Alan Moore didn't kill the Joker. What killed the Joker was EXTREME oversaturation, and hack writers asking the same "ethical question" of batman in all those stories. No. He's not going to kill the Joker, no matter what he does. We get it. Move on and ask a different question.
Yes - Allan Moore intended for us to consider that both Batman and the Jocker died - though the latter is more likely than the former. The real joke (on us, as readers) is that neither are explicit or definitive - if we want to continue the story into later "canon" lore, we can; but we'll definitely be influenced in our reading of it
For me it did. When I bought Detective Comics #1000 I almost became physically nauseous reading it because I realized after reading Batman stories off/on since 1965, I was done. This hero & villain have been done to absolute death in every possible permutation from slapstick to gory. It obviously still sells well enough for DC to maintain printing to keep it alive for licensing purposes but wow - beyond being an iconic image, give it a rest. There's nothing left to mine story-wise.
Yo...! You got it man! @ 8:16, I overlooked that. I just figured that his reaction was due to the blow to his head and him trying to regain his senses. Brilliant narrative dissimulation if so intended by the author. Makes hella more sense too, now that you point it out. Good shit. Favorited! 🍻
This is a total fallacy. If you read Moore's script it's clear that at the end both men are just laughing and hanging on to each other as they double up with grim mirth.
I totally agree. This is a great video up till that midpoint. It handles the history of the book well, and even has the good taste to mention that Alan Moore himself has publicly criticized it on many occasions. But then it gets lost in Grant Morrison's flimflam. It's really weird that Morrison is such an incredibly talented writer, and yet they've allowed themself to become so twisted in Alan Moore's shadow. But from what I understand, they've always been a bit of a troll. This particular notion is pure fan canon, utterly unsupported by the text. One could just as easily claim that the Joker stopped laughing because Batman kissed him. As far back as 1954, Fredric Wertham proved that you could read anything into Batman you want to. He added a gay subtext to Batman and Robin's relationship simply by perceiving it there and complaining to congress. Ever since, the idea has become an inescapable part of the Batman legacy, whether people like it or not. But so far as I know, it's never been an actual part of the comics, either explicitly or implicitly. People are free to read a queer subtext into the characters if they want, but that doesn't make it canon. Both Alan and Grant have claimed to be magicians, and I think this kind of thing speaks to that. With just the right magic words at just the right time, Grant has altered people's perception of a comic book they didn't even write, attaching a subtext that simply isn't there. But like hypnotism, the subject has to want their perception to be altered. There's a difference between subtext actually implied by the work, and subtext we insist is there because it maybe could be. Go too far down that road, and anything can mean anything. That's how you get lizard people conspiracies.
@@rottensquid All the years...decades...of crap dumped into RUclips, the ranting about this one Batman/Joker story, and you post a perfect response...just damn! Yep, nailed it and put the mess to rest, words stop. I do disagree with the observation about Lizard people. No one explains what is and is not a conspiracy better than Kermit Roosevelt.
@@theunknowngamer5477 Not familiar with Kermit Roosevelt, so I don't know how he sums up what makes for a conspiracy theory. I admit though that I can often lose vital details in my search for the simplest summation. But there does need to be some kind of accepted distinction between actual, verified conspiracies and the elaborate fever dreams of people who can't accept that reality doesn't match their core beliefs.
@@rottensquid Lol, a proper novel would be this ambiguous on purpose to allow a read to come to his or her own conclusion (specially modernist) and Moore is a proper writer. To say a work has only one interpretation is such a narrowminded way to look at a work of art but then again, if you only read comic books.
I really like the idea that Batman has killed multiple Jokers and hasn't told anyone as if he is being haunted by some kind of supernatural menace that he really fears.
I hate to contradict you, but Alan Moore himself addressed this in an interview and said "No. Batman did not kill the Joker. Batman and the Joker just shared a laugh at the end. That's all". However, just like the Joker, Alan Moore can be considered an Unreliable Narrator.
So, Barbara was actually retired from Batgirl at that point. The other issue is that Barbara/ Batgirl is that she was never a popular character in the same sense that Supergirl who had died already at that point. The 66 TV show where she was created and the cartoons was where people knew her from. Oracle was a better character. Cassandra and Stephanie were better Batgirls. I doubt the comics would have utilized her better. She probably would have been renamed regardless to shift her away from being the female counterpart.
Nice one! But I think it's for us to say. I think they deliberately left it open for everyone to draw their own conclusions. Like a cliffhanger, but it ends here and now they are Schrödinger's hero/villain couple.
Being a big Moore fan (but not a big Bats fan) I bought this at my local comic shop back in ‘88. Never got it sadly. I think this may be one of the most overrated books in comics. Art was beautiful though.
🙄 Do you - the creator of this RUclips review - mean "Did Alan Moore kill the Joker" AS a character, as in, "as a decent character/remotely believable villain in comics/pulp fiction"?? (As to that, I believe he probably did: though The Animated Series, Sean Murphy, and the movies featuring Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix respectively, may have resurrected him a little bit!! 😏 Or DO you the creator of this RUclips channel mean: "DID Alan Moore intentionally kill the Joker, literally but in a 'veiled' way, in the comic Batman: The Killing Joke?" IF you mean the latter assertion, I know for a fact, that it is bollocks. 1) Because Alan Moore, on any occasion he has ever been asked, has basically pooh-poohed it (or has by implication) and 2) Because I'm old enough to remember a time, when I was young, that NOBODY reading comics was talking about this. THAT means, that as a "theory of what happened in the story", it is a RETCON. NOBODY was mentioning this as a possibility, in the late 80s, or the 1990s. This garbage was only put about by Grant Morrison in the 2000s. Therefore, it is a total afterthought. And it's a stupid "theory" anyway! 😏 TO ME, anyway, as a young adult reader back in 1988, I'll tell you what it looked like to me then! 😏😏 BATMAN was obviously so, if not enamoured, then MYSTERIOUSLY sympathetic to the Joker (strange since this guy in Moore's story has attacked and injured BOTH his best friends from the cop world, Commissioner Gordon and Barbara Gordon! ), SO sympathetic (despite any atrocities the Joker has committed here) that he seems determined to offer him all kinds of help (which the Joker turns down 😏) and laughing at the Joker's jokes, and all... That *I* was wondering if they didn't both go for a drink at a BAR afterwards 🙄, that being about the level of seriousness that the Batman seemed to evaluate the Joker's crimes at! 😏 And of course, *on* the actual page, there were just these two pairs of feet shown facing each other at the end - no action - and then an empty street, and the sound effect of a police siren drawn in the background. Well', to ME: the obvious "Extrapolation" from that, was that the Batman couldn't be bothered to take in the Joker, and that he either left him for the police (hence siren) or that he let him escape completely. (Not that he killed him! 😏 Where's the signs of scuffle, were that to happen?) In fact, the secretary of the British comics creators guild or something like that, told me in the 1990s, that the police siren meant that the police took him in! 😏 But REALLY, I think that the FEMINIST evaluation of that whole thing, would basically be, "Fail, Batman"!!! 😏😏 Pity there were no feminist comics critics in the 1980s. Or fro most of the 1990s. 😏 Yeah, well. I don't know why people are still talking about this with interest today. Or why they were, even 2 or 10 years ago. It was NEVER intended to be canon, firstly; and I can SEE why Alan Moore has basically repudiated it - why he was talking about it disparagingly as early as the early 2000s, basically - because it is NOT in line with modern sensibilities; and because it was NEVER a very good story to begin with!! It's just trashy melodrama. And unlike something like Victorian melodrama, it is totally devoid of sympathy, empathy, sentiment (except for some brief and specious violin-playing for "Joe"), or anything that we would now put under the bracket of "EQ". Very much like Alan Moore himself, really. 😏
@Emprah NOT woke! (I'm too old to be "woke".) Simple truth! Why was Alan Moore posing as a "feminist" all along, yet he wrote something like THIS? 🤔 Why have (Transatlantic) comics been dismissive and abusive ("women in refrigerators") towards its female characters? (Certainly since changes in the publishing rules, and in the "etiquette" of the industry by the 1980s made it possible (nay fashionable) to produce a lot more violent crap? If "mature comics" means "violent misogynistic, homophobic anti-minority crap", then I'm against it. That's not "woke". That's true socialism.
They thought of a completely different "Joker origin story" for the 1989 Tim Burton movie anyway. Much more based on the 1952 original, it seems. (And then that was pretty much borrowed, for The Animated Series.) And in my view, Sam Hamm (the writer for the movie) did a much better job, than Moore? WHY? Because he gave the Joker a much more believable background (not a fan of the idea he killed the Waynes, though) and you saw WHY he might have been in that factory, HOW he got swept out of the vat into the river, how he got disfigured, how he turned into a "criminal mastermind" - because he was basically a top level gangster already, really... At least the first half of that movie made reasonable logical sense. Silly ending; but what can you do? 😄 Writers who write ILLOGIC not logic - most of DC's modern writers - get my thumbs down, x 10000! "Vital", or "vile"?? (I HATE the way in which movies tend to "sample" the garbage ideas out of this GN, btw. 😏) So anyway - THIS is the reason, why O'Neil and Giordano thought of injecting the Batman mythos full of MISOGYNY and needless violence, and general trash?? Because they were worried about being overtaken by the movie??Ye gods!! 🙄🙄👎
Alan Moore didn't kill the Joker. What killed the Joker was EXTREME oversaturation, and hack writers asking the same "ethical question" of batman in all those stories. No. He's not going to kill the Joker, no matter what he does. We get it. Move on and ask a different question.
Yes - Allan Moore intended for us to consider that both Batman and the Jocker died - though the latter is more likely than the former. The real joke (on us, as readers) is that neither are explicit or definitive - if we want to continue the story into later "canon" lore, we can; but we'll definitely be influenced in our reading of it
For me it did. When I bought Detective Comics #1000 I almost became physically nauseous reading it because I realized after reading Batman stories off/on since 1965, I was done. This hero & villain have been done to absolute death in every possible permutation from slapstick to gory. It obviously still sells well enough for DC to maintain printing to keep it alive for licensing purposes but wow - beyond being an iconic image, give it a rest. There's nothing left to mine story-wise.
Yo...! You got it man! @ 8:16, I overlooked that. I just figured that his reaction was due to the blow to his head and him trying to regain his senses. Brilliant narrative dissimulation if so intended by the author. Makes hella more sense too, now that you point it out. Good shit. Favorited! 🍻
This is a total fallacy. If you read Moore's script it's clear that at the end both men are just laughing and hanging on to each other as they double up with grim mirth.
I totally agree. This is a great video up till that midpoint. It handles the history of the book well, and even has the good taste to mention that Alan Moore himself has publicly criticized it on many occasions. But then it gets lost in Grant Morrison's flimflam.
It's really weird that Morrison is such an incredibly talented writer, and yet they've allowed themself to become so twisted in Alan Moore's shadow. But from what I understand, they've always been a bit of a troll. This particular notion is pure fan canon, utterly unsupported by the text. One could just as easily claim that the Joker stopped laughing because Batman kissed him.
As far back as 1954, Fredric Wertham proved that you could read anything into Batman you want to. He added a gay subtext to Batman and Robin's relationship simply by perceiving it there and complaining to congress. Ever since, the idea has become an inescapable part of the Batman legacy, whether people like it or not. But so far as I know, it's never been an actual part of the comics, either explicitly or implicitly. People are free to read a queer subtext into the characters if they want, but that doesn't make it canon.
Both Alan and Grant have claimed to be magicians, and I think this kind of thing speaks to that. With just the right magic words at just the right time, Grant has altered people's perception of a comic book they didn't even write, attaching a subtext that simply isn't there. But like hypnotism, the subject has to want their perception to be altered. There's a difference between subtext actually implied by the work, and subtext we insist is there because it maybe could be. Go too far down that road, and anything can mean anything. That's how you get lizard people conspiracies.
@@rottensquid
All the years...decades...of crap dumped into RUclips, the ranting about
this one Batman/Joker story, and you post a perfect response...just damn!
Yep, nailed it and put the mess to rest, words stop.
I do disagree with the observation about Lizard people.
No one explains what is and is not a conspiracy better than Kermit Roosevelt.
@@theunknowngamer5477 Not familiar with Kermit Roosevelt, so I don't know how he sums up what makes for a conspiracy theory. I admit though that I can often lose vital details in my search for the simplest summation. But there does need to be some kind of accepted distinction between actual, verified conspiracies and the elaborate fever dreams of people who can't accept that reality doesn't match their core beliefs.
@@theunknowngamer5477 Regardless, if you can point to the essay that best sums up this Kermit Roosevelt person's definition, I'd love to watch it.
@@rottensquid Lol, a proper novel would be this ambiguous on purpose to allow a read to come to his or her own conclusion (specially modernist) and Moore is a proper writer. To say a work has only one interpretation is such a narrowminded way to look at a work of art but then again, if you only read comic books.
I really like the idea that Batman has killed multiple Jokers and hasn't told anyone as if he is being haunted by some kind of supernatural menace that he really fears.
I hate to contradict you, but Alan Moore himself addressed this in an interview and said "No. Batman did not kill the Joker. Batman and the Joker just shared a laugh at the end. That's all".
However, just like the Joker, Alan Moore can be considered an Unreliable Narrator.
@5:56 it was also in theaters briefly dude, not just direct to DVD. I should know, I saw it in the theater and disliked it
"Batrape: The Anime Version".
So, Barbara was actually retired from Batgirl at that point. The other issue is that Barbara/ Batgirl is that she was never a popular character in the same sense that Supergirl who had died already at that point. The 66 TV show where she was created and the cartoons was where people knew her from. Oracle was a better character. Cassandra and Stephanie were better Batgirls. I doubt the comics would have utilized her better. She probably would have been renamed regardless to shift her away from being the female counterpart.
yeah because now all Batman is dark and stupid.
Nice one!
But I think it's for us to say. I think they deliberately left it open for everyone to draw their own conclusions. Like a cliffhanger, but it ends here and now they are Schrödinger's hero/villain couple.
I'd say Batman and the Joker are both Rorschach tests - bringing out the individual creativity of any artist, writer, or director working on them
The Killing Joke is the WORST Joker story!! 👎👎👎👎👎
No wonder Alan Moore disowns it.
Being a big Moore fan (but not a big Bats fan) I bought this at my local comic shop back in ‘88. Never got it sadly. I think this may be one of the most overrated books in comics. Art was beautiful though.
🙄 Do you - the creator of this RUclips review - mean "Did Alan Moore kill the Joker" AS a character, as in, "as a decent character/remotely believable villain in comics/pulp fiction"?? (As to that, I believe he probably did: though The Animated Series, Sean Murphy, and the movies featuring Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix respectively, may have resurrected him a little bit!! 😏
Or DO you the creator of this RUclips channel mean: "DID Alan Moore intentionally kill the Joker, literally but in a 'veiled' way, in the comic Batman: The Killing Joke?"
IF you mean the latter assertion, I know for a fact, that it is bollocks. 1) Because Alan Moore, on any occasion he has ever been asked, has basically pooh-poohed it (or has by implication) and 2) Because I'm old enough to remember a time, when I was young, that NOBODY reading comics was talking about this. THAT means, that as a "theory of what happened in the story", it is a RETCON. NOBODY was mentioning this as a possibility, in the late 80s, or the 1990s. This garbage was only put about by Grant Morrison in the 2000s. Therefore, it is a total afterthought. And it's a stupid "theory" anyway! 😏
TO ME, anyway, as a young adult reader back in 1988, I'll tell you what it looked like to me then! 😏😏 BATMAN was obviously so, if not enamoured, then MYSTERIOUSLY sympathetic to the Joker (strange since this guy in Moore's story has attacked and injured BOTH his best friends from the cop world, Commissioner Gordon and Barbara Gordon! ), SO sympathetic (despite any atrocities the Joker has committed here) that he seems determined to offer him all kinds of help (which the Joker turns down 😏) and laughing at the Joker's jokes, and all... That *I* was wondering if they didn't both go for a drink at a BAR afterwards 🙄, that being about the level of seriousness that the Batman seemed to evaluate the Joker's crimes at! 😏
And of course, *on* the actual page, there were just these two pairs of feet shown facing each other at the end - no action - and then an empty street, and the sound effect of a police siren drawn in the background. Well', to ME: the obvious "Extrapolation" from that, was that the Batman couldn't be bothered to take in the Joker, and that he either left him for the police (hence siren) or that he let him escape completely. (Not that he killed him! 😏 Where's the signs of scuffle, were that to happen?) In fact, the secretary of the British comics creators guild or something like that, told me in the 1990s, that the police siren meant that the police took him in! 😏
But REALLY, I think that the FEMINIST evaluation of that whole thing, would basically be, "Fail, Batman"!!! 😏😏 Pity there were no feminist comics critics in the 1980s. Or fro most of the 1990s. 😏
Yeah, well. I don't know why people are still talking about this with interest today. Or why they were, even 2 or 10 years ago. It was NEVER intended to be canon, firstly; and I can SEE why Alan Moore has basically repudiated it - why he was talking about it disparagingly as early as the early 2000s, basically - because it is NOT in line with modern sensibilities; and because it was NEVER a very good story to begin with!! It's just trashy melodrama. And unlike something like Victorian melodrama, it is totally devoid of sympathy, empathy, sentiment (except for some brief and specious violin-playing for "Joe"), or anything that we would now put under the bracket of "EQ". Very much like Alan Moore himself, really. 😏
I think that Alan moore did the end so you can decide what happened. Just like watchmen
The real joke is that the female character was disabled while the two male characters live on unharmed.
No one said they were real.@@ryanvetter5852
Loser
Precisely!! And that they let that stand at DC, for so many years. 🤮 #misogyny
@@oneoflokishere we go again… #woke
@Emprah NOT woke! (I'm too old to be "woke".) Simple truth!
Why was Alan Moore posing as a "feminist" all along, yet he wrote something like THIS? 🤔
Why have (Transatlantic) comics been dismissive and abusive ("women in refrigerators") towards its female characters? (Certainly since changes in the publishing rules, and in the "etiquette" of the industry by the 1980s made it possible (nay fashionable) to produce a lot more violent crap?
If "mature comics" means "violent misogynistic, homophobic anti-minority crap", then I'm against it.
That's not "woke". That's true socialism.
They thought of a completely different "Joker origin story" for the 1989 Tim Burton movie anyway. Much more based on the 1952 original, it seems. (And then that was pretty much borrowed, for The Animated Series.) And in my view, Sam Hamm (the writer for the movie) did a much better job, than Moore? WHY? Because he gave the Joker a much more believable background (not a fan of the idea he killed the Waynes, though) and you saw WHY he might have been in that factory, HOW he got swept out of the vat into the river, how he got disfigured, how he turned into a "criminal mastermind" - because he was basically a top level gangster already, really... At least the first half of that movie made reasonable logical sense. Silly ending; but what can you do? 😄
Writers who write ILLOGIC not logic - most of DC's modern writers - get my thumbs down, x 10000!
"Vital", or "vile"?? (I HATE the way in which movies tend to "sample" the garbage ideas out of this GN, btw. 😏)
So anyway - THIS is the reason, why O'Neil and Giordano thought of injecting the Batman mythos full of MISOGYNY and needless violence, and general trash?? Because they were worried about being overtaken by the movie??Ye gods!! 🙄🙄👎