> > Crap this was an amazing issue, one of my favorite batman and more importantantly joker stories ever, the nods to the past were brilliant as joker does away with his past in the comic, morrison does away with the past classic joker stories adn metamorphasises the character in both the story and th way he is handled by writers. Bravo Grant, just amazing!!
>
> It was indeed extraordinary, with some magnificent turns of phrase ("The Satire years, before Camp and New Homicidal") and word-images. IMHO It works better as an illustrated text story where you can imagine the events better than the artist could hope to capture them. (Not terribly fond of the VERY CGI bits, but...)
>
> However, that being said, I do wonder how other writers and artists will deal with this "new look and new attitude" Joker. Given Paul Dini's magnificent depiction in Detective 826, this new Joker needs time to develop and discover if he will work in a standard comic presentation.

I asn't terribly impressed by most of it, really, excepting perhaps the bit you quoted and the lovely little scenes with Harley -- it's refreshign seeing her played as frighteningly insane rather than as light comic relief. But Morrison's choice of primarily visual symbolism simply called attention, for me, to how hard his prose had to stretch in its physical descriptions where pictures would have done the job more subtly and better.

More than that, however, I'm not sure how "new" this Joker is. His smile is permanent, yes, but his terrifying annunciation of his new personality in this story is...to murder his old henchmen and then escape Arkham. He's been doing those things for around 30 years now, and while getting more of an inside track on the extent of his nihilistic thinking this time around, his actions themselves aren't especially compelling. And his little (unspoken) speech to Batman was basically straight out of Engelhart's and O'Neil's portrayals: crime is an ego-booster, he can't kill his only worthy opponent, etc.

Nothing new here, I'm afraid.

- Omar Karindu

"A Renoir. I have three, myself. I had four, but ordered one burned...It
displeased me." -- Doctor Doom

"It's not, 'Oh, they killed Sue Dibney and I always loved that character,' it's 'Oh, they broke a story engine that could have told a thousand stories in order to publish a single 'important' one.'" -- John Seavey