Powers & Panels Show - Batman - The Killing Joke - Episode #9

 🦇🦇From the cosmic chaos of World War Hulk, the heartbreak of The Death of Superman, the breaking of the Bat in Knightfall, the dystopian nightmare of X-Men: Days of Future Past, the psychological terror of Kraven's Last Hunt, the gut-punch of The Night Gwen Stacy Died, and the fractured reality of Brand New Day — Blaze and Zoey are back, and this week they're stepping into one of the most disturbing and debated single issues in comic book history: Batman: The Killing Joke.

It's the story of one bad day — and how far a man will go to prove that sanity is nothing but a joke away from madness.

The Joker escapes Arkham with one goal: to prove that anyone, even Commissioner Gordon, is just one terrible day from becoming exactly like him. What follows is a night of horror that permanently reshapes Barbara Gordon's future, tests Gordon's own sanity, and pushes Batman and the Joker's twisted relationship to its breaking point. Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's one-shot has spent decades as one of the most influential — and most controversial — Batman stories ever told.

Blaze and Zoey dig into what makes The Killing Joke a chapter fans still can't stop arguing about:

 ⚡The origin theory Moore gives 🃏the Joker — and why it's built to be unreliable Brian Bolland's iconic, unsettling artwork and its lasting influence on Batman visuals The lasting fallout for Barbara Gordon, and the decades-long conversation about how her story was used The bathhouse ending and what it really means for Batman and Joker's relationship Whether a story can be a landmark of the medium and still deserve real criticism at the same time

SHOP THE STORY:
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Support the show by grabbing this classic at the link below:

Read the Comic: Batman: The Killing Joke Deluxe (New Edition) → https://amzn.to/3SQyglG

MUSIC CREDITS:
Music from #Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io
License code: HUS7OXD9DBYXOCNO
Music from #Uppbeat: uppbeat.io

🎨Brian Bolland's iconic, unsettling artwork and its lasting influence on Batman visuals ♿The lasting fallout for Barbara Gordon, and the decades-long conversation about how her story was used The bathhouse ending and what it really means for Batman and Joker's relationship Whether a story can be a landmark of the medium and still deserve real criticism at the same time

SHOP THE STORY:
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Support the show by grabbing this classic at the link below:

Read the Comic: Batman: The Killing Joke Deluxe (New Edition) → https://amzn.to/3SQyglG

MUSIC CREDITS:
Music from #Uppbeat: https://uppbeat.io
License code: HUS7OXD9DBYXOCNO
Music from #Uppbeat: uppbeat.io

Music from #Uppbeat: uppbeat.io
License code: HUS7OXD9DBYXOCNO

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:31

We're back! Welcome back to PowerShell Channel, Shacomics Universe, old and new. Here we are, episode 9, and wow, we're just flying through the air and through the episode. And okay, first, uh, I wanna thank you for joining us today. I'm Blade, your host, and Joy, my trusty side game options. Uh hope will be joining us soon as well. But I do wanna bring up some housekeeping. Last episode we asked you something I think turned out to be one of our best questions yet. We said setting aside how it had happened, uh setting aside the brand new day, one more day Spider-Man block that we were in, setting aside the pistol entirely, if you were reading Brand New Day issue one back in 2008, and you had never read one more day, and you had no idea what had been undone to make Peter Parker's fresh start possible, would you have loved it? Does the context change everything? Or does the story exist independent of the cost? The comments on that on that one were generally great. A lot of you said the writing on its own terms is fun, breezy, exactly what Spider-Man should feel like. And a lot of you said no, you can't unknow the cost, it colors every single panel, whether the story asks you to think about it or not. So we're going to let that one breathe in the comments a little longer because we feel it does deserve it. And here's the big news for this episode. We're leaving Queens. We're leaving the Spider-Man neighborhood. After eight episodes anchored in the world, we're now crossing over back into Gotham City. And I owe you a quick explanation because last episode we had teased that episode 9 was going to be an X-Men story. That was the original plan, but going back to our lineup, Zoe and I have realized that we've now done a real stretch of consecutive Marvel stories in a row, and we didn't want to run DC into the ground on the schedule while it sat untouched for months. So we're we're pausing the X-Men story plans for now. We're absolutely still doing it as it is a major X-Men story, but we're going to do that later in the year, and it's definitely going to be worth the wait. But for right now, we're going to be crossing back into DC and show some love to that universe as well. And I want to be up front with you. This is going to be one of the heaviest, most debated episodes we have ever done. Heavier than Gwen Stacy, more controversial than One More Day, because today we're talking about the single most influential and most argued over Batman story ever published. And my co-host Zoe um does know about this and knows what's coming. Welcome back. I know a couple weeks have passed, and here we are in episode 9. And now we're going to do a Batman story, and it's a big one. And uh I'd love I'd love to let you say hello um to the to the folks out there. Um and um it'd be great to hear your voice. How you doing?

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Hello, Blaze. Good to see you too. Another couple of weeks, and here we are at episode number nine. Wow. Also, hello everyone! Okay, I will give my quick take on that brand new day question before we jump into whatever Blaze has planned for me today. Because I've been thinking about it since we recorded last episode. Honestly, I don't think the story exists. Independent of the cost, I want it to. Issue one is genuinely fun. Peter's got his energy back. It reads like classic spider. But the second you know a marriage got erased and a dying man's memory got rewritten to make that life impossible. You can't fully unveil that. Even if the comic itself never asked you to. I think that's the uncomfortable answer. A story can be well crafted on its own page and still be built on ground you're not allowed to think too hard about. That's my take. Write me in the comments. Okay, big shift today. Hello, welcome to Powers and Panels. I am so glad you're here. And I need to say something honestly up front. Blaze told me what today's story is, and I have already looked up some things I did not need to look up. We are doing Batman today. We are doing the story, the one people still argue about in comic shops 30 some years later. I'm a little nervous, and I will be back later to give my take and the listener question of the week. Blaze, take it away.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

Well, Zoe, I think she'll be a little nervous today. Okay, then we'll talk about this story that's actually called The Killing Joe. And this is Batman The Killing Joe, a one-shot graphic novel published by BC Comics back in 1988, written by Alan Moore, uh, art and colors originally by Brian Bollin. Though Bollin's original color work wasn't published until the recolored edition came out nearly 20 years later, which is its own interesting story, which we'll also touch on. This is a 60-some pages story, uh, no ongoing art, one story, no multi-issue buildup, and it is without exaggeration, one of the most influential single comics ever published, and also one of the most criticized. So let's get into it. So let me tell you about the story that decided for a whole generation of writers what the Joker actually is. By 1988, Batman and the Joker had been going at each other for almost 50 years. The Joker first appeared in Batman No. 1 back in 1940, and over those decades the Joker had been a lot of different things. A straight-up murderer in its earliest appearance, a goofy trickster during the more comedic silver age, and then by the late 1970s and into the 80s, under writers like Steve Engelhard and Denny O'Neill, he had shifted back into something more genuinely dangerous, a homicidal, unpredictable force with no clear motive beyond chaos itself. So what Alvin Moore wanted to do with the killing joke was to give the Joker an origin, not a definitive one, and this matters a lot, we'll actually come back to it, but a possible one. Because up to this point, the Joker's past was famously and deliberately blank. Even his own line in earlier comics was something like, Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes I remember it another way. Moore takes that uncertainty and builds an entire story around it, framing the origin explicitly as something the Joker himself might be constructing rather than recalling. So the version we get is this um before he was a Joker, he was an unnamed engineer, a failed stand-up comedian, he was broke yet with a pregnant wife, trying to make ends meet by working one night with a couple of criminals on a robbery at the chemical plant where he used to work. Before the job even happens, he told his wife died in a household accident. He goes through with the job anyway because he has nowhere else to go and he has no money. Batman shows up, there's a struggle, the engineer in a red hood, terrified, jumps into a chemical runoff to escape, and the fall and the chemicals are what transforms him. He climbs out, looks at his reflection, and cannot recognize himself, cannot stop laughing. That is the man who became the Joker. So the reason that backstory matters is because of what Moore is building toward thematically. This is a story about the idea that anyone, and anyone is one sufficiently catastrophic day away from becoming something unrecognizable. The Joker's entire philosophy, which he says almost word for word in the book, is that it doesn't take much to break a person. It's just one bad day. That's the whole thesis. And his plan and this story is to prove that point. Specifically to prove it by giving Commissioner Gordon one very, very bad day, and seeing if he breaks the same way the Joker believes he himself had broke. Now that's to set up a villain with a theory of human nature and a plan to run an experiment on the one man closest to Batman who isn't Batman. So the story opens with Batman visiting Arkham Asylum, trying almost desperately to talk to the Joker directly. No theatrics, no fighting, just two men across the table. Now he's trying to reach some kind of resolution, even suggesting that one of them is going to end up killing the other someday if this doesn't stop. It's quite a strange, almost intimate scene. And then Batman realized he's been talking to a decoy. The real Joker has already escaped. Now the Joker's plan unfolds fast. He shows up at the home of Commissioner Jim Gordon and his daughter Barbara, who in this era of comics has already served as Batgirl, though she isn't active in that role at this point in continuity. The Joker shoots Barbara at point blank range through the front door. The bullet hits her spine. She is paralyzed. Then the Joker has her stripped and photographs her gravely wounded on the floor for a purpose we learn shortly. Then he abducts Commissioner Gordon. Now, I want to be straightforward about the about this scene rather than skip past it because it is the single most discussed moment in the entire story, and you should understand exactly what happens and why it's controversial. Barbara Gordon is shot and paralyzed specifically as a device to inflict pain on the two men in her life, her father and by extension, Batman. She has no agency in the scene. She is not the subject of the story. She is the mechanism by which harm is delivered to the men who are who are actually the subjects of the story. That's the core of the criticism that we'll get into in a few minutes. And it's worth sitting with now because it shapes everything that follows. The Joker takes Gordon to an abandoned, decommissioned amusement park and puts him through a genuinely disturbing ordeal, stripping him, by chaining him, forcing him through a kind of haunted haunthouse gauntlet of the photographs of his wounded daughter blown up grotesquely large alongside sideshow performers hired to taunt him. The Joker's goal explicitly stated is to break Gordon's sanity, to prove that any man given one sufficiently terrible day will crack the same way the Joker believes he did. He wants Gordon to end this experience believing the universe is a cruel joke, the same conclusion the Joker reached in the chemical plant. Now Batman, meanwhile, is rach is racing to find them, working with Barbara from the hospital bed as she pieces uh together clues despite her injuries, uh steady, clear headed, doing real detective work even in that state in the hospital, she helps Batman find the amusement park. He then finds Commissioner Gordon, alive, traumatized, brutalized. He insists that Batman bring the Joker in by the book. By the book, not killed, not beaten past the point of arrest. Proof in the middle of the worst day of his life that the Joker's thesis is wrong, that decency can't survive unbearable cruelty. Batman then confronts the Joker directly, and this is where the story becomes something more than a horror piece. Because the fight when it comes is short, and what follows is stranger and more ambiguous than almost anything else in mainstream comics of that era. So after the fight, Batman and a Joker end up alone together outside in the rain, and Batman does something he almost never does in stories from this era. He talks to the Joker not as a villain to be stopped, but almost as a person he's trying to save. He acknowledges essentially that he understands what one bad day can do to a person, that he had one too the night his parents died, and that it could have taken him somewhere just as broken. He offers the Joker something like a way out, not forgiveness for what he's done, something closer to it that doesn't have to end with one of them killing the other person. And the Joker's response is to tell a joke, a short, bleak one, about two mental patients trying to escape an asylum across a rooftop involving a flashlight held out like a bridge, and a punchline undercuts the entire premise of trust. It's a Joker's way of re restating his thesis one last time that reaching out that connection, that trust is always in the end a setup for the fall. And here's the part people still argue about. In response to the joke, Batman starts laughing, genuinely helplessly laughing, alongside the Joker in the rain. And then the final wordless panel shows their hands, Batman's hand on the Joker's shoulder, and the laughter fading, and the rain hitting a puddle, and the panel closing on that image with no further text. Now, for decades, fans have debated what actually happens in that final sequence. There are two dominant readings. The first, and for a long time, the more common one, this is simply the emotional climax of the one bad day theme. Two broken men sharing one genuine moment of dark human connection before police sirens arrive, and Batman, presumably presumably, brings the Joker in exactly the way Gordon demanded by the book. The second reading, which gained real traction over time, including from artist Brian Baldwin himself in later interviews, is that the ambiguity is intentional in a much darker way. That Batman in that final wordless sequence actually kills a Joker. Bolin has said in interviews that he personally intended it that way, even though writer Alan Moore has said that was not his own intent when he wrote that story. Now that disagreement between the story's own writer and artist about what actually happens is remarkable, and it's exactly why this ending has stayed a live debate for over 35 years. Moore said publicly more than once that he doesn't think the Batman kills the Joker. Renee matches his script, but he's all he's also said he's fine with the ambiguity existing because a genuinely ambiguous ending was closer to what he wanted than a tidy one. This isn't a mistake in a storytelling, it's a deliberate choice that the creative team themselves don't fully agree on, which is almost unheard of for a mainstream superhero comic. Okay. So um the killing jokes uh influence on superhero comics and honestly on pop culture genuinely is hard to overstate. This is a story that cemented the modern definitive read on the Joker as a purely philosophically driven force of chaos rather than a scheming criminal. The version that shows up in almost every major Batman adaptation since, including Heath Ledger's performance in The Dark Knight, which draws directly and explicitly on Morse's agent of chaos conception of that character. The One Bad Day line has been quoted, referenced, and built on in comics film and television for over three decades. But I do want to spend some real time on the other half of the story's legacy because it matters just as much and because I don't think you can honestly talk about the killing joke without it. The treatment of Barbara Gordon in this story is one of the most cited examples in a much larger conversation about how mainstream superhero comics have historically treated female characters, specifically the pattern where a woman is severely injured, killed, or depersonalized purely to create emotional stakes for the men around her, with no real interest in her as a subject in her own right. This pattern even got a name a few years later, Women in Refrigerators, coined by comics creator and comics writer Gail Simone, drawing on an unrelated Green Lantern story, but the killing joke is consistently raised as one of the most defining examples of the same dynamic. Barbara Gordon is shot, stripped, and photographed, and then the story moves on to be almost entirely about her father and Batman. She doesn't get a line of dialogue after she's shot, and she reappears without, you know, working working a case from her hospital bed, and even then the narrative weight of what has happened to her belongs to the men in her life, not to her. So here's where I think it actually um the most important part of this whole conversation lands. Alan Moore himself has said repeatedly and without hedging that he thinks he got it wrong. In interviews over the years, he's been blunt that the killing joke wasn't, in his view, a good story. And that the way Barbara Gordon was used in it was a mistake, a device rather than a character. That's not a fan criticism being imposed on a story after the fact. This is the writer himself saying this, and I think that matters because it means the honest way to engage with this book isn't to pretend the criticism doesn't exist or to pretend the story is untouchable just because it's influential. It's the influence and and the flaws can still be in the same book. So what happened next in the actual comics is in a strange way the the most redemptive part of his whole story, though it happened almost by accident, writer John Ostrender, working on the Suicide Squad series shortly after, made the choice to bring Barbara Gordon back, not as a victim to be pity, but as Oracle, a master hacker, information broker, and tactical genius who becomes one of the most important behind the scenes figures in the entire DC universe, coordinating Batman, the Bat Family, and eventually the Birds of Prey from her wheelchair, using her intelligence rather than her body as her primary tool. Oracle became, for a lot of readers, one of the most well realized depictions of disability and mainstream superhero comics, not because her paralysis was erased or fixed, but because the character built an entire identity and a genuine position of power on top of it without ever needing to walk again to become one of the most competent people in the room. That evolution wasn't planned by Moore, it came from other writers choosing to do right by a character who had been badly used. And I think that's worth knowing because it means. So the book's visual legacy is also worth noting quickly because Brian Bollins line work is extraordinarily clean and precise, almost clinical, which makes the horror of the story land harder by contrast. The original 1988 coloring by John Higgins was much more muted and grim. A fully recolored edition with brighter, more stylized colors by Poland himself came out in 2008. And fans are genuinely split on which version serves the story better. The starker original coloring versus the more polished polished later edition is his own small ongoing debate in Batman fan circles. And the story's cultural footprint kept extending forward. It was adapted into an animated film in 2016, which added a lengthy prologue focused on Batgirl that was itself heavily criticized in ways that echoed a lot of the same conversation about how the character gets used versus how she gets developed. It's almost fitting in an oblique way that even the adaption trying to give Barbara more space ran into the exact the exact same criticism the original story and the book did as well. So where does that leave us? The killing joke is one of the most important single Batman stories ever published. It defined a modern Joker, it produced one of the most argued over endings in comic history, and it indirectly gave us Oracle, one of the great characters in the DC universe. And it's also a story that mishandles Barbara Gordon very badly in a way that his own writer has openly admitted. Both of those things are true at the same time. I don't think you have to choose between them to understand why this book still matters. If you want to read it, it's a short read, one volume, widely available, easy to find in either coloring. I'd actually recommend reading the original John Higgins colors first if you can find them, then the 2008 recolor, just to see how much a color palette can change the feeling of the exact same pages. So I'm going to get Zoe back on because there's a lot to sit with from this story. And knowing Zoe, she's got her thoughts and her takes. So I'd love to hear what she has to say. Zoe, the floor is yours. Take it away.

SPEAKER_00 24:51

Okay. I have a lot going on right now. Let me start with the one lighter thing I'm allowed to say. And then I promise I'll be serious. The Joker's whole origin is failed comedian has the single worst night of his life and falls into a vat of chemicals. And I just, as someone who has also bombed on a mic before, I want it on the record that most of us do not become supervillains about it. We just don't do open mic again. There's a less chemically drastic off-ramp available to all of us. And I want that acknowledged. Okay. Serious now. The Barbara Gordon thing, yugis blaze, thank you, for actually sitting with that instead of just gliding past it. Because I think that's the only honest way to talk about this book. It's wild to me that the writer himself has basically said, yeah, I didn't serve that character well, that's rare. And I think what got me listening to all of this is that the most powerful part of the whole story isn't actually in the story. It's what happened after. Oracle, a character other writers built out of the wreckage of a decision Alan Moore himself regrets. There's something almost hopeful, buried in that, even though the original book absolutely doesn't earn it on its own. Okay, question of the week, and I want real answers on this one. Given everything we just talked about, the ambiguous ending, Moore's own regrets, the one bad day thesis, sit day. Do you think the killing joke actually deserves its reputation as the definitive Batman Joker story? Or is it more influential than it is genuinely good? Drop your answer in the YouTube comments. I want to see where people land on this because I genuinely don't think there's an obvious consensus. Listeners, I can't wait to rejoin you all for episode number 10 in another two weeks. Also, I almost forgot to say this.

SPEAKER_01 27:13

Please avoid chalky-skinned clown-looking people in purple suits with green hair blazed. Back to you to wrap it up.

SPEAKER_02 27:25

Okay, and I think that question is going to split the comments right down the middle. And honestly, that feels appropriate for this book specifically. I do want to thank you all for listening to Powers and Panels. I'm Blaze, she's Zoy, and we'll see you folks in two weeks for episode number 10. And we're heading right back across the aisle. Um, we did one DC episode today, and we're going back to Marvel, and we're doing a big story, we're doing the Fantastic Course, The Coming of Galactus. Completely different kind of scale after what we went through today. Um, instead of one bad day from one man, we're talking about a threat to the entire planet, and which should be a fun, good change of pace after everything we just sat with. So until then, again, we thank you for joining us. Please like us, please subscribe, you know, please spread the news about our podcast. We'd appreciate it. And uh keep thinking, and please remember uh besides reading those comic books and those great stories, wherever you can get them in print or online, that one bad day doesn't have to be the whole story. Sometimes it's just the beginning of a much better one. So we appreciate you, and uh well, we'll see you guys real soon. Thank you. We'll see everybody real soon, guys and gals. We appreciate you all, and uh, we can't wait to see you again or be with you in two weeks. So be safe out there. Thank you again.