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That was much better than I thought it was going to be.
It did read like a fairly lurid shade of magenta to begin with, but once it settled down it did make sense as an experiment. George would have struggled to fit all that in about the Joker's new way of looking at things otherwise. And I suppose he might have been worried about the artwork as well, and a possible 'Arkham Asylum-'related f***ing bollocks misinterpretation of his ideas about the characters; best to get it down in cold, hard text, then.
Not quite sure about the wisdom of redesigning him along the lines of the early, pre-Columbine Marilyn Manson, though. I suppose it doesn't really matter, but it's not a look that going to last much beyond the end of the current run, I fear. More pertinently, George is going to need a much better artist than the current series regular if he's planning on getting the new, short-lived, scary, post-ECT god of death Joker across at all.
The other thing is, the treatment of the character here reminded a lot of the Clown in the recent 'Nighthawk' mini-series by Daniel Way, in the sense of his being portrayed as a semi-catatonic, homicidal maniac (the Joker that is, not Daniel Way.) It's not a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a thing. Only, there was very little in that series that recalled the swinging 1970's playboy Batman, for all Nighthawk's basically, and self-consciously, much the same character, had Bruce Wayne been born as an African American. And seen his parents gunned down by a white American. And ... well there are some tricky issues raised, really. (It was a good effort I thought; for anyone who missed it, I'm sure it's still available from your local comic shop, possibly at a substantially reduced cover price, but you shouldn't let that, or Daniel Way's increasingly troubling work since, put you off. Arguably.)
So is all this a sign that George has abandoned the idea of trying to brighten up 'Batman', and has decided, instead, to go one more dark? Well I certainly hope so. Whatever, I'm looking forward to the Joker's (surely inevitable) next appearance in this, in a way that I'm probably not wrt the ninja man-bats. |
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