•
Rating:
The night. The rain.
There are these two madmen in an asylum.
Batman wants to know. Why. Why do they clash, what's the reason, why? The Joker doesn't know, but the bat has realized that, one way or another, theirs is a vicious circle from which they will never escape. Ever.
This clockwork masterpiece is based precisely on this premise. Two mentally ill individuals who have been endlessly fighting each other for years, without a valid reason, and no, the fact that the Joker is a murderer and thief doesn't count: the police could step in for that.
Bruce Wayne is a tormented man, marked by the death of his parents and many, too many losses (and more he will experience in the future), he can fit into the category of society's outcasts, the fools, those who find no place. He goes around dressed as a ridiculous bat and scares thieves simply because the shadows of the night help him; if he acted by day, he would cover himself with ridicule.
Joker, whose name we do not know, has been forced to live with misery, poverty, and that's all we know, but he probably always harbored sick and perverse instincts. Instincts that finally became apparent when (after the death of his wife, the last straw for an already fragile mind), he fell into a pool of acid and was disfigured and realized, realized that life is funny, meaningless, neither fair nor charitable. And he laughs, oh yes, from then on he will always face everything laughing like the madman he is.
However, while Batman is still anchored to this grim existence, Joker is not, and he has no goals, he is just a loose cannon. But he wants to show something.
He will demonstrate this by shooting and paralyzing Commissioner Gordon's daughter, he will demonstrate this by kidnapping him himself, setting him up in an abandoned amusement park, stripping him and after delivering a crazy yet lucid and brilliant discourse on the average man, tormenting him with photos depicting the abuse of the stripped and bleeding body of the child the old policeman created and loves.
Joker wants to show everyone that it only takes a single event, a bad day to turn the wisest of men into a caricature. Let it be clear, he won't succeed.
"Perhaps it was always just you," shouts Batman at the pitiful and fascinating freak, and it's true: not all of us are destined to give in just because life is futile. But what's the point? Nothing makes sense. Nothing.
Batman has faced Joker once again, defeated him, saved Gordon from the chains, but then realizes that it's all just like this, all a joke. A joke that the villain recounts to him, gesticulating and crying. This after the bat has said that yes, he can still be helped, saved from the abyss. The other doesn't want it. And finished reciting it, he laughs, laughs, laughs. Soon Batman too will join the laughter, and, embraced, they will establish a bond of esteem and respect that, despite future clashes, will never be broken. They are two poor derelicts, rejects, waste, and trash; and this unites them, completes them.
Alan Moore has often described and labeled this story of his as cold and soulless; I find it to be the highest point ever reached by American mainstream comics, because it is all introspection, all dead-end streets, a true psychology treatise.
The prose is rapid, decisive, the mechanisms fit together perfectly and without blemishes. Bolland's drawings offer us the best Joker ever, and the colors give it all an air of "carousel of madness."
At last, his origins are shown to us, finally a turning point is given to the duo's relationship, a turning point that has been truly seminal, and the fruits are still being harvested today.
Masterpiece.
Loading comments slowly
