Joker - Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo
Written by Brian Azzarello
Art by Lee Bermejo and Mick Gray
Cover by Lee Bermejo
Colors by Patricia Mulvihill
Published by DC Comics ; 128 pages
Pills and Psychos
Petty criminal Jonny Frost is out of prison for his fifth time. He's got a wife who is working hard to legally become his ex-wife, kids he has no interest in, and when his local gang of crooks learn Joker is inexplicably being released from Arkham, Frost volunteers to pick him up.
Azzarello's story is a well done Batman comic book novel (though Bats only really appears in the last few pages of the book. On the other hand, it's always on Joker's mind in some way so we're never left without knowing that Gotham is where Batman lives and a place where Joker only temporarily gets to work his magic).
Joker takes an instant liking to Frost. Jonny is naive, amiable, malleable, slightly-innocent somehow, and he has a car. Soon he is Joker's driver and sidekick, not counting Harley Quinn who is working at a strip-bar when she rejoins Joker as his demented other sidekick, handing over drugs and acting as a kind of mother-confessor in the wee hours.
Azzarello uses the character of Jonny Frost as a looking glass into the private realm of Joker's unhinged world, and what we get is a pill-fueled crime lord who becomes increasingly vicious and frenzied as his badly articulated effort to rule all of Gotham's underworld goes off the rails. At least, this seems to be the Joker's intentions, but as the body count mounts it seems to be more of an excuse because Joker's real goal is to get either God's attention, or just Batmans... in fact Joker seems a bit confused about the two figures, they overlap in his mind and play some part in his personal crazy quest.
Killer Croc's Evolution and Gotham's Status Quo
Killer Croc in Azzarello's 2004 "Broken City" had previously been a more evolved version of the usual lizard-like (and Marvel comics-like) killer from other Batman comics. Here Azzarello has evolved Croc even further, and he is now essentially just a very large criminal with a strange skin ailment and the foresight to see what's really going on around him as he acts as Joker's 'muscle'. Croc also defines Frost's future: it will end with Jonny gurgling in his own blood. We sense that Croc has seen this all before and can predict the Joker's pattern effortlessly. Frost, on the other hand, was too preoccupied with the quickly vanishing glamour of working with a famous criminal, satisfaction that quickly gave way to just playing for survival, Joker's moods swinging from affection to a vindictive, murdering rage in the space of a panel or two.
There is 'noir' twaddle in the tale, the hiccups of crime writing in which Gotham is apparently being victimized in an almost supernatural way by an inscrutable God. Gotham is a terrible place without any redemption possible; in fact it was probably built from the same disease that infects Joker. Azzarello's Jonny Frost goes further: Joker himself is a disease. But Azzarello hasn't built up the oppressive claustrophobia of an urban noir, where the feeling is a whole city, and by extension maybe the whole universe is in cahoots against the main characters. Instead all of the random and intentional malevance is centered in the actions of our famous crazed clown. Azzarello's other criminal characters seem organized, and grossly refined, completely dedicated to a status quo where corruption works hand in hand (and relatively peacefully) with the rest of the middle class existance around it. In the end, the Joker is a whirling tazmanian devil creating chaos and spilling blood, but he's still just one fellow in a big city.
With driver and sidekick Jonny Frost, Azzarello has the ex-con narrate the careening plummet from a career highlight of joining the Joker's ranks, then the swift plummet to well-deserved paranoia. Though it seems like Frost should feel Gotham City and the Joker are marshalled against his survival (and sanity), it is only his close proximity to the Joker that really poses a threat. Azzarello doesn't make Gotham come alive as a third character containing its own actions and intentions, instead all of the very detailed architectural drawing and text produces more travelogue than atmosphere.
Joker; his phobias and friends
Azzarello's Joker has a number of psychological problems besides just a desire to see a lot of blood spattered everywhere. He has a raging inferiority complex, a desire for self-destruction wound up with doses of megalomania and feelings of being wrongly persecuted.
When Azzarello's Joker reveals he doesn't eat food, he just lives on pills, a twisted inversion of Elvis, Michael Jackson and every other celebrity who succumbed to chemical living comes to mind. Is the Joker an unintentional glam icon? In keeping with the Joker's 'look' from the Chris Nolan Batman movie, Joker has also had some serious facial surgery performed, with horrendous scars enhancing his smiling visage.
And here is where the superhero universe intrudes the most into Azzarello's story. None of these characters care a whit about Joker's amazing looks. No one asks, and few remark on it. Joker tells Croc how he likes to see him because it makes him feel handsome, but since Bermejo draws Croc as essentially a generic looking (though a bit scaly) muscle-bound gangsta from the 'hood, the remark doesn't make a lot of sense. In a "real world" there would be a lot of commotion over Joker's visuals, but there's not much here among this cast of characters (however, in the tale people get quite nervous when confronted by the Joker, but this seems to be all about the man's penchant for random killing versus the milky-white death grin he is sporting).
(Regarding visuals: Azzarello has Joker verbally dwell on Batman's look for a bit, a combination of analysis, riddle and an expression of Joker's twisted affection for the Caped Crusader.)
Though the silent Harleen Quinzel seems exempt (like Croc), everyone else in the tale is in a tense position where they might be on the receiving end of Joker's next burst of crazed excess. But as demented as the Joker is, he is also a standard issue sadist with a demand to limit and approve/not approve of the behaviour of people close to him. Frost's anxiety grows from his tripping over those shifting lines of conduct that Joker requires, a set of rules that he finds harder and harder to understand as he sees other victims randomly dispatched by an unpredictible caprice in the Joker's mind.
Abusive and controlling, Joker is a father figure that Frost is attracted to but then later can only fear. Quinzel seems to know how this all works, she says nothing whatsoever throughout the story but otherwise seems to anticipate every move. Croc's business attitude seems to shield him, and he makes no special editorial statements (aside from his warning to Frost). Penguin appears briefly, but Joker's contempt and Penguin's inability to play the behaviour game correctly almost gets him killed.
Lee Bermejo and Mick Gray Artwork, Patricia Mulvihill Colors
Lee Bermejo's artwork is effective and makes for a true professional superhero comic. Mick Gray assists with nicely drawn buildings and bridges. A reliance on photo reference haunts the look of this book, but the finishing effects are interesting and remind me of Italian comic books, that is where a series of frames are drawn in a basic ink on paper style, but certain panels are embellished into small paintings. This seems to emphasize that a particular panel is important for the reader to notice, or just to show that the artist can really create a beautifully detailed image, but there's not enough time to do the whole book that way.
The colors by Patricia Mulvihill keep the book in a seedy, shadow-filled nightmare mode of dank and dark criminality. Although there are glimpses of the city as if it just might be any other American city with its good and bad sides, what we really see are endless visions of a bad place with a very bad man running amok.
The Long Shadow of Heath Ledger
A step removed from the usual Batman graphic novels, Azzarello's JOKER is built along the lines of the Heath Ledger Joker from the Dark Knight movie, although I have read that Azzarello was already in progress on this tale prior to the Dark Knight movie release. Either way it is in keeping with the sick-fiend dreamed up by Jerry Robinson back in Batman #1 from 1940, versus the cartoony character that developed over the decades within the standard month-to-month fare of DC Comics.
In the Nolan Dark Knight film, the Heath Ledger Joker character is dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy and double-dealing of Gotham's citizens, with some sense of self-justification going into the project. As with the start scene from the film where Joker kills off his henchmen one by one, the dangerous and unpredictable personality of the Joker is given center-stage. Azzarello takes a more nuanced approach, since his Joker is more common pillhead blown up larger than life by way of makeup (or surgery?) and a taste for bloodletting violence coupled with hints of supernatural foreboding. There's more nuts-and-bolts of running a gang in Azzarello's tale, and though the Ledger Joker has obviously been stamped into the visuals of this book, Azzarello's JOKER is still a step apart from the Hollywood version.
Article history: Originally written Aug 20, 2009. Edited and added to November 3, 2009.
Click on the images below to see enlarged pages from the Joker Graphic Novel , artwork by Lee Bermejo:
Directly related: The Azzarello Joker gets interviewed!
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