After reading the first joker arc in Batman Confidential I was very excited to see that this arc was going to look at the joker once again. I enjoy reading batman confidential because it is a chance to read a comic book without worrying about what else is going on in the Universe, I'm not complaining about other batman comics, but it's just a different experience. When I first put this book down I thought it was really good, for about, ten minutes. Then I headed to class and started thinking about it, and it went from a 4 star book to what I consider a 2 and a half star book.
At first I found myself angry that this joker did not seem like a scary villian at all, and I remember the joker from the second arc of Batman Confidential being very scary. The story starts with joker being dragged into Gotham Police Station by Batman, who says, "He calls himself 'The Joker'" and then leaves, it seemed like a quick way for the writing staff to get to the point of the story and not focus on how batman brought in the joker or what he had just done, but that didn't really bother me.
My real problem with this story came with it's conclussion. Joker calls a policeman's wife and tells her she is her doctor and has a rare blood disease. Joker tells the police officer about his hilarious little phone call and the police immediatly rush to see if she is alright. Upon arrival they see that she has hung herself, as doctor joker has prescribed, and the second to last page shows the officer on his knees greiving his wifes death.
I am all for suspension of belief while reading comics, but this all felt so phoney to me, as if the writers were too lazy to come up with a good joker story so they had him convince someone to commit suicide to try and hide the poor story telling. I'm sorry, but there are too many holes to ignore in this story.
1. While rushing to the house, why not call her and tell her it wasn't true.
2. Why would she believe that a doctor would tell her to commit suicide? Perhaps she was depressed, but from the way the officer talked about her earlier in the issue they had just had an amazing vacation where she had helped him come back from a dark period in his life. Her description didn't read as someone who was suceptable to suicide.
3. Joker says he called her with the results of her blood test. I don't mean to pick this apart, but it seems like a huge coincidence that she had a blood test done and joker called just in time to let her know the results.
It felt like Andrew Kreisberg was telling a weak story and wasn't trying to make it plausable at all, and with The Dark Knight still fairly fresh on my mind, this interpretation of the Joker in jail seemed like a dumbed down version of a joker story that does suceed in making the joker seem very horrifying, even while his is in custody. The last page of the comic the preview for #23 says Joker keeps on killing, even from jail! I am very concerned that Kreisberg will try to keep this story going and wind up further dumbing down of Nolan's brilliant portrayal of the fear joker can instill in people, even from jail, and I am don't like feel as if a comic is a cheap rip off of a comic book movie.
This is not a joker that inspires fear when he is at large, and he certainly isn't a joker that is anywhere close to horrifying when behind bars, I won't bother reading the rest of this arc, and I wouldn't recomend this issue to anyone.