing beneath it. Sure, this is Batman and the Joker eyeing each other down and battling as they have for decades, but that's it. It's the name Batman, it's the name Joker. There is nothing more than that. There is none of the history or complexity or depth in these characters, there's just a guy named Batman fighting a clown named Joker. The Joker is evil and likes to mess with Batman. That's not a character study as some mistakenly believe it, that's the first line of a Wikipedia page.

Eventually we reach the crux of the issue, with the Joker asking Bruce exactly why he won't kill him, to which Batman says that it's because the Joker would win. Wait, what? Batman is so petty that he puts the lives of Gothamites in danger because he doesn't want the Joker to win? Once again, Snyder puts his concept of the Batman/Joker mutual obsession and dependence dominate common sense, and decades of character development. He later tries to rectify this by saying that the reason Bruce does not kill the Joker is because he knows something worse will come, or that the Joker will come back worse than before. This is, again, completely out of character. Batman does not kill because he would never be able to stop. He does not kill because the darkness inside of him that he keeps at bay would consume him totally. He would cease to be human and thus cease to cherish human life. The reason Batman does not kill is for others, not himself, nor the belief that someone else might show up. Snyder clearly, more than any other point in his run, demonstrates that he simply does not understand the Batman character.

Of course, this is all looking at the comic as it exists in terms of the Batman mythos as a whole, which does reduce the score, how is it as an entity upon itself? In short; silly. Really, really silly. The constant use of the removed face motif becomes tiresome by around the 1/3rd mark of the issue, and by the 2/3rd, the ongoing "torture" of the Bat-family has actually become unintentionally hilarious. Joker prances about declaring his undying obsession with Batman, calling him darling and speaking in so many painful cliches that the subtext of them secretly being in love almost punches the reader in the face. Batman then escapes, without his Family, because they apparently couldn't be bothered. So Batman chases the Joker and they engage in fisticuffs, with the Joker gaining the upper hand. Batman eventually drives the Joker over the edge, both metaphorically and literally, by revealing that he knew who the Joker was before he became the Joker. They tussle more, and the Joker falls off a cliff into an abyss of water and rock. Naturally, this means that the Joker is "gone" as Alfred puts it, until another writer decides to write another "epic storyline that redefines everything we know". Then Batman reveals that he did not in fact know who the Joker was, but was bluffing.

Anyone remember that one-shot a few years back where the Joker says that he honestly doesn't care about his past, and that even he struggles to recall precisely what happened? You should remember it, as it's the defining Joker story (aside from Morrison's work) called The Killing Joke. If Batman was to discover who the Joker was, the Joker wouldn't care at all. There was nothing before the Joker, there was a man who had no yet become. It was a chrysalis state. It is like telling a butterfly that it was once a caterpillar in a cocoon. That no longer matters, because it is a butterfly now. The Joker exists. That is what matters to him. The past is just something to play with, it holds no merit. Nothing does to the Joker. But Snyder simply doesn't get it, he's never got it, and it's become painfully clear.

But the final idea behind "Death of the Family" was that the Family's faith in Bruce has been shaken, that they worry about what else he is not telling him, that they wonder if they can truly trust him. This does not work though, since Bruce trusts his Family enough for them to not be so bloody stupid as to believe the Joker does not know who they are. Bruce respects them enough to believe they aren't a group of imbeciles dressing up like its Halloween. The lesson of "Death of the Family" is not that the Familial ties have been shaken, but that maybe the Batman Family is just bloody incompetent, can't put two and two together, and that the only reason they are alive is by the good graces of their villains.