Review: Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing Vol. 2 hardcover (DC Comics)

Matthew Rosenberg’s Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing Vol. 2 ambles toward its conclusion. The finale is a big action set piece, depicted well as throughout this series by artist Carmine Di Giandomenico, but it’s rather the epitome of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Rosenberg’s Joker took a long time to get here and “here” ends up mostly inconsequential. That the second Joker series is even more tied to the day-to-day of the DC Universe than the last one is a treat, but I worry if Man Who Stopped’s lack of real impact is also a warning. In addition to the old standby Harley Quinn and Catwoman series, DC’s had of late Punchline and Poison Ivy and Penguin and Joker, and Joker ultimately Peters out (ironically, in the very book that talks about “Joker fatigue”). The Two-Face series itself didn't expand beyond a mini; I wonder if Joker’s end suggests this bubble has already burst?

[Review contains spoilers]

I would say you won’t read me complaining about two whole issues of Manhunter Kate Spencer fighting a villain across the whole of Los Angeles, but then this would be a very short paragraph. Mark Andreyko’s antihero remains a favorite (his Manhunter and related stories are surely worth a compendium collection) and I’m thrilled to see Rosenberg use her, especially among other “gray area” heroes like Red Hood, Ravager, and Spoiler. But it does seem this volume loses the plot with two whole issues mostly dedicated to the Joker trying to escape Manhunter and get out of Los Angeles, with very little attention paid to the series' mysterious second Joker — and that’s in addition to the last issue of the first volume, also following the Joker leaving LA.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

Late in the book, Man Who Stopped coincides with Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Rosenberg had to pad out his story to hit the right beats at the right time, but it shows. The upside, as mentioned before, is that Di Giandomenico and colorist Romulo Fajardo do these set pieces phenomenally, the fire and the speed lines and the flashing lights. I would venture it’s hard to do a cinematic car chase among comics' flat, self-paced page-to-page, but Rosenberg, Di Giandomenico, and Fajardo accomplish it.

When all is said and done — and with the idea of multiple Jokers ever present in the zeitgeist — Man Who Stopped’s central mystery ultimately comes to nothing. The faux Joker is a henchman of the Joker’s who inhaled the gas and looks like the Joker and that’s it; it’s hardly a mystery and moreover it changes the Joker not at all. I’m skeptical another writer will pick up with this idea that the surviving Joker is really the faux Joker, and even if they did, at best I’m not sure what difference it makes and at worst it’s so easily reversible anyway.

As well, I still struggled to differentiate the two Jokers, sometimes flipping back and forth to verify whom I last saw where. A smidgen of that is intentional, I’m sure, but I also think the creative teams loses track of which Joker is which. Take issue #11, where the faux Joker with Albert starts out in a hoodie and the real Joker with Killer Moth is in a suit. But a few pages later when the real Joker and Killer Moth go out to the train derailment, real Joker’s in a hoodie, and when faux Joker and Albert attack Manhunter, that faux Joker’s now in a suit. It’s an issue that’s got even more faux decoy Jokers in it, rather the worst time for the book itself to mistake who’s who.

Man Who Stopped continues this idea from the previous volume that the Joker is a “diminished figure,” as one TV reporter says, not just in Los Angeles but also in Gotham. It remains a curious invention on Rosenberg’s part, prescient of sorts with the poor performance of Joker: Folie a Deux, though hard to reconcile in the comics given the Joker featuring prominently in Chip Zdarsky’s contemporaneous Batman run and Tom King’s inaugural Batman: Brave and the Bold story. I’m equally skeptical any writer will pick up on this, but it’s a notable in-story cultural shift from the Joker-obsessed Gotham of James Tynion’s post-Joker War run to what Rosenberg imagines now.

The book doesn’t take it this far, but there’s also a contrast between the villains' and general public’s unimpressed reaction to the Joker on one hand and Jason Todd’s continued obsessiveness on the other. As discussed with the first volume, Rosenberg never quite squares Jason’s outsized compulsion to kill the Joker with recent portrayals of Jason as more level-headed, but it’s interesting to see how so many have left the Joker behind and yet Jason cannot (granted Joker didn’t kill those others as he did the resurrected Red Hood). We’re used to the public lauding Lex Luthor while Superman called him villain, at least in the John Byrne days, but this disconnect with the Joker is more surprising.

James Tynion’s Joker series lent itself to a sequel that I hope still comes; Matthew Rosenberg’s Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing Vol. 2, not as much. I know there’s some Three Jokers material upcoming in Chip Zdarsky’s Batman, though I wonder if Man Who Stopped will muddy that a bit for me. We’ve seen now, and know, how there can be two Jokers and it not turn out to be a big deal; does that make making me care about a trio of Jokers that much harder?

[Includes original and variant covers, cover sketches]

Rating 2.25