Amazing Moments in Grant Morrison's Batman Run #1
Grant Morrison simply writes amazing Batman. He does so with creative subtext while writing vastly entertaining scenes and stories that are great without the subtext but brilliant with it considered. One of my favorite scenes from his first issue is a scene that might seem like a throwaway joke, and while it is hilarious on a surface level, it also explores both the character of the Batman and his history in comics.
As issue #655 begins we are in the middle of a confrontation with the Joker that is vastly fantastic but we'll move on to the aftermath. Commissioner Gordon had been dosed with the Joker venom, which causes the victim to literally laugh themselves to death, but is now recovering in a hospital while still in the reduced throes of the affliction, which insinuates that he is at least partly in the mindset of the Joker.
Gordon is reading a newspaper article about a live beheading and giggling exactly as one might expect the Joker to respond to a fat man being decapitated.
Please take note of the line "How did they manage to find his neck?"
The nurse is obviously none too responsive to this black humor. On the next page Batman pops in through Gordon's hospital room window to talk about the case, but in the last two panels we get this...
On its face this is simply a throwaway joke (that got a pretty good chuckle from me, mother****er) but it's absolutely not throwaway. On a very easy-to-read subtextual level it compares the Joker's worldview to Batman's, implying that no matter how different they may be there is an uncomfortable level of anti-social similarity in how they view the world. What this means for just how similar their views are is left, and should always be left, unclear.
They are two sides of the same coin but just what that means is too uncomfortable and inscrutable in just what that says about the human race for the audience to ever know. The Nazis didn't rise to power because the German people, or even a segment, were evil. They rose to power because the division between those who would support the Nazis and those who wouldn't isn't simply grey but abstract to a level that must be approached academically.
This relationship between Batman and the Joker in this scene is especially interesting when you consider the scene in Alan Moore's
The Killing Joke which this scene is most likely referencing (Grant Morrison's Batman run references much of Batman lore throughout the years so I am not simply grasping at straws). If you've never read it or don't have a clear remembrance of it then let me remind you of what is relevant to this discussion.
In
The Killing Joke there is a scene where Barbara Gordon and her father Jim Gordon are having a conversation in his house when there is a knock at the door. Barbara opens the door to reveal the Joker.
Joker shoots her in the stomach, incapacitating her, and then kidnaps Jim Gordon. He also undresses Barbara and takes pictures (insinuating that he may have raped her because Alan Moore has a thing that may or may not be unseemly about that kind of thing) that he later uses to torture Jim Gordon for the sake of driving him insane to show that all you need to drive someone to madness is one bad day. At the end of this comic Batman and the Joker have an altercation and chase scene that ends with Batman trying one last time to reason with the Joker to convince him to seek help. The Joker's response is quite possibly his only lucid, human moment in all of comics: a joke to imply that both he and Batman are equally insane and therefore Bat's attempts to lead Joker to sanity are as ridiculous as the Joker's attempts to lead him to insanity (in context it's ludicrous for Batman to show such compassion for the Joker after having done what he's just done, but Batman's boner for saving the unsaveable is such that he may be willing to ignore his feelings for those who have been wronged to treat the victimizer with the same level of understanding that he wishes himself to be given... in other words they're both too obsessed with their own pain to see the world realistically and consequently can only ever truly relate to each other).
One important thing to keep in mind to bring this into ultimate context is that there is a theory about the last page. When Batman is laughing at this joke and seemingly resting his hand on Joker's shoulder to support himself because he is incapacitated by this joke, he is in fact strangling the Joker to death because he has finally realized that Joker is beyond saving, and by extension that Batman is beyond saving and so loses all hope, finally understanding the joke that he was never able or willing to get. This comic wasn't originally supposed to be canon, but due to its popularity was included in canon, making the idea that Batman had finally given in to madness to commit murder obviously not canon, but at the time this was potentially non-canon.
To bring this back to Morrison's comic, Batman's laughing at a beheading joke originally made by Jim Gordon high on Joker venom implicates him as being just like the Joker, which due to the possible reference to the above scene justifies the interpretation that Batman killed the Joker even if it isn't truly canon. It is a throwaway joke, but one that has implications for Morrison's interpretation of Batman. Perhaps not one that will have the repercussions of Moore's story had the possible interpretation been made canon, but one that calls in to question just how Morrison views Batman.
I suppose at this point I myself am questioning what this post means to me. I originally thought this was a post about a funny joke with a potential subtext worth exploring, but at this point now I'm treating it as an exploration of Alan Moore's story through the lens of Morrison's, making this really about
The Killing Joke. I suppose I don't care. I just had fun writing and contemplating this.
The Killing Joke was flawed but the ending was spectacular, and Morrison's little joke was still just a joke, even if it had greater meaning, so we're talking about the
culmination of a Batman-defining story and the
beginning of a Batman-defining story and this is why I ****ing love both Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Moore is God, Morrison is Jesus, and the Holy Ghost wishes he could live up to either.