brenticus reviewed Batman by Alan Moore
None
3 stars
I grabbed this from the library on a whim; I felt like reading a graphic novel, and I'd previously heard The Killing Joke is amazing. I'm not exactly a huge Batman or Joker fan, but I still found that this was a pretty decent book, if a bit short for my preference.
I'll start with what I didn't like, which pretty much boils down to the plot. It all feels incredibly rushed, with the whole thing taking less than 50 pages but with an incredible amount of time and detail spent on each scene. In a way, it's remarkable that they can cram so much detail and ambiguity into such a short story — and I do love the ambiguity in the Joker's backstory and the ending — but it still felt like Moore should have made a script twice as long for there to be some time to develop …
I grabbed this from the library on a whim; I felt like reading a graphic novel, and I'd previously heard The Killing Joke is amazing. I'm not exactly a huge Batman or Joker fan, but I still found that this was a pretty decent book, if a bit short for my preference.
I'll start with what I didn't like, which pretty much boils down to the plot. It all feels incredibly rushed, with the whole thing taking less than 50 pages but with an incredible amount of time and detail spent on each scene. In a way, it's remarkable that they can cram so much detail and ambiguity into such a short story — and I do love the ambiguity in the Joker's backstory and the ending — but it still felt like Moore should have made a script twice as long for there to be some time to develop some of the notable themes a bit and give some time for an actual progression of the plot. In the end, the best part of this was a character study of the Joker, but there's a bunch of other stuff surrounding that that's just kind of... eh.
In spite of that, I did enjoy this book. The art and colouring is fantastic, almost haunting at times. In the flashbacks, Bolland used the now-ubiquitous technique of washing out all the colour except for a single object, and the choices of object are all carefully selected to highlight the important part of the scene as well as to just general unnerve the reader a bit. And while there are a couple of instances where Bolland seems to put way too much detail in to a face to the point that it just doesn't look right, his incredibly detailed settings and characters make this book a genuine pleasure to look at.
But really, the whole point of this book is the Joker, and it's a good point. Moore perfectly highlights his insanity, his rationality, his coldness, his humour. More than any other work, The Killing Joke drives home what a wildly contradictory character the Joker is, and it does so in a way that only makes the character better. As someone who never really cared for the Joker through a pile of movies and TV series, this is the work that finally drives home for me what a great character he is.
On a side note, his joke at the end is genuinely funny, I might steal it sometime.
