Batman and The Case of the Stolen Story

 The Shadow of the Bat

Before Batman, before Superman, before comic books at all, there was The Shadow. And there were many pulp series, comprising text without illustration, publishing stories quite similar to those also heard on the radio. Some years back, the revelation broke that the very first Batman story, from Detective #27, borrowed – heavily, it turns out – from an earlier story featuring The Shadow. This was revealed by brief comments from the Batman story’s writer, Bill Finger, and then explored more deeply by Will Murray and Anthony Tollin in a special issue, The Shadow #9, back in 2008.

It’s worth beginning by making a careful distinction: Certainly many prior stories and ongoing serials helped inspire Batman as a character, as a concept. In the aforementioned issue of The Shadow, Murray and Tollin, in two separate essays, break this history down in impressive fashion, naming some obscure pulp stories that were available to Bill Finger and Bob Kane when Batman was being formulated as an idea. Murray and Tollin identify about six possible connections between certain 1930s pulp crime dramas and Batman; early Batman writer Jerry Robinson, penning a piece in the same volume, added more based on his in-person experience with the first years of Batman stories, and his knowledge of what he, Kane, and Finger had been reading.

It’s two different matters, though, to say that a character was inspired (or borrowed or stolen) versus to say that a story was inspired (or borrowed or stolen). In terms of defining the character either as we know him now, or even as readers knew him in the early 1940s, that first story isn’t particularly significant; it’s simply one story of many, and it easily could be shuffled into some other location in the first year’s worth of Batman stories, or omitted entirely, and the character doesn’t come across any differently. Without that first six-page story in 1939, Batman would still be Batman. So, we are not discussing here whether that story by itself robbed the entire idea of Batman from the creators behind The Shadow. The point under discussion here is if that particular story was lifted from an earlier story, and there is no need for the “if” – it certainly was.

Anyone who reads both of the stories will see the similarity; Murray and Tollin spend, combined, little more than a paragraph discussing the point. My ambition here is to flesh out the details and itemize exactly what was borrowed and what wasn’t. In doing so, we will find out, first, why the first Batman story creates such a strange and relatively insubstantial impression and, second, that perhaps the greatest thing borrowed from that Shadow story was not a few pages of Batman plot but some compelling details crucial in defining the Joker, who did not appear until nearly a year later.

A Tale of Two Tales

To lay out the basic facts, the 1939 Batman story “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (CCS, for short) obviously borrows from Theodore Tinsley’s 1936 The Shadow story “Partners of Peril” (POP); nobody could read both and fail to see the strong similarity. As Murray and Tollin note, POP even likens The Shadow – twice – to a bat. However, CCS is not simply a retelling of the entirely of POP, because that is not possible: POP is much longer than CCS, at about 60 pages of text as opposed to 6 of comic panels. POP has far more plot and detail than could conceivably be packed into the shorter format; POP has many more characters, many more scenes, and much more intricacy than CCS. And so, it’s not the case that CCS does or could contain all of the plot of POP; rather, essentially all of CCS is selected from the details of POP. Moreover, the selection of which details are borrowed and which are not was not very carefully made, and the comprehensibility CCS suffers considerably as a result.

That said, we may construct a breakdown of how closely CCS is borrowed from POP. CCS has a total of eight named characters, while five others (presuming that several brief appearances of a policeman represent the same policeman) have an extremely minimal quantity of dialogue. The eight with substantial presence are the following:

• Four businessmen

• Batman, appearing both in costume and as Bruce Wayne

• Commissioner Gordon

• The son of one businessman

• The assistant of one other businessman

This cast corresponds fairly well to the most prominent characters in POP, with some modifications: The “son” character in CCS belongs to the first businessman in the story, whereas the “son” in POP belongs to the third businessman we see. And, Gordon in CCS is a sort of amalgam of POP’s Commissioner Weston and a separate character, an ace detective of the police department named Joe Cardona. Some of the many additional characters in POP include a niece of one businessman, many faithful assistants to The Shadow, and an entire gang of armed thugs who participate in several action scenes that as part of a massive red herring of a side plot corresponding to nothing whatsoever found in CCS.

The plot of CCS boils down to this: Four businessmen are partners in the ownership of a chemical company. One of them decides that he can profit by killing the other three, eventually owning the entire company without needing to pay for the other three-quarter shares. In his effort to kill them one by one, he succeeds in killing the first two before Batman intercedes. In the end, Batman spares the life of the third partner, subdues the evil businessman’s assistant and a final struggle claims the life of the villain, who falls into a tank of acid. As far as that goes, it’s a simple plot, and a sensible one, as far as people who are willing to kill for large sums of money go. Nearly everything in this paragraph describes, equally well, POP, except that in POP, the assistant is killed, the evil businessman is arrested, and the hero is The Shadow rather than Batman. Moreover, the “son” in CCS is the son of the first businessman and is briefly put forth as a suspect for his father’s murder; the son in POP is the son of the third businessman and appears throughout the story, sometimes as a possible culprit and nearly becomes, more than once, a victim of the killers.

Batman explains the plot of Tinsley's story

Now, with the greater length of POP, we can imagine adding in the other elements of the plot, primarily the involvement of a gang who is trying to steal one of the products of the chemical company. While the story unfolds, the reader is uncertain if the murders were committed by the gang, who are in fact willing to kill if that helps them achieve their ends, but as it happens, they did not commit the two murders. The uncertainty the reader has throughout the story regarding the role of the gang, the involvement of one businessman’s niece, and many action sequences in which The Shadow and his helpers cross paths with the fourth businessman’s thugs and/or the gang is what makes POP a story that engages the reader for over an hour while CCS is a trifle that flits by in a few minutes.

This is the relationship between the two: A long story published in 1936 has a central plot and some side plots; a shorter story published in 1939 keeps the central plot, changing it only slightly, while eliminating the side plots. Case closed?

Left in the Shadow…

Around 2008, I read many comic book stories that had been published between 1935 and 1942. The first stories featuring Superman, Batman, and various members of the Justice Society were of great interest to me, and as “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” is such a quick read, and has such a central place in comics history, I read it many times. These readings left me with a minor but general sense of befuddlement that I might never have expressed if it weren’t for the fact that Grant Morrison put the same idea into writing. In their book Supergods, Morrison says of CCS that it has “a bizarrely complex plot…” “It’s not a great story, and no matter how often I read it, I’m still left slightly in the dark as to what it was about.”

Several Golden Age stories give me a similar impression, that the logic doesn’t quite hold up, and I suppose that when it comes down to brass tacks, the writers were poorly paid, probably hustling through a chore to get their rent money, and had a juvenile readership to entertain. With the artwork providing more of the entertainment than in all-text adventure stories, the comic book plots didn’t need to stand up to the scrutiny of academics with advanced degrees, so we can explain the confusion, perhaps, on writers who were simply careless and had no great incentive to be otherwise.

There are indeed gaping plot holes in CCS, as there are in other Golden Age comic book stories. That said, the extent of the plot holes and illogic in “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” exceed even that which was normal at the time. To list just a few:

• The killer warns each victim, before the attempt on his life, with threats. There is no apparent reason to do this. The killer simply needs for the three men to be dead, and that could only be easier if there were no advance warning. Without such threats, the plan probably would have succeeded.

• Ordinarily, a series of murders that result in one person profiting would make the killer’s identity obvious, so the story asserts that the partnership was in fact secret, but offers no reason why it would have been secret.

• When Batman bursts into the lab where the third businessman is nearly killed, he enters a glass dome where the man is trapped, then plugs a vent through which gas escapes, then breaks the glass to free them. This is a strangely complicated death trap and it’s even stranger that Batman, who enters the room at the last moment, would understand the mechanism and how to defeat it.

• When the villain’s assistant subdues the third businessman, the assistant announces, “Soon, I’ll control everything!” It is unexplained why an assistant would believe that he would control everything, and this is at odds with the subsequent exposition indicating that the fourth businessman, the assistant’s boss, is the one who would control everything.

When one reads POP, one finds explanations for most of these plot holes.

Gas as a weapon doesn't even make sense here

• The contracts, in POP, stipulate that the fourth partner is buying the company from the other three over a period of ten years, but must pay the same total sum even if one or two of the three die during that time. Therefore, when there is a threat to any of the three, it makes the others who are being bought out the likely suspects. The fourth ends up expecting to profit only because all of the other three are to be killed. [Why anyone would agree to such a contract, that robs one’s heirs of the payments, is never explained in POP, and is seemingly present only to drive the plot forward.] Therefore, the death threats towards the first two businessmen direct suspicion, at least temporarily, to the third victim rather than to the actual killer. In POP, then, the death threats serve a purpose. In CCS, they are counterproductive.

• In POP, The Shadow is present, but hidden, during a very lengthy scene in which the assistant explains how the death trap works. This scene, and the poison gas in general, drive an aforementioned side plot involving poison gas being developed as a weapon for the military and a gang that wishes to steal its formula. Therefore, in POP, there is a reason for this complex apparatus to exist, and the Shadow knows how to deactivate it. Batman, barging in suddenly from outdoors, should not have that information. A fragmented description of the death trap is just a weird digression from the plot and the whole story would make more sense if the assistant or the fourth businessman simply tried to kill the third businessman by more conventional means.

• In POP, the assistant is for many pages offered as the most likely identity of the killer, and the reader is given reason to believe that the fourth businessman – the assistant’s boss – is to be yet another victim after the first three are killed. It’s a plot twist that comes after the assistant is dead when The Shadow reveals that the fourth businessman sought to frame his assistant as the killer of the other three. Therefore, the assistant has an important role in the narrative of POP, but in CCS is just a bizarre distraction.

Bill Finger not only took his plot from POP, but also took details indiscriminately from the longer story, which had lengthy exposition explaining some of its stranger aspects, such that Finger’s story, which includes certain details but no explanations, ends up almost nonsensical. In a better and tighter story, Finger could have kept the details of the contracts that offered a reason for the killer to issue threats to the businessmen. Further, he could have simplified the death threat to the third man from poison gas to something more conventional, and eliminated the assistant, who plays no useful purpose in the story that the villainous businessman himself couldn’t have performed. The haphazard inclusion of certain details from POP is precisely what makes the story, as Morrison notes, bizarrely complex, and hard to absorb. It certainly would be a better and tighter story with a few simplifications. We can say now with confidence that the eventual success of Batman was not hindered by the weakness of his first story, but this helps explain why that first story did not go on to become a staple for later writers to reference in loving homage.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before

While the above lays out the relationship between POP and CCS, it was another observation, coming as early as POP’s first page, which struck me earlier, and has perhaps never been noted before. Perhaps the most vivid match between POP and a Batman story is not with May 1939’s Detective #27, but with 1940’s Batman #1, and this detail does not reside only in a Golden Age comic book, but was also adapted, as a significant piece of Batman lore, into a memorable scene in 2008’s The Dark Knight. In fact, the character whose schtick is most directly borrowed from POP is not Batman but the Joker.  While Anthony Tollin states, “there is no concrete evidence to suggest that Tinsley’s stories influenced the development of DC Comics’ Joker,” there is overwhelming evidence that the same story already discussed here influenced the first Joker story, if not the character’s overall concept. Less than a year after Finger borrowed extensively from Tinsley’s POP for the plot and many story elements for the first Batman story, he went on to borrow many plot elements for the first Joker story – more than could conceivably be a coincidence.

While Jerry Robinson was the creator of the Joker, and his comments printed in The Shadow #9 go into some detail about previous pulp stories that may have provided inspiration for Robinson, his own reflections indicate that he did not write the first Joker story. Instead, he conceived of the character, and then, to his disappointment, Bill Finger was given scripting duties for the first Joker story, which opened the series of stories that appeared in Batman #1. And we already know that Finger read POP and felt free to borrow from it without limitation.

Batman #1 contains both the first and second Joker stories, which also happen to be the second and fourth stories with Dick Grayson. (Hugo Strange and Catwoman serve as the villains in two stories that appear between the two Joker stories.) The first of those untitled Joker stories has the following plot: On three separate occasions, the Joker breaks into a public radio broadcast to issue a threat against a prominent man. In each case, the Joker names an exact time later the same evening at which the man will be killed. In the first two instances, the victim is a wealthy man and the threat also specifies a robbery that will take place; in the third case, the threat is leveled at a judge who had previously sent the Joker to prison. All three of these attacks proceed exactly as the Joker predicts, but he is followed by Batman and Robin after killing the judge. After tussles between the heroes and the villain prove inconclusive, the Joker heads off the same night to commit another robbery (apparently, he made this threat to Robin off-camera). During this fourth attempted crime, he is stopped and apprehended by Batman.

In its overarching structure, this story is only a little like POP: There are four prominent men, threats, and killings, but the main plot is different. Unlike in POP, there is no mystery regarding the identity of the culprit, and no major mystery regarding motive, as the robberies serve as their own motivation, and the Joker has a grievance against the judge. (There is no apparent motive for the Joker to kill the first two men aside from his twisted desire to kill.)

However, the first crime in the first Joker story is quite specifically similar to the first murder in POP. All of the following similarities apply:

1) The crime is threatened in advance.

2) The time named in the threat is midnight.

3) The victim is a wealthy man.

4) The victim goes to the police for protection.

5) The police go to the man’s home and provide what seems like overwhelming protection.

6) Nonetheless, the crime is committed at the threatened time.

7) The cause of death is poisoning, but there is no apparent source of poison.

8) In both cases, the poison was introduced to the home long in advance.

9) The poison causes the dead man’s face to contort horribly.

10) After the man is dead, the police open a safe in the room and find that something was stolen.

To be thorough, there are some differences between the two scenes.

1) POP is a whodunit; the Joker identifies himself (though with that alias) before the crime.

2) In POP, the weapon is a poisoned cigar which the killer is confident will be smoked just before midnight; the Joker poisoned the man directly (somehow) long before the threat and the poison (implausibly) acts only very suddenly after a delay with pinpoint precision.

3) In POP, the death is threatened by midnight and occurs two minutes beforehand.

4) The man’s disfigurement in POP is withered and grotesque; the Joker’s poison creates – here, for the absolute first time – a ghastly smile.

5) The motive for the killing is unclear in POP, which is essential to the criminal’s hope of evading suspicion. The Joker robs the man’s safe, and that also had been performed before the threat was made.

To put the whole matter in contrast, take a look at the first Sandman story from Adventure Comics #40, scripted by Gardner Fox in 1939. In this story, the Tarantula threatens to kidnap a wealthy actress, and her home receives heavy police protection, and yet the kidnapping takes place anyway, baffling the investigators. (Besides Wesley Dodds, who comes up with the correct explanation in a few seconds.) This story may also have been advised by knowledge of POP, as it matches similarities 1, 4, 5, and 6 from the above list. Then again, maybe some of those plot elements were tropes that had been floated about in the noir world of the time. It would take a lot more research to work that out. However, ten similarities are a lot more than four, and in my mind there’s no doubt that Finger lifted from Tinsley’s story again, when we already know that the author of the later story had previously done exactly that on another occasion.

In the initial Joker story, the similarities wane, though don’t end, after the first crime. One more detail perhaps also taken from POP, in that the weapons used in the Joker’s second crime included “a strange gas,” which is how the villains attempt the third murder in POP (after the second involves electrocution).

What binds the first Joker story and POP is not the overall structure so much as the motif presented during that first crime – a threat is made in advance, giving the villain an air of invincibility when the police are unable to prevent it despite the advance warning. Continuing throughout Finger’s first Joker story and into the second, this motif is repeated again and again, with the threat occurring in all nine of the Joker attacks in those two stories, and poisons leading to the distorted face occurring in all but the two of them that Batman prevents. These two motifs become almost definitional of the Joker not only in 1940 but to the present day, from the most obscure monthly comics of decades past to the global prominence of The Dark Knight movie and its billion-dollar earnings.

So, I would suggest that the most significant legacy of Bill Finger’s casual approach to lifting details from Theodore Tinsley’s "Partners of Peril" was in the creation of the Joker’s modus operandi, which established comics and movies created over the years right up to the present, and sure to continue onward, and not the previously-revealed theft of the threadbare plot of the six pages of CCS. A bit over a decade ago, comics historians and creators lobbied for Bill Finger to receive credit as at least a co-creator of Batman; however much this may be true for the concept of Batman, some stories themselves and the concept of the Joker owe more than a little to the ideas of Theodore Tinsley. And this closes the case of the stolen story.

Doomsday Clock 7

Something big happened. Now that Doomsday Clock begins its second half, some of the key meetings have taken place and the biggest one yet to come – Superman facing Dr. Manhattan in battle – has appeared in Dr. Manhattan's future-vision.

Early on, Johns added detail to the backstory of how Dr. Manhattan changed the DCU by deleting the Alan Scott Green Lantern from its history; this is something I sketched out in my review of DC #3 as matching "the subplot of a JLA/JSA crossover in which an evil Johnny Thunder on Earth One used the Thunderbolt to prevent the Justice League from existing." Just as the Thunderbolt in that story prevented, for example, the lightning that gave Barry Allen from striking his lab, Dr. Manhattan in this story prevented Alan Scott from obtaining his lantern (and, moreover, causing his death). We can be sure that most if not all JSAers were similarly interfered with.

With a scene that looked almost literally like a set stage, DC #7 was centered around a group meeting (after a brief, frantic battle) that put Mime, Marionette, the Comedian, New Rorschach, Veidt, Batman, and the Joker together with Dr. Manhattan. And what followed was, for the most part, talk. In the meantime, Dr. Manhattan teleported the Watchmen Universe members of the group to three different times and places, as significant backdrops of relevance that was not stated directly. First, they go to an idyllic nature scene by a waterfall. Then, to an anti-superhero riot at night in Washington, D.C. Finally, they enter a movie theatre in 1954, terrifying the audience seeing the final Nathaniel Dusk film, The Adjournment. And during this time, with a lot of talking and a couple of one-sided fist-fights, something big happens. What is not immediately clear is: What is that something big?

Dr. Manhattan says "No" to Veidt's request. That happens immediately, and seems obviously irrevocable. There is a little more discussion, including the revelation that Veidt was lying about his brain cancer in order to manipulate Reggie into assisting him. (In retrospect, this was foreshadowed by the Veidt jigsaw puzzle that Reggie was working a couple of issues ago. In one frame, Veidt's head had a piece missing. Then Reggie put the correct piece in place and said that it was in front of him the whole time.)

But this is a big scene for some reason besides those. We know this because when Veidt returns to the Owlship, he believes that he no longer needs Dr. Manhattan's help, and that he has a plan to save everybody. These thoughts frighten Saturn Girl, who believed at the beginning of the issue that everything would turn out fine, but at the end believes that Veidt's new plan will ruin everything. This is yet another turn in her demeanor as seen during "The Button" and makes the details of her mental state an important part of the picture.

Why? Whatever Dr. Manhattan said or did changed Veidt's plan is the mystery in front of us the whole time. It was cryptic for us, and we know things that most of the characters don't. We know that the Nathaniel Dusk movies are tied in some way to the JSA-era superheroes, but Veidt presumably does not know that. So what did Dr. Manhattan say that instantly changed Veidt's worldview?

Dr. Manhattan says a few things with a lot of implications, and some pithy but key statements of his concern the two children of Mime and Marionette. Those statements tell us a lot and tell Veidt a lot, too, but not necessarily the same things. First, we find out that Marionette is pregnant again, which means that the child was conceived in the past few hours in the DCU. Second, we find out that their first child will do or has done something that is so significant to Dr. Manhattan that it is for that child's sake that he spared Marionette's life during the bank robbery we saw in DC #2.

If the information that suddenly changes Veidt's worldview is this, then why? Very likely, because Veidt has some reason to suspect that that child would not have a valuable future ahead of him. And we can guess at several reasons why. First, there was a nuclear war happening on the Watchmen Earth when last we saw it, and that is reason enough. Perhaps Veidt even knows from the child's location that he is dead due to the nuclear attack. Also, the photo of the child that New Rorschach gave to Marionette was "a few years old": Perhaps the child died between 1987 and 1992. In any of these scenarios, Dr. Manhattan's statement may give Veidt hope that the entire timeline can be altered. And therefore, it gives Veidt hope that the past can be changed for the better. This is likely the information and motive behind his current plan.

Dr. Manhattan's comments and thoughts also tell us a lot about Dr. Manhattan's plan. First, we find out that he prevented the rise of the JSA through the murder of Alan Scott. In the same passage, introducing the issue, we find out that one of the events in Alan Scott's timeline of which Dr. Manhattan was aware was the JSA's surrender to HUAC, causing the superheroes of the DCU to disappear. Second, we find out that he was greatly dispirited by the death of Colman Carver, which led him to say that his comment at the end of Watchmen was wrong, and that "Nothing ever ends" has been replaced in his worldview by "Everything ends." Why? The connection here likely lies in the inconspicuous details of DC #3's end notes about Colman Carver and a simple panel at the beginning of that issue. According to those references, the screenwriter of Carver's 1947 movie went to prison for refusing to cooperate with HUAC. This was in fact a real man, Ring Lardner, Jr. who really was imprisoned and then blacklisted from Hollywood just as the fictional DC #3 says. Why include this information? This is likely the key as to why Johns has included the Colman Carver subplot in Doomsday Clock. Knowing that HUAC exists in the current DCU timeline, we also know that the same threat that caused the JSA to retire was not dissipated by Dr. Manhattan's alteration to the timeline entailed by the death of Alan Scott. We now know that killing Alan Scott was not a petty or malevolent act on Dr. Manhattan's part, but a calculated one intended to bring about a positive outcome. And this tells us a lot about Dr. Manhattan's and Johns' intentions:

The notion of an entire generation of Golden Age heroes retiring due to pressure from HUAC was introduced in 1979 as I noted in my review of DC #4. This is an idea that Alan Moore copied in Watchmen, with Hooded Justice retiring (like Alan Scott) and Mothman (a major focus of that issue) ending up in a sanatorium (like Lardner). Mothman remembers this when, after Veidt's scheme killing millions is revealed, he says "They're rounding them up" in reference to the events of 1992. Mothman remembers when his generation, also, was rounded up.

And Dr. Manhattan remembers, too. He was discouraged by the lack of hope in both the Watchmen and post-Infinite Crisis DCU timelines entailed by the surrender of the heroes to the political pressures of their respective times. Removing Alan Scott prevented the JSA from existing, and therefore from surrendering to HUAC. But the death of Colman Carver extinguished the hope that Dr. Manhattan found in that. Why? Here, I see two possibilities, not mutually exclusive. One, based on no more information than an offhand comment early in DC #3, that Carver was regarded by Johnny Thunder's fellow inmate Donald as a hero suggests that Carver resisted the political pressures but remained working and in fact subsequently won an Oscar. A second, as I mentioned earlier, is that Carver actually is one of the would-be JSAers, likely Hourman (obsessed with clocks), and his movies had inspired positive heroism, until his death (being beaten to death with his own trophy like Watchmen's original Nite Owl).

And this tells us what is driving Dr. Manhattan. He, too, is driven by hope. He has been altering the timeline of the DCU, trying to achieve a more hopeful outcome. He deleted Alan Scott's Green Lantern career, trying to prevent the surrender of the JSA (which resembled a sad occurrence on his own world), but it didn't work, culminating with the death of Colman Carver. And now, he is seeing how the events finally play out, with Superman, the current symbol of hope, in some future act of war against Dr. Manhattan himself. This is fated to fail, and at that point, Dr. Manhattan ends the current timeline. The post-Flashpoint DCU is an experiment that Dr. Manhattan is running and he (and Johns) deem it a failure, set to end a month from now. The now-explicable scene at the end of DC #1 showing the deaths of the Kents shows another Dr. Manhattan-triggered tragedy that edited the timeline for the sake of an experiment that turned out tragic. When Dr. M (and Johns) give up on the current timeline, some version of the previous timeline, with Alan Scott living and the JSA existing will prevail. And, by implication, we will also get the Kents back. The fistfight between Superman and Dr. Manhattan will not end with the punch making contact, but with the implied sense of malaise leading the entire timeline to come to a dour close.

In the background, another, probably far less consequential mystery concerns the "identity" of Dr. Manhattan in the DCU. We get three clues. One, Dr. Manhattan himself says that he thought he "might find a place among" the DCU. Two, he says that he stood (physically) on the set of The Adjournment in 1954. Third, Bubastis' eyes glow when he is staring in the direction of The Comedian. I don't see a clear resolution behind all these details, but I do see a misdirection. Veidt believes that his cat responds to The Comedian, but New Bubastis already faced The Comedian and had no such response in DC #3. Either the trace of Dr. Manhattan on The Comedian's body happened after that or Bubastis isn't responding to The Comedian at all but to the man who happens to be standing behind him – The Joker. But we see The Joker still standing there after Dr. Manhattan manifests, so The Joker can't be him, as I postulated earlier, but is possibly "on" him in some fashion, or has left his trace there. I don't see how the details shake out yet, but there is some connection between the old movie set (predating most or all of our current DCU adults) and The Comedian and/or The Joker.

Still, whatever the small details, the large details are now apparent. We know Dr. Manhattan's actions and motives and where they lead. We also know that Veidt has a different plan and it isn't the one that Saturn Girl is hoping for, no doubt leading to her horror in the opening scenes of "The Button." Veidt's new plan is supposed to fail, then, and hope lies elsewhere.

And on the note of hope, the theme I mentioned earlier is emphasized once again: Batman comes across very poorly in DC #7. Although he manages to show his competence in battle, it is with mixed results, as he is injured by Marionette and then sucker-zapped by The Joker. Dr. Manhattan takes us to an anti-Batman riot in Washington and, though Batman is the last man standing after the fistfights of DC #7, he comes across as a mere brawler achieving temporary victories while Superman is "the most hopeful." Veidt, Dr. Manhattan, and Johns are all seeking hope. And we hear again and again that Batman is not it; Superman is.

Doomsday Clock 6

For the second time in six issues, Geoff Johns has dedicated an issue of Doomsday Clock in large part to providing the biography of Watchmen Universe characters of his own devising. Before, it was New Rorschach; this time, it is Marionette and Mime, but primarily the former. In it, we get a very recognizable origin story: The young costumed character suffers a traumatic event, and this gives them the overwhelming motivation to suit up and live a life driven by compensating for youthful suffering.

But, there's a twist. This trope, which originates with Batman, has been modified in many forms throughout comics history, often depicting the way in which the killing of one or both parents led a person turned their life into heroism (often, vigilante). Johns even took this Batman backstory and applied it to Barry Allen via time travel. And New Rorschach followed a version of this, with the deaths of his parents due to the plan of superhero-or-maybe-villain Adrian Veidt taking him on a path to adopt the vacant Rorschach identity. Marionette and Mime, however, are pushed down this path after each loses a parent to corrupt cops. And so, apparently, they begin to fight the law and never look back. This is made all the more painful as young Marionette's father is shown to be an inherently good man, kind to his daughter. Moreover, he embodies an intention very obviously the inverse of Watchmen as a whole: Whereas Alan Moore adultified and made tragic some characters that were invented to entertain children, Marionette's father takes some of the grim characters from his own world and makes them into entertainment for children. Symbolically, his fate shows that this spirit is not tenable in the Watchmen Universe, as payoff money for the corrupt police is hidden inside the head of a hero, and in turn, the puppet-maker himself is driven to suicide. Whereas Moore's grim characters like Comedian, Rorschach, and Veidt are dark figures injected into the world of superhero comics, Marionette's father, as her brief performance of Pinocchio's song highlights, is – as the crooked cops taunt – Geppetto injected into the Watchmen Universe. And he doesn't last. To make his suicide even grimmer, the way he hangs from a rope visually echoes his marionettes, seen behind him in the same panel.

The story arc of the youthful Mime and Marionette also echoes, in many places, the story of Moore's original Rorschach, from a traumatic childhood, a beating suffered from bullying kids who sling the insult "whore" turned into a particularly violent counterassault againstthose bullies, and the eventual use of deadly force against policemen.

This seeming aside, not involving the major players in the story, shows is in more detail Johns' intention. The Watchmen Universe is, in Johns' hands, something like the Crime Syndicate's Earth Three, a world that is not simply different from the main DCU, but a world that turns light and dark topsy-turvy. Seeing this, the eventual fate of the Watchmen Universe in this story will comprise Johns' ultimate statement: Will the Watchmen Universe die, survive dark, or be redeemed? In my last post, I suggested that the Nathaniel Dusk films may offer a big clue. If Johns is showing them in such detail, perhaps the reason is for us to see a Before-and-After in the DCU when the JSA comes back and The Adjournmentis therefore made in a different world, a world with heroes. But many options remain in play.

The JSA plot, and any possible onscreen presence of Superman and/or Doctor Manhattan are completely on hold in this issue, as is the Nathaniel Dusk series that pertains to the JSA plot, and we do not see Veidt, New Rorschach, Johnny Thunder, nor Saturn Girl. Instead, we get a focus on the Joker with his captive Batman and a meeting of supervillains who comprise two factions: Those who wish to join Black Adam in Khandaq and those who choose not to. As we learn in the end materials, Typhoon, the obscure villain who is murdered by the Comedian, is a product of the U.S. government and the Supermen Theory is thereby proven real (or a really tricky double fake).

The mystery that is being dangled before us is: Who is the creator of the program? Before, Luthor said that the person was a former member of the Justice League. This issue dangles some very superficial clues before us in the form of documents that cover the creator/director's name with black rectangles and coffee stains. The black rectangle corresponds in size to a word about 8 letters long. Around the coffee stain, we can see certain features of the letters, including a vertical stroke on the left side of the first letter. We could run many different names past these clues and narrow the candidates down, but that presumes that there are no other tricks going on, such as aliases. In all, the documents contain the names of three people from the Department of Metahuman Affairs: An admiral, the director/founder, and Brittany Brandon AKA Moonbow. One thing we see in recent Supermen Theory details is a large number of characters associated with Firestorm. With that in mind, the obscured versions of the founder's name is compatible with these names (and certainly various others) associated with science and/or government: Raymond, Luthor, Palmer, Magnus, and perhaps Waller. None of them is a straightforward solution to the mystery because each has some reason or another to doubt them. Perhaps Luthor is the favorite, but the overall list of candidates, meanwhile, remains large.

And who had a really bad issue in #6? Batman. The only DC superhero seen on-panel in the issue is reduced to a muttering hostage of the Joker, pushed around in a wheelchair. He's on a remarkable losing streak. After failing to anticipate New Rorschach's escape, Batman was outplayed by Veidt in the Owlship, beaten by a crowd, then drugged by the Joker, and treated as an object of ridicule in a room full of supervillains. The wheelchair and the Joker suggesting that he take "a few pictures" of the captive Batman are both subtle stylistic pointers to Alan Moore's post-Watchmen story The Killing Joke.

What happens next will prove to be defining for the series' direction. Many a Batman story would have the Caped Crusader suddenly and miraculously spring from the chair and take down the villains like bowling pins. So far, this series has shown no signs of this, and Batman's poor fortune has resulted not from being overpowered but rather from being foolish. Johns has apparently set the stage either for Batman to pull off a magnificent turnaround on his own, or for the story to end with Batman having been thoroughly shown up in a story which sees Superman, likely, prevail; this would, as I suggested after DC #5, make Doomsday Clock into a rebuttal of The Dark Knight Returns.

In fact, Johns pointedly and knowingly calls out DKR with paraphrases that turn the meanings in some respects reverse and an exact quote.

DKR: Diana went back to her people. Hal went to the stars.

DC #6: The Lantern's other adversaries have left for the stars. And there are rumors that the Amazons kidnapped Wonder Woman and dragged her back to Themyscira.

DKR (Batman, as Superman bursts into an underground chamber): Not him. Not now.

DC #6:(Riddler, as the Joker enters an underground chamber): Not him. Not now.

Intentional shout-outs to DKRsend a signal that Johns indeed means to make a comment on that series, and the state of Batman thus far makes it look like Johns may intend to conduct a hard reversal of the Batman-over-Superman dynamic that has held sway in pop culture since 1986.

As we reach the halfway point in the miniseries, the absence of Doctor Manhattan and Superman in most – nearly all – of the story so far heightens the tension considerably. While movement among those big players seems to have been absent, we still received possible clues about Doctor Manhattan:

One, for Johns to include the Joker in this opus story, years after one of his stories raised the "Three Jokers" mystery, suggests strongly that one of the three, the Joker in this story, will be revealed as an alternate Joker, however much he looks and acts like a standard version thereof.  And if this Joker isn't whom we think he may be, and we have the long-standing mystery of Doctor Manhattan's presence in the DCU, there would be some economy of plot if this Joker were a corporeal – and stunningly out of character – guise for the dull, humorless demigod from Watchmen. If true, then the final pages of this issue are achingly ironic, with the Joker zapping The Comedian with electricity much like the mosquito zapped by Doctor Manhattan at the end of DC#4. And why would Doctor Manhattan – photo of Jon Osterman and Janey included – be in Arkham Asylum in the first place? Perhaps because he has full memories of a life as the Joker, to whom Arkham is a kind of home? Then, when Marionette suggests that The Comedian might know the whereabouts of Doctor Manhattan, this Joker repeats the name and asks, "Who's that?" Unmistakably, having the utterly stoic Doctor Manhattan take the role of the least stoic character in the DCU would be deeply ironic; is that the punchline that Johns is going for?

And note also the curious arc of The Comedian. He is brought to the DCU by Doctor Manhattan, who is undoubtedly in his blue usual self at that point. Then The Comedian rather stunningly finds Ozymandias in Luthor's office, which would be nearly inconceivable as detective work in a world where Veidt had never previously had any trail to follow. But now he's trying to find Veidt and unable. Is this an arbitrary inconsistency to move the plot along, or is Doctor Manhattan toying with The Comedian?

Two clues run through the extended story. One, when the Reverse Flash sees Doctor Manhattan in the fourth chapter of "The Button," he is immediately terrified. Would Doctor Manhattan's usual appearance terrify Thawne? Even if DM meant to kill Thawne, why would that cause terror first, before the attack? On the other hand, if he appeared as a gigantic, glowing version of the Joker, the Reverse Flash's terror is immediately explicable. This is not explained if Doctor Manhattan appeared as his usual self or as one of the DC heroes whom we know. The moment that Thawne is killed, that manifestation of Doctor Manhattan draws the Comedian's button up towards himself, for no apparent reason. At the end of DC#6, the Joker also lifts the Comedian's button up towards himself. The irony is further heightened if Doctor Manhattan has adopted this tremendously off-type identity and ends the issue with the words, "It hurts when I smile." And it would further explain why this Joker takes such a fondness to Marionette and Mime. And, remember, Veidt brought Marionette to the DCU especially because he expected them to be bait that would attract Doctor Manhattan. The fact that they escaped from the Owlship did not concern Veidt – that was part of his plan, responding to the discovery of their absence with, "Perhaps now Jon will…" Now, consider how the Joker found Marionette and Mime in the first place – he had a plan to meet at the Bat-Signal. Why? He runs into Batman there – which an ordinary version of the Joker would have absolutely no way to anticipate – and his plan draws Marionette and Mime there, something Doctor Manhattan could anticipate by seeing it in advance.

Note the alternate cover of DC #5. The Joker – given curious prominence to be on a cover in a story that otherwise seems to concern him only tangentially – is painting a smile on himself, as though the smile is not part of his normal identity. Behind him? The mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. Coincidence? I think not.

Finally, if this Joker is Doctor Manhattan, then the Riddler's "Not you. Not now." has a greater impact and makes for a very fine counterpoint with DKR's use of the line in reference to Superman. Why use a line about Superman in reference to the Joker in a story that will feature a clash between Superman and Doctor Manhattan? The clues indicating that Doctor Manhattan could be hiding as this Joker remain a bit short of absolute proof, but the clues do abound, and seem too subtle to be red herrings.

At the midpoint, Johns has begun a very good story, one that has never sagged  or fallen short of a brilliant, compelling follow-up to a story that was incredibly ambitious for Johns to try to follow up. And now we await what has to be a busy second half.

Retro Review: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth

Some literature excels in developing characters; some excels at developing locales or settings. The DC Universe is tremendously rich in characters – its landscape is most meaningfully defined in terms of characters – but relatively impoverished in well-developed places. A notable exception is Arkham Asylum, home to many of Batman's villains when they're not on the loose. It may surprise some fans to learn that Arkham was not introduced until 1974, and was first given a detailed backstory not in a story but rather in an encyclopedia article entry in 1985's Who's Who in the DC Universe (a title that, again, reinforces the emphasis on characters over places).

Denny O'Neil created Arkham and Len Wein gave it an origin, but Grant Morrison's 1989 work Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth made Arkham a place to remember. AA (as I'll abbreviate the name of the graphic novel here, to distinguish it from the place) redefined more than just one building on the outskirts of Gotham City. AA may be thought of as the last of several impactful graphic novels of the Eighties, but also the first significant work in Morrison's long history in writing Batman. But to a reader picking it up new, AA did not relate to a past or a future so much as it was squarely part of a Batman renaissance in progress, the great year of Batman 1989, when the Batman film starring Michael Keaton ruled the box office and a new series, Legends of the Dark Knight, debuted in the stores. Significant as it is for its place in this larger web of Batman works, AA is complex enough when considered alone, and many of its references, starting with the title, are owed to mythology and literature outside of the superhero genre, although the many references to Lewis Carroll, Parsifal, mythology, and religion perhaps operate more as decoration than they contribute to the structure. The title itself, borrowing from a poem by Philip Larkin, compares Arkham Asylum to a church. AA's impact, however, may have gone beyond the world of Batman and graphic novels to influence the zeitgeist of the early Nineties.

AA tells two stories; we know at the beginning that they are related in that they occur in the same place, although decades apart. There are, moreover, many curious parallels between the insane ravings written down by a man in the past and the specific experiences of Batman on a night seven decades after Amadeus wrote in his journal. It is only near the end when we learn that the past and present stories are very tightly related, and wonder if they might be related in a deeper way still. The main story, set in the present, shows Batman entering Arkham in response to an inmate riot, and getting more than he bargained for. The background plot, which runs from 1901 to 1929, and centered in 1921, is something different than a superhero story, and can appeal to readers who prefer, instead, mystery and horror. The Batman story itself also diverges markedly from the pre-existing norms of the superhero genre, and is something else, more psychological, and if it does not provide an actual account of human psychology, that leaves AA in good company with other "psychological" films and books.

The bare facts of the story, where another writer might focus but Morrison did not, is that the present administrator at Arkham, Charles Cavendish, goes mad and, informed by the journal of his predecessor, Amadeus Arkham, who also went mad, releases the inmates as part of a plan to kill Batman. Cavendish's guilt, however, is a secret until the book's final pages, the solution of a mystery that is teased very lightly near the beginning (i.e., when Jim Gordon announces that the Arkham inmates have taken over – "We don't know how" – and when Joker says that Killer Croc, too, was freed from his unique confinement).

But the reader begins the present-tense story confronted not so much with a mystery as with a simple, compelling scenario: The inmates, led by the Joker, have taken over Arkham; they want Batman to come to them, and they have hostages they can torture and kill if he doesn't comply. Another writer might imbue Batman with the ability not to choose, to storm Arkham like a commando, freeing all the hostages, re-caging all the inmates and achieving total victory. That would have been a conventional superhero story, but a much less interesting one than the one AA tells. Instead, Batman reluctantly surrenders to the inmates and submitting to their games, before finding the opportunity to use his skills to evade several of the most serious dangers in the Asylum. Eventually, Batman is confronted by Cavendish, who sees Batman as the cause of all the madness that Arkham confines, and therefore an evil that must be eliminated. Another Arkham doctor, Ruth Adams, kills Cavendish, and Batman goes on a brief, ambiguous rampage before he himself proposes the final game of the evening, for his life to be decided by a single coin toss by Two Face. Dent tosses the coin and announces that Batman is free to go, but we later learn that the result actually called for Batman's death and that Dent announced the opposite choice of his own free will.

Told concurrently with that present-tense plot, in narration that switches from scene to scene, page to page, and sometimes juxtaposed within a single panel, is the story of Amadeus Arkham, how his personal studies, his personal tragedies, and his personal madness all aligned to make him both the creator of Arkham Asylum and later an inmate. The story of Amadeus Arkham is profoundly disturbing, completely beyond the bounds of superhero comics as they existed only a few years earlier, but some ground had been broken in this regard, by Alan Moore and others, so Morrison's story, which would have been unthinkable in 1983, was merely shocking in 1989. The conclusion of the past-tense plot was that Amadeus Arkham fell victim to (perhaps hereditary) madness, and loses his mind after having already lost everything else.

While Batman is confined to the trap that is the physical Arkham Asylum, the reader should sense another trap in the past-tense plot, which is that it has long since ended, and Batman is therefore powerless to do what superheroes do and create a happy ending. From the outset, it is impossible that AA could allow a traditional superhero story's ending in the past-tense plot, and the reader must sense early on that the genre is being broken and turned into something new and full of horror.

There are no taboos holding back the horrors of the past-tense plot. Early on, we learn of Amadeus' mother's madness in a disgusting image that shows insects falling out of her mouth. The worst of it, though, concerns "Mad Dog" Hawkins, who was a victim of abuse, and gives the world plenty of abuse back, culminating in the murders and apparent rapes of Amadeus' wife and daughter. In presenting Mad Dog Hawkins and his crimes, Morrison tapped into a fascination with serial killers that was growing in popular culture at the time. A search on Google Books reveals that the phrase "serial killer" was almost unheard of in 1984, but grew rapidly in occurrence over the next dozen years. Morrison's depiction of Mad Dog Hawkins and his mutilation of victims and need to cut himself "just to feel something" was ahead of the curve in depicting such characters and perhaps played a significant role in the phenomenon, which surged in the mainstream with the film The Silence of the Lambs two years later. Morrison also gives nods to a much earlier forerunner, Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho, reproducing one frame of the movie in the art, and having Amadeus Arkham, like Norman Bates, sit alone in his madness while wearing his mother's dress.

Hawkins eventually impacts the plot – and arguably, culture as a whole – by escaping –, which Amadeus tragically chooses to ignore – and slaughtering Amadeus Arkham's wife and daughter. Amadeus' journal narrates it horrifically: "I see my wife first. My dear Constance. Her body is in pieces. Harriet lies nearby, indescribably violated. Almost idly, I wonder where her head is. And then I look at the doll's house. And the doll's house. Looks. At. Me." AA shows families and children as victims many times, including the fact that Mad Dog Hawkins was sexually abused by his own father, and this carries over to established DC characters via the sexual interest that the Mad Hatter shows in "little blonde girls." A year later, Morrison's second major Batman story, "Gothic," opens with a man learning that his wife and daughter were being forced into making pornography. Amadeus Arkham turns the violence within families back a generation as well, killing his mother as – in his mind – an act of mercy, saving her from her fears and madness. If the medium's use of shock and horror which increased suddenly in the Eighties is to be seen as excessive, AA is one of the stories where that excess was pioneered.

A narrative device that Morrison uses to heighten the impact of the story's excesses is to use language that implies that a character's emotional reaction to an event is muted when it should have been shock. Mad Dog cuts himself "just to feel something." Amadeus looks for his daughter's head "almost idly" and tells his mother, "Don't be afraid" right before he kills her. Ruth Adams interrupts another of her own thoughts with, "Oh, Christ. I just killed someone."  The casual reactions are jarring in contrast with the horrific events unfolding. Years later, Morrison used the same device in JLA #17, when Prometheus tells Kyle Rayner, "I should shoot you right now, purely out of mercy. There. I just did." Elsewhere, in arguably the story's darkest comment, Two Face says that the Moon is a coin tossed by God, and because it landed scarred-side up, he created the world.

The association between families and violence is not, to say the least, new to the Batman mythos, but is at the very core. Morrison takes the origin that was established in Detective Comics #33 and renders it in blood and guts and psychological shock, with Batman breaking down when a word association game forces him to reveal to the Joker how traumatized he was by his parents' murders. As Alan Moore had done in the immediately preceding years, Morrison brought a new level of shock and horror to DC's superhero lineup. Also like Moore, Morrison had Batman as the DC flagship figure closest to the center of the spectacle – Batman as the star of Morrison's work, and a guest of far greater repute than the star of Moore's Swamp Thing. Batman is a natural choice for this, as a figure of darkness as opposed to, say, Green Lantern or The Flash. But Morrison went far further than either the traditional legends or Moore's uses of Batman, by marking the hero as a fundamentally tragic figure, not only in his origins or his milieu, but in his character. Early on, Batman says, "I'm afraid that the Joker may be right about me [that Batman belongs in the madhouse]. Sometimes I… question the rationality of my actions. And I'm afraid that when I walk through those asylum gates… when I walk into Arkham and the doors close behind me… it'll be just like coming home." The notion that Batman is damaged psychologically is reinforced throughout the story, perhaps most emphatically in the closing psychological sketch of Batman, a one-page internal monologue which is placed in the middle of those for Arkham's inmates, and whose final words read, "Mommy's dead. Daddy's dead. Brucie's dead. I shall become a bat."

This vision of Batman as a fundamentally wounded figure is very different from the Batman that Morrison wrote two decades later, a man who is relentlessly strong in body and mind even in response to physical and psychological attack while in captivity. In 2006-2010, Morrison portrayed a Batman who could eventually escape from any trap, and could endlessly summon greater and greater resources in response to absolutely any crisis. In 1989, Morrison showed us a Batman who was, at least in principle, fragile, and who not only could be broken, but was willing to tell Jim Gordon that he feared that. And the horrible murder and abuse afflicting families in the story included the Waynes. "Brucie's dead" is a line that could only come from Bruce/Batman himself, and the use of a diminutive to describe himself is just as jarring as the thesis that Bruce Wayne died in spirit on the night that his parents died physically, but he was still, for a time, childlike enough to call himself "Brucie" as he reflected upon his trauma.

While Morrison's vision of Batman changed considerably from AA to his run on Batman, the Morrisonian vision of the Joker is firm on one idea: That the Joker's wide range in characterization over the years – from a "bad" but funny clown to a terrifying psychotic murderer – should be interpreted in a metatextual way as the changes taking place in the mind of an insane – or "super sane" criminal. In AA, Ruth Adams gives us this vision of the Joker for the first time: "…some days he's a mischievous clown, others a psychopathic killer." It next appeared 17 years later in 52 #30, with Dick Grayson narrating, "The Joker gave up being a murderer for a while and there was just this crazy, brilliant clown running around." This is developed further in Morrison's prose issue, Batman #663, "The Clown at Midnight," with Batman explaining to Harley Quinn, "He's changed again. You know how he changes every few years. You wrote the book, Doctor Quinzel. He has no real personality, remember, only a series of 'superpersonas.'" Then a flashback in 2008's Batman #682 shows an apprehended Joker with a twisted smile telling Batman, "…you look tired, Batman. Like I say, sometimes the fun just has to end. And I'm thinking… practical jokes next time around." Alfred, narrating in the present, comments: "At that time, no one had devoted serious study to the Joker's flamboyant pathology. Batman was, customarily, ahead of the curve, as they say." And then Batman, in the past, says of the Joker, "He keeps coming back… different. I think he recreates himself constantly. Like some kind of super-MPD. We need to make sure he's carefully monitored in case his original… his original persona resurfaces." Four times, Morrison delivered the same assessment of the Joker's changing characterization, although he perhaps contradicts himself on whether it was Harleen Quinzel or Batman who first diagnosed this. What is perhaps most interesting about this is that one of Morrison's high concepts for his run on Batman was that every era in Batman's past "happened," that the changes in the published feature should be interpreted as changes that took place in just one fictional world for various reasons that make sense in that fictional world, and this idea was introduced back in AA. Though his vision of Batman changed considerably from 1989 to 2005, Morrison's use of the metatextual narrative device that every past era of Batman happened to one and the same character was there in Morrison's Batman stories from the beginning.

In comparison with Morrison's later works, perhaps the most important aspect of AA is something so subtle that many readers may put the work down without having noticed it: The plot is built around a time loop. Morrison used time travel in the purely science fiction sense to create a causal loop in time in many of his later works, such as Seven Soldiers, Final Crisis, and Return of Bruce Wayne. The time loop in AA is more subtle and mysterious: Amadeus Arkham's mother has, circa 1920, a terrifying vision of a monstrous bat; perhaps the vision drives her mad, or perhaps her madness produces the vision. At the time she experiences the vision of the bat, it is seemingly a hallucination, but it proves to be prophetic, as Batman becomes a terrifying bat figure several decades later. Her fear of "the Bat" indirectly impacts Batman's entire career, leading to the creation of Arkham Asylum, and to Cavendish deciding that he has to trap and/or kill Batman. Did the existence of Batman in the present create Mrs. Arkham's vision in the past? Morrison leaves that, characteristically, as a mystery. There is neither science fiction nor time machines in the story that could explain it, but references to Aleister Crowley and "that other world… of magic and terror" suggest a supernatural link between Batman in the present and Mrs. Arkham's visions in the past. It could, then again, be explained as madness combined with coincidence. Morrison shows no eagerness to resolve the mystery. We would be naive to dismiss it as coincidence but reaching too far to consider it definitively attributed to magic.

The style in which Morrison approaches that mystery is evocative of his later Batman works. A year later, in 1990, his story "Gothic" also hints of supernatural evil in a case concerning Gotham in general and Batman quite personally. The supernatural basis of the story is rejected by one character, entertained as a possibility by Batman, and kept ambiguous until a final reveal. Almost two decades later, Morrison teased at a supernatural basis to the master villain, Doctor Hurt, who was attacking Batman. Supernatural powers connected to Doctor Hurt were shown an alternate future story and hinted at in other places. Batman, R.I.P. was written as "the story of how Batman cheats the Devil" but Morrison devotedly keeps the fact of the matter ambiguous before eventually, in another series, linking Doctor Hurt to Darkseid.

In AA, Morrison first suggests a link between Mrs. Arkham's vision and Batman's reality with a pair of juxtaposed panels in which we see Mrs. Arkham make a bat-like shadow figure with her hands, right before the bat signal is seen in present-day Gotham. This juxtaposition should be seen as evocative by the reader, but may be seen as a mere device employed by the writer, as when Alan Moore couples a phrase spoken by one character with similar action taking place in a juxtaposed narrative. But in AA, the words joining those two connected visuals are "magic and terror," suggesting a causal connection. Elsewhere in the story, other suggestions of prophecy come true, with Amadeus noting a joker card that is found in the house, and Harriet Arkham's bad dreams preceding her nightmarish death at the hands of Mad Dog Hawkins.

If we accept the supernatural link, then we have a time loop in which Batman in at least some way inspires himself, which can be seen as either tragic or grandiose, in which he is both a victim and a figure so important that many others lives as mere supporting characters in a drama where he is the star. Of course, on a metatextual level, that is entirely the case.

Arkham Asylum belongs to many worlds. It is the last great graphic novel of the Eighties, an early contributor to a growing cultural fascination with serial killers, a pioneering instance of psychological and literary devices in superhero comics, a painfully dark and disturbing work, an early major work by artist Dave McKean, and an early forebear to Morrison's long run on Batman that began seventeen years later. It is worthy of consideration in all of these ways, and belonging to so many worlds, it is something of an oddity in each of them. At the time, it promised big things to come, from Morrison personally, and in the genre more generally. Now, we can look back on a quarter century of work since then and appreciate the many directions that has taken, with Arkham Asylum having hinted at much that was to come just as Mrs. Arkham's terrifying vision foretold, in her world, of the coming of Batman. 

Retro Review: The Killing Joke

Alan Moore's final work for DC was the 1988 landmark, The Killing Joke, a one-shot magnificently illustrated by Brian Bolland that redefined Batman and the Joker and the relationship between them. Cutting between flashbacks and narration in the present day, TKJ offered a possible backstory for the Joker, and showed one fateful encounter between the caped crusader and his archenemy, which left Barbara Gordon disabled for over two decades of DC comics.

The Joker's Plan

The major action of TKJ showed a plan by the Joker that targeted Jim and Barbara Gordon with acts of exceptional cruelty and violence in order "to prove a point." Apparently, he was able to carry out every step that he had planned. After enticing another man to pose as him in Arkham Asylum in order to delay notice of his escape, the Joker agrees to buy a closed-down carnival, but he murders the sales agent, then begins to adapt the location for a single night of terrorizing Jim Gordon.

Shortly thereafter, bizarrely dressed in a tropical shirt, he arrives at the home of Jim and Barbara Gordon. Without saying a word, he fires a gunshot into Barbara's midsection, crippling her. Then, while his thugs incapacitate Jim, the Joker comments that Jim is "topping the bill." He strips Barbara and takes photos of her naked, injured body.

When Jim Gordon awakens, he is tormented by dwarfs grotesquely clad in sadomasochistic leather. They strip him of his clothes and bring him to the Joker, who begins to assault him verbally, and sings him a song about the virtues of insanity. Then, Jim is taken on a ghost train ride and shown gigantic photographic enlargements of the nude photos that the Joker took of his bloody daughter. When the ride is over, the Joker once more explains to Jim, with mock compassion while an audience of "circus freaks" laughs, about the good sense of losing one's mind.

At this point, Batman arrives, deliberately tipped off to the location by tickets the Joker sent to the Gotham police. A short chase through the carnival grounds allows the Joker to make his pro-insanity lecture to Batman. The chase eventually turns into a fight, with the Joker injuring the caped hero lightly before Batman inevitably brings him down. Along the way, Batman escapes a couple of attempts on his life, and it is not clear if the Joker expected those to succeed, or if they were mere gestures to express his hatred. When the Joker is completely beaten, he says, in self-pity, that Batman should "kick the hell out of [him] and get a standing ovation from the public gallery."

Batman's Pitch

The timing of the Joker's plan coincides exactly with Batman's desire to make an overture to his enemy, that they should put aside their conflict. Batman first begins to make this pitch to the man who was posing as the Joker. It is repeated in silent captions when Batman begins to fight the Joker. Then, when the fight is over, the Batman lays it all out again: He doesn't want to hurt the Joker, and that if they don't stop their conflict, one or both of them will end up dying. He offers to help and rehabilitate the Joker. The Joker seems to consider it, but answers, "No. I'm sorry but… No. It's too late for that. Far too late." Despite the rejection, the Joker tells Batman a joke, and they appear to communicate calmly and genuinely once the fight is over, but it is clear that their battle will resume when next the Joker is once again free.

The Joker's Origin

Usually, recurring heroes and villains in comics are given a distinct origin and real name. Occasionally, there is no origin out of apparent indifference on the part of the creators. The Joker, however, is one of a select few for which an origin has been intentionally vague, to preserve a sense of mystery around the character. In 1987's Secret Origins #10, Alan Moore provided one of four possible origins for the Phantom Stranger. In The Killing Joke, Moore provides one for the Joker.

An earlier semi-origin the Joker had been offered in 1951's Detective Comics #168. That story indicated that the Joker had originally carried out crimes as the Red Hood, who wore a helmet and matching cape. His initial interaction with Batman ended with a swim through chemicals that transformed his hair to green and skin to clown white. Maintaining the character's mysterious background, that story never offered his real name nor showed his pre-accident face.

In an extended flashback divided into four parts, TKJ affirms the basic details of the 1951 story, but added more detail to the character's backstory, indicating that the man about to become the Joker was a failed comedian and only reluctantly a criminal, who lost his pregnant wife and unborn child on the same day that his botched robbery and run-in with Batman changed his pigmentation. TKJ breaks from the 1951 story in adding a significant emotional element to the Joker's transformation, indicating that the trauma of that one bad day instantly changed him from a not-particularly-bad man into a devoted criminal, whereas the earlier story implied that the one bad day only altered his appearance.

Moore only offers these details tentatively, however. In one panel injecting ambiguity into the flashback, the present-day Joker says, "Something like that happened to me, you know. I… I'm not exactly sure what is was. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another… If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" Thus, Moore makes the Joker's backstory, like that of the Phantom Stranger, one that we have possibly but not certainly seen.

Theme: One Bad Day

An essential idea in TKJ is that trauma can remake a man from something ordinary into something remarkable. The Joker analyzes his own past in this way, and the flashback implies that the pre-Joker individual was driven to crime only out of extreme financial need and an honorable desire to support his pregnant wife and soon-to-be family. As soon as he learns of his wife's tragic death, he tries to back out of his agreement to participate in a robbery, but he is forced to comply by his partners. The day is marked not only by extreme misfortune but also by futility, as he is unable to make his own decisions, being threatened into crime by the Red Hood Gang – of which he is a stooge, not the leader – and then being cornered by the relentless police and Batman. Faced with the futility of being good – and sane – the Joker snaps and becomes a devotedly insane criminal as we see him in the present.

This aspect of the origin is owed crucially to one earlier story: Batman's origin as first presented in Detective #33. That first telling of Batman's origin connects the "terror and shock" of witnessing his parents' murders as the single motivation for his life as a crime-fighter. The vow he makes on that occasion is called "curious and strange" by Finger and Kane. The details have been affirmed and extended numerous times in successive stories, but the essential idea is that trauma fundamentally transformed the normal boy into something extraordinary.

There's little in DC mythology that's firmer than the concept of Bruce Wayne deciding to become a crime-fighter because of his parents' murders. As such, it is natural for Moore to take the same idea and reflect it through a mirror, and make a similar moment the origin of the Joker.

However, TKJ does not affirm that simple psychological model of trauma. The Joker carries out his plan for the express purpose of transforming Jim Gordon, to make him insane, but, while the Joker is able to carry out every step in his plan, Gordon does not change as the Joker hopes. When Batman rescues Jim Gordon, Gordon tells him, "I want him brought in… and I want him brought in by the book!… We have to show him that our way works!" This fact, which Gordon and Batman rub into the Joker's face, shows that the Joker was wrong, that One Bad Day does not drive everyone mad, and as Batman adds, "Maybe it was just you, all the time."

This is a neat contrast insofar as the Joker and Jim Gordon go, but what of the third side of the triangle? The Joker guesses that One Bad Day is what made Batman what he is, and in this, he is correct. But, as part of his perception of the situation, he sees Batman as confirmation of his theory, that One Bad Day turned him into someone who would "dress up like a flying rat," which is "crazy," as is "everybody else." If this is wrong, then it was unnecessary for Gordon to be put to the test; Batman already shows that One Bad Day does not drive someone crazy.

Indeed, various creators over the years have suggested that Batman is crazy; TKJ neither confirms nor rejects the idea, but it agrees, as all Batman stories do, that the traumatic event was transformative, and suggests that Batman's life itself is not enough to reject the idea that One Bad Day makes a normal person "crazy."

Mutual Assured Destruction

Batman's description of his ongoing war with the Joker closely parallels the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). As applied to the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union both possessed massive nuclear arsenals, the idea was that a war between the two would inevitably lead to the destruction of both of them. Therefore, any war between them was unwinnable and therefore unthinkable.

War is obviously on Moore's mind in TKJ, as voiced by the Joker. He explicitly uses the phrase "World War Three" as he describes how close the world is to accidental nuclear war. One panel later, he (with considerable oversimplification) suggests that "the last World War" (WW2) was triggered by an argument over telegraph poles. TKJ describes the Batman-Joker war in terms that are parallel to the Cold War conflict between the US and USSR.

When TKJ begins, the Batman-Joker war has been in progress for years, but Batman sees death as an inevitable outcome. And, while he rejects the suicidal nature of it, the Joker accepts it. As such, the dynamic in TKJ is similar to the Cold War's nuclear arms race. In Watchmen, Moore, through Ozymandius, also expresses that nuclear war is inevitable unless something exceptional takes place to prevent it. In TKJ, Moore scripts the Joker's position as similar to that of the U.S. and Soviet Union, while Batman's choice is something sane that the West (and Eastern Bloc) should adopt. In another possible comment on nuclear war, the Joker says, "That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day." A nuclear war would be to the world what the Joker is to a healthy, ordinary mind.

But, as in his Twilight of the Superheroes proposal, Moore also finds fault with society as a whole. He believed that society as a whole was at risk of disintegration, and the Joker in TKJ voices similar concern, that the average man has a "deformed set of values" who survives "not very well" in "today's harsh and irrational world."

As prophecy, Moore's work has, fortunately, not played out in the 27 years since it was printed. Total societal disintegration has yet come to pass.

Style

The artwork, by Brian Bolland, is exceptionally vivid, with the use of photorealistic proportions in most cases highlighting exceptions such as the proportion of the Joker and his circus freak sidekicks. Another exception is when Bolland copies panels from older works, such as file photos of the Joker, Batman from the cover of Detective #27, the Batman family including the Kathy Kane Batwoman, and an implausibly old-fashioned Batmobile. The technique of including older-style artwork within a story has been used many times since TKJ, and it powerfully contrasts the style of those more innocent times with the especially brutal content of TKJ.

Moore makes use of the medium in unusual and attention-getting ways. The story begins and ends with long stretches without dialogue, with the title pages' artwork blending seamlessly into the story. In the beginning, as in the end, we see the concentric circles made by raindrops as a pattern in puddles. This suggests cycles and repetition and the fact that the struggle between Batman and the Joker, and all superhero comics, goes on in a repeated pattern forever. The scene between Batman and the solotaire-playing (fake) Joker is iconic and was repeated by Grant Morrison in DC Universe #0's lead-in to Batman, R.I.P.

Dialogue and captions are repeated, overlie superficially unrelated art, and make sly comments at the transitions between scenes. The first line of the joke that Joker tells at the end are used, out of place, as the story's first words: There were these two guys in a lunatic asylum. In fact, Batman and the (fake) Joker are the two guys in a lunatic asylum, and the joke at the end provides commentary on them. The re-use of the line also reinforces the pattern of a cycle, and the fact that Batman and the Joker cannot break out of their endless war. Later in that scene, Batman says that he doesn't want Joker's death on his hands as the makeup of the fake Joker comes off and smears his gloves. When Jim Gordon warns Batman not to harm a hair on the man's head, Batman offers Gordon the fake Joker's wig. When the real Joker, at the carnival, says that money isn't a problem "these days," we see the first cut to his earlier days, when poverty was a great problem. When that scene ends with the pre-Joker seeing his face reflected in a metal cabinet door, the narration cuts back to the present-day Joker seeing his face reflected in the glass of a "LAUGHING CLOWN" machine, but the Joker isn't laughing. When Joker kills the sales agent, his dialogue is overflowing with double meanings, seemingly speaking cheerfully while referring, repeatedly, to the man's death. The man's death grin ends one scene as the joker card that Batman took from Arkham opens the next one. Later, after shooting Barbara, the Joker refers to her, a librarian, as though she were a book, including "There's a hole in the jacket and the spine appears to be damaged." The Joker ends the scene holding a drink in one hand as he touches Barbara, and then the narration cuts to the proto-Joker holding a drink in one hand as he picks up a shrimp. The technique is used, scene after scene, throughout TKJ as it was in Watchmen and other Moore works.

Moore, a horror writer in his work on Swamp Thing, uses particularly sharp moments in the wording and actions to build up the Joker as something otherworldly. When Batman accosts the man who helped him escape from Arkham, he asks, "Do you realize what you've set free?" with not a "who" but a "what." The Joker strips both Barbara and then Jim Gordon naked, an indignity one wouldn't find in earlier superhero comics, with an added note of perversion when he forces Jim to see pictures of his naked (and crippled) daughter. Later, Barbara shares her horror with us when she tells Batman, "He's taking it to the limit this time. You didn't see. You didn't see his eyes." The proto-Joker's shock when he learns of his wife's death and again when he is forced into joining the robbery are exceptionally tragic alone and more so in juxtaposition. When his grief is the greatest, two leering figures, one of them probably a prostitute, lean in and seem to laugh at his misfortune. Elsewhere in that scene, we see a man passed out in his own vomit. The cover itself is shocking, with the Joker's seemingly harmless "Smile" as he points a camera towards us is galling when one considers how he used a camera in the story. Moore doesn't just break the rules of family comic books; he shatters them. While the Joker and the Gordons are traumatized by their experiences, the reader – at least in the late Eighties – was shocked by the innovative levels of horror in the content. And, given the themes of the story, this is not gratuitous; it illustrates the points effectively.

Did Batman Kill the Joker?

In August 2013, Grant Morrison, in an interview with Kevin Smith, says that in his interpretation, Batman kills the Joker at the end of TKJ. As he explains, Batman reaches out and places his hands on the Joker, then the laughter stops, then the light goes out, and this "in such a way that it’s ambiguous" indicates that Batman has killed the Joker.

It's certainly no better than ambiguous: There is no real evidence that Batman has killed the Joker, and certainly readers do not typically read the story concluding that he did, or else Morrison's supposition would not have made such a splash online.

I strongly disagree. Laughter ends in that scene because laughter always ends. The siren ends and the light goes out because police turn off their sirens and their headlights. The jumps from one panel to the next do not have a specific timeframe associated with them, and we see simply nothing of any attack by Batman on the Joker.

Even more important: Batman has just said that he will not beat the hell out of the Joker because he is (as requested by Jim Gordon) doing this one by the book. Batman is asked to do it by the book, he says that he is doing it by the book, and we don't see anything to indicate that he's not doing it by the book.

References online to the original script seem to confirm that the story does not end with the Joker's death. The description of the ending is, "[Batman] and The Joker are going to kill each other one day. It’s preordained. They may as well enjoy this one rare moment of contact while it lasts." But I don't think this evidence was even needed.

Morrison used the carnival grounds from TKJ in his run on Batman and Robin. He obviously respects the work greatly. But this particular theory seems to me to be difficult to defend.

Impact

Though not a perfect story, TKJ is nonetheless one of the most memorable Batman stories – and certainly one of the most memorable Joker stories. It is flawed: The point that the Joker is trying to make and the way it is refuted are both fairly slapdash. The comics make much of One Bad Day creating a hero or villain, and neither the Joker's thesis that it always creates a villain nor the case of Jim Gordon in refuting that thesis are very compelling. As Alan Moore himself says, "Brian did a wonderful job on the art but I don’t think it’s a very good book. It’s not saying anything very interesting." He furthermore said, "Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they're just two comic book characters."

That last comment is particularly interesting. The Cold War parallels might permit the claim that TKJ is saying something interesting and that Batman and the Joker in TKJ are symbols of something real. This leaves us to conclude either that the Cold War parallels are unintended, or that Moore considers any such parallel relatively inconsequential.

This suggests that the Cold War overtones that I saw in TKJ from my first reading is, like the Batman-killing-Joker ending that Morrison saw in it, more in the eye of the reader than the writer. And perhaps that is a benefit of the doubt that readers extend to an accomplished writer and a work that is of overall high quality; Moore's reputation makes readers look for hidden levels that may not have been intended. It's perhaps timely to post this retro review right after the one for Kingdom Come, as both are highly regarded for their excellent art and powerful overtones, but neither has a deep message to make them truly great, though they easily fool us into feeling that they do.