The horror in the Knight Terrors crossover tie-ins I read recently was mostly lackluster, so I’m glad to see Matthew Rosenberg and Carmine Di Giandomenico’s Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing Vol. 1 delivers. Weirdly, Rosenberg’s Knight Terrors: The Joker tie-in was more humorous, not scary, more like the Silver Age-esque backup stories also collected here; with a horror-focused main title, maybe it makes more sense the crossover issue did something different.
Irrespective, this is good work from Rosenberg, tonally similar to James Tynion’s preceding Joker series but different enough not to be repetitive. Continuity with Rosenberg’s Task Force Z is awkward, but I appreciate the throughway nonetheless. If the story continues a bit too long, it gives us more pages to enjoy Di Giandomenico’s art, which assuredly sells not only the gore, but often the widescreen dramatic set pieces of it all. I’ll be interested to see how this one resolves.
[Review contains spoilers]
Man Who Stopped Laughing kicks off exactly right, with a soup of body parts and three executions and a couple more murders before we’re at our premise — if the Joker’s in Los Angeles, who’s the clown killing people in a bar in Gotham? Clearly this iteration can bring the rampant carnage that the title requires; it took me maybe an issue more to acclimate to dueling cut scenes of the two Jokers differentiated mainly by their head wounds, but then I was set. (If the two Jokers aren’t that confusing, one still has to read carefully — Punchline meets one Joker here, but then mistakes the second Joker for the first over in Punchline: The Gotham Game, which takes a minute to parse out.)
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
At one point DC’s portrayal of the Joker was as the nightmare villain, the one who commands fear in any room he enters (think circa the potentially immortal Joker of Scott Snyder’s Endgame). But times have evolved, and I think Man Who Stopped Laughing wrestles with the Joker’s many statuses — there is still the Joker force of nature, the visage on television that threatens nationwide terror, but there is also the Joker who’s lost status with Gotham’s other criminals and who is, here and elsewhere, more often a side character in Harley Quinn’s origin story than a “protagonist” in his own right. We also get the rare West Coast perspective and it’s interesting how unimpressed the regular person seems with the Joker and really superheroes in general, versus DC Comics' usual East Coast settings.
The showpiece of Rosenberg’s first volume is Joker’s extended “hospital stay.” Notable in the third chapter lead-in are Di Giandomenico’s depiction of the gory visage of a doctor performing brain surgery on the Joker without anesthetic and also the cinematic splash of the hospital parking lot surrounded by police cars, moodily colored by Arif Prianto.
But the very best comes in the fourth “bottle” issue as the Joker tries to evade the police throughout the hospital. If the first site of horror in this book is gore, the second is the general feeling of uncomfortableness, up to and including the tragi-comedy of the backup stories. That extends to this issue’s scene of the Joker in a room full of sick kids, with the audience wondering just how far Rosenberg will go. What we get is a dance, the Joker neither going soft (not that we would want him to) nor causing real harm, just again this uncertain dark humor (or funny darkness). That’s followed by the Joker seemingly giving comfort to a dying woman, seemingly out of character.1 So many in this book have died already, but then Rosenberg’s Joker starts sparing people, keeping us perpetually on our toes.
The Infinite Frontier era kicked off with Red Hood Jason Todd renouncing his murderous ways in Chip Zdarsky’s story in Batman: Urban Legends. Rosenberg followed up on this in Task Force Z, including Jason’s switch from guns to an electric tire iron as weapon of choice. Here we have Rosenberg writing Jason again and there’s connections to Task Force Z — Jason’s friendship with Batgirl Stephanie Brown, for one — but Jason’s regressed in that the guns are back and he’s aiming to kill the Joker. The reasons aren’t clear, and I wish Rosenberg had done a better job explaining it; the same is perpetuated in Rosenberg’s Jason in Batman/Catwoman: Gotham War, but we’ll see what Shawn Martinbrough has to say with Red Hood in the miniseries after that.
The backup stories here are not hilariously funny, more a kind of dumb-funny that reminded me of less-biting bits in Mad magazine. I might have preferred instead Manhunter Kate Spencer backups ahead of her appearance at the end, though it is interesting to see Francesco Francavilla’s noir style on these satirical tales. Among the best I thought was the faux-controversial pregnancy story for its palindrome wordplay; the story with Power Girl also has a good run of spoofing Joker’s cinematic costumes, as well as the “TODD” sound effect when Joker beats up Mirror Master.
It’s capped with a gallery of freaky Joker covers; not like Knight Terrors didn’t have those too, but indeed Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing Vol. 1 is the kind of horror comic I wanted when DC’s imperative was to produce horror comic versions of all of their regular titles. Another good one from Matthew Rosenberg; I don’t see much else from him on DC’s docket other than DC vs. Vampires, but that’s a title I’ll certainly be getting to eventually.
[Includes original and variant covers]
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The woman’s name is Lena, and in “Knight Terrors: The Joker,” the Joker’s imagined wife is also named Lena — that stuck out to me since Lena is a name with some resonance in the DCU. I wonder if we’re meant to draw a connection here between the woman in the hospital and the Joker’s Knight Terrors dream — or if this is a clue to something that’s resolved in the next volume or etc. ↩︎
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