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alan (spit) moore, the killing joke

The Killing Joke, killing a heroic archetype
Here, digital_eraser says she's torn on The Killing Joke, because it's so misogynist, but it's by Alan Moore & Brian Bolland, whom she admires.

That's funny. The Killing Joke is a big part of my case for why I despise Alan Moore. I have no problem denouncing the man. What follows is expanded from my reply on her LJ:

What gets me is that Alan Moore could write The Killing Joke, could turn a cute kid's comic like Marvelman into the vile horror story that he made it, could spend much of his career making his name by doing unspeakable things to other people's characters, especially children's pop literature characters, & people still defend him, still think his name on something is an inherent plus.

OK. I can hear people saying, "But the revisionist Marvelman was Dez Skinn's idea, & The Killing Joke was part of the editorial 'darkening' of Batman after they sacked Mike W. Barr. This is editorial fiat, surely?" Even if it were, that doesn't explain Watchmen (his baby, his pitch), or the rejected Twilight of the Gods pitch (more of the same), or his return to the cynical reinvention genre in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. There's a pattern here. And note in Bolland's own recounting of events--

"Back in Northampton, Alan had to check with editor Len Wein how DC would feel about him crippling one of its key character, Batgirl. Len phoned back. His precise words are not printable here, but the gist of it was that it was okay. The Joker had, after all, to be shown to be a seriously nasty piece of work."

--that Moore & Bolland were asking permission from DC editorial to cripple Barbara Gordon. There's clearly a lot of this violence coming out of Moore himself.

So, when I remember that Alan Moore claimed to have threatened Julie Schwartz's life in order to write the last Schwartz-era Superman story (instead of Julie handing it to somebody who'd worked so hard to build that character, like Elliott S! Maggin), it no longer seems like cute exaggeration. I actually visualize a young, manic Moore threatening an old man about to retire.

Alan Moore is the king of the clever little British comics monkeys. I think his Swamp Thing was well-done, I seriously love some of his Green Lantern Corps stories, I think The Ballad of Halo Jones is at least pretty good space fantasy. He seems to have done all right with Supreme. He had some real skill. The pity is that he kept going back to that violently iconoclastic well, & editors kept hiring him to do it. More the pity that he now casts a long shadow over comics, surpassed only by a few with names like Neal Adams & Stan Lee. Because what is now imitated is the destructive, careless side of his art.

So much for Moore.

I would also mention that The Killing Joke is probably part of the reason that Bolland's art now almost always looks creepy to me, but I also read Camelot 3000 at a comparably young age, & was a bit scarred by that, so... no, it's still largely Jim Gordon's implied rape scene that did it.

In any case, I'm very much on John Ostrander & Kim Yale's side regarding the treatment of Barbara Gordon. Not that they never killed anyone off prematurely & brutally; I have a complete run of their Suicide Squad, & there are parts of that that still bring tears to my eyes. But it was a story they wrote in a Batman Family book (Batman Chronicles?) that really brought home how betrayed Barbara must feel. The Joker gut-shot her, tortured her, kidnapped & tortured (maybe even raped) her father. She asked Bruce to kill the Joker, & when Bruce tracked the Joker down, he...hugged the Joker.

(In Suicide Squad, things went south a lot. Good people died. But I don't remember Waller hugging criminals who'd killed her people. So when Batman would show up & tell Waller he didn't approve of her, which he did a couple of times; really, who was he to say?)

Bruce chose the Joker over Barbara Gordon. He chose the serial killer (who even attacked his friends) over his friends, over the girl who had idolized him. Let me point out here that contrary to later retcons, Barbara wasn't originally Robin's girlfriend; she had a thing for Batman. He chose the red-lipped sadist over her--the young woman who emulated him--who loved him.

This eventually convinced me that in Moore's interpretation, Dr. Wertham was right about Batman. Bruce was not only gay, but gay in the worst possible way, for the worst person. Batman as a concept plumbed the depths of immorality & misogyny in that story, & what's worse is that a lot of us, on first reading it, didn't even notice. It was easy to be distracted by all the other stuff. Maybe Bruce was distracted. But it's not OK.

But there is a deeper problem than misogyny that makes The Killing Joke a watershed moment in the downfall of Batman as heroic archetype.

Mike W. Barr once said (in a Maze Agency letter column) that when he was writing Batman, he always had the Joker stop short of killing anybody. The Joker might try, but would fail. Barr's logic was that if the Joker actually succeeded in killing someone, Batman would be morally obligated to, in Barr's words, "drive a stake through the Joker's heart." In order to keep the Joker viable as a commonly recurring villain, Barr kept him from being too dangerous. Now I remind you of that hapless amusement park security guard, body grinning in death in the scene in The Killing Joke where we find Jim Gordon being tortured. Apparently, by Mike Barr's standards, that was enough cause for a hero to kill the Joker, & Batman was to be written as a hero.

But not in the Denny O'Neil (& Len Wein, I guess, I forget about him) editorial regime. The Joker would kill dozens of random people, & that wasn't enough for Batman to put him down. The Joker would kill Batman's own son, that wasn't enough. Batman, in the end, was impotent to protect any innocents, anyone like his own parents, due to his pseudo-Kantian moral strictures. A useless vigilante, who attracted violence but could not end it.

And so a cultural split appeared. On one side those who swallowed whole the hypocrisy--embodied in the Batman books by Dr. Leslie Thompkins--that refuses to kill the habitual killer, thus enabling further crimes while pretending to be "better than he is." On the other, those who believe in consequences, in the idea of actually making a difference, to which Batman paid lip service but which he didn't really accomplish. Maybe we gave up on Batman & read the Punisher, or other series not marred by hypocrisy. Maybe we just gave up on a tendency to try to make an already dark character as dark as possible.

Me, I became a fan of Black Canary, I read Bat-spinoffs like Nightwing & Robin, & I found Batman to be... insufferable. I rooted for characters DC told us were "morally compromised"--like Huntress--not to be cowed by a self-righteous bully like Batman. Who still makes me vomit.

Grant Morrison now says he's trying to rebuild Batman, to make him less of a bleak one-dimensional character. Let's hope he has editors who understand this, & can help.

I'm not holding my breath.