Of Lovers and Madmen

When I read The Killing Joke last year (I am quite new to the comic book genre, yes), I appreciated how writers, like Alan Moore, can substantiate a character who, up until then, I didn't give a second thought about.  That was partly because I didn't take reading comics seriously, and partly because I didn't read comics.

Fast forward to a year later and I was well into reading some of the more well-known collected story arcs released by DC within the last decade.  There was no system to my reading, however: I just picked up stand-alone works I found lying around the house, or I just downloaded something people would recommend.  To lend a sort of system to my reading, I did what any novice, who just happened to be undergoing some sort of mid-life crisis, would do: search the internet for the Top Ten Batman and Joker anything.  The anachronism of my reading was not lost to me, and half of the time I spent searching through stuff I already downloaded in order to remember who did what to whom and what happened to whom in who wrote what where what happened before or after what when who was who was told.  So.  In light of my recent enthusiasm, this piece will either give you spoilers, or constipation.  

Recently I came across Batman Confidential, and I remember what a student sent to me: a theory that the Joker had the superpower of impeccable timing (most of the comments to which do not make sense to me).  Lovers and Madmen  (Batman Confidential #7 up to #12) did one better: it masterfully explores what kind of man the Joker might have been before he was created by Batman, effectively taking away the need for a superpower theory.  In five short comics it did a brilliant work of tracing the line crossed from the effortless, perfect and therefore boring excellence straight to insanity brought by the inevitable and enormous vat of anti-psychotic chemicals.  The story of a Jack to the Joker created by a Batman: a love story involving mad men who cannot but dance this dance that created and fuels both of their insanities.  (It beats The Man Who Laughs  hands down, at least, and dings the Joker's Red Hood origins in the ear.)

We see the restless and erudite Jack managing his "trade in securities" perfectly if only he would find fun in it, who pisses off powerful criminals in Gotham precisely because of his talents.  He is an intelligent, precise marksman who cannot seem to manage to get hit despite or because of his willingness to take any bullet.  His mirth for his creativity disappears while his talents do not.  Take away the weight of reasons behind a crime, and you have an artist who takes no pleasure in perfect execution.  Which he pulls off every single time, even without takeaway.  Batman's rational, rigorous training cannot predict a pattern to this apparently irrational, motiveless work; the dummy for his Procrustean suit is not a dummy, and is ultimately alien to rational motives.  After a brief  date with Jack where he kisses both ends of Jack's mouth with his batarang, he consults Dr. Crane who promptly tells him why his methods will fail. (That's the pre-med student Harleen Quinzel waitressing for him, by the way.  One can wonder how the entire story might have turned out had she not given him naive encouragement about his gift.)

After smirking momentarily at reading "Mr. Batman,"  we read on to see how Mr. Batman resorted to a soul-staining.. uh.. resort:  asking the stained criminals of Gotham to clean Jack off of the table.  It is needless to enumerate the two things that resulted from this:  one, the Batman called them off after some soul-searching (admittedly after breaking his supercomputer in frustration), and two, Batman arrives too late to prevent said criminals from bungling everything up.  Jack tells the criminals how they're as efficient as bananas at hurting him; he ends up in said vat, and only then does Batman arrive. That entire scene is suffocating with meaning: in his boring perfection Jack wanted to die (he explicitly and implicitly asks several times to be shot, to no avail even at point-blank range), and when the opportunity comes to nearly killing him he folds.  He wants to live. To live again and see, and play, with the Batman, who he sees staring down at him while he was drowning.  After ingesting everything offered by a three-minute full submersion into anti-psychotic chemicals (making "insanity insane," as Batman observes), we see the Joker emerge.

In that scene we see the culmination of the transformation of Jack into the Joker, as an intelligent, bored man, not merely a criminal (for criminals have motives) but rather evil in perhaps the metaphysical sense of the word.  Mix that psychological mess with an overdose of chemical sanity and you get something that goes so far beyond sanity you come out at the other end.  You can say, because comics logic.  Or because the Joker.  Or because it makes a really goddamned good story.

When the Joker emerges, Batman sees what Jack has become: the ghost that defies his logic, the partner in his dance, the life he has created by never killing him and by both of them never dying.  Both of them do not die, as the Joker observes.  They just live on and keep dancing and keep escaping and letting each other escape.  (This is the perfect pretext, in multiple elsewheres, for Superman's anger at Batman:  Lois dies time and again by the Joker's hand.)  In not so many words, Batman has created the Joker, by putting on a bat suit.  All the rest are merely circumstances surrounding that piece of kismet.  

 At the height of their dance way above Gotham's streets, we have this bloody brilliant piece of art (make like manga and read from right to left):

He jumps. And Batman saves him, of course.  For he sees what the Joker has become:  the ghost that defies his logic, the partner in his dance, the love of his life: or, in less exalted terms, the life that he saved for which he is now responsible.

Batman breaks up with Lorna (good grief, what a name) for this.  Bruce Wayne finds comfort in her for the first time in quite a long while, Jack sends her to the hospital, she wakes up to Bruce breaking up with her.  Batman cannot be distracted:  he has found someone who makes him real.  Death of the Family plays with this same theme:  it is the mask that the Joker sees, Bruce Wayne be damned.  And Batman, amid Alfred's hope for him striking a balance between "both bat and man," amid his repeated "I can quit any time I want to (but not today, tomorrow won't be, either),"  created an everlasting dance of madmen.

Michael Green, Denys Cowan and John Floyd made a masterpiece.  Now to look for the action figure.