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Is Analyzing The Killing Joke Like Dissecting a Frog? 

So what have we learned or relearned from this worldwide discussion? Richard Bensam said...

What bothers me about Morrison's interpretation is that it approaches The Killing Joke as if it were a Grant Morrison script rather than an Alan Moore script. Their names have been linked since the days of Warrior but they have different preoccupations and different thematic concerns and different storytelling quirks. The way Grant reads this ending is what those pages would have meant if they'd been the ending of one of his stories. For example, he's very fond of concealing the twist ending earlier in a story so that you only realize when you've finished that you passed right by the crucial moment without realizing it. Grant is also inclined to have critical moments take place off camera. (Moore by contrast usually calls attention to his storytelling devices: "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" being the most famous example.)

I doubt that Moore at that time, the person he was then, would have done a "Batman finally has to kill the Joker" story in the first place...but if he did do it, he would have done it Alan Moore style, not suddenly switching to Grant Morrison techniques.

August 20, 2013 at 4:28 PM J. L. Bell said...

Good point. Morrison praised Moore highly in his podcast comments, as he usually does when speaking of specific other comics creators. (He's lasted too long in the business to be in the habit of bad-mouthing.) But your observation suggests that Morrison was praising Moore for being more like Morrison.

I didn't come to or become convinced by the "Batman kills the Joker" reading because the "sharing a joke" reading was transgressive enough, especially in the first years of the post-Crisis continuity.

August 20, 2013 at 9:02 PM Topic Labels