Did Batman Murder the Joker 25 Years Ago?
Posted in news by Doom DeLuise
Grant Morrison recently sat down with Kevin Smith, when he dropped this bombshell (language is NSFW):
I’m with Smith on this one. I’ve read that story about a dozen times over the years. My entire reading of that book was just shattered.
Unbelievable.
So is the implications that the rest of DC editorial and all subsequent writers just supremely goofed and didn’t understand what they’d published when they decided to treat Barbara Gordon as paralyzed? For someone like Morrison, who treats every published utterance as canon (when convenient, I suppose) it’s kind of an annoyingly cute certainty.
Sure, it’s a fun interpretation but it’s no more substantiated by the book than a more mundane “The Joker stops laughing because the cops are there and his whole plan, upon which the whole book is based, failed. Hence Batman’s laughter beginning as the Joker’s ends” interpretation.
Because the most simple response to Morrison’s claim that Batman is obviously reaching out to grab the Joker’s neck is “Uh, look at the panel. That’s not his neck. You can see his neck, and Batman isn’t grabbing it.” That could be why millions of people have read this story and no one except Grant Morrison noticed that Batman obviously grabbed the Joker’s neck to snap it.
Ok, now that everyone is talking about this, apparently some guy wrote a book about it last year, and he has a counter-argument about a poison needle. I find this much more convincing.
And so on.