JOKERS ARE WILD

When Bob Kane and Bill Finger were producing the Batman, the villains were influenced heavily by Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. They were often bizarre, barely human creatures which reflected a perception that criminality was an aberration, out of pace with normal human behaviour. In one sense, they were ogres from children's bedtime stories; think of the Riddler, the Penguin, or Catwoman, yet not really threatening in a real-world sense. Yet even in those days of more straightforward comic books, and even through the Sixties rebirth of the Batman as an icon of ironic camp culture, there were a few villains who hinted at darker depths, and touched more sensitive areas. Two Face is a brilliant creation, a basic psychological trauma personified, but the key adversary for every version of the Batman has always been the Joker, and no matter how camply the caped crusaderwas portrayed, no matter how comic the Joker became, he was the one villain who can never quite hide the basic frightening instability that serves as the perfect foil to the Batman's obsessive quest for revenge against crime itself. He was and is the one villain who personifies the chaos which is what we all ultimately fear.

This is the spirit which is captured brilliantly in Batman: Going Sane, written by JM DeMatteis and drawn by Joe Staton and Steve Mitchell, in which the Joker, having 'killed' the Batman, discovers both 'normal' life and love. DeMatteis' story pulls no punches, but is based on the perilous ying and yang between hero and villain; without the Batman, the Joker remains haunted by an emptiness even love cannot fill, while the 'reborn' Batman cannot conceive of a world in which a Joker reborn as an ordinary man can exist. The artwork plays this dichotomy well: often harkening back to the simplicity of 'comic' books, but always bordered with darkness that occasionally is allowed to take centre stage, as in the dramatic moment when the Batman announced to Jim Gordon 'I'm back'. But the studied plainness of the Joker's life as a citizen makes a strong contrast, and the way he edges back to his Joker-madness is an intercut sequence of rough brilliance.

The real key to the modern Joker is the embrace of his madness; some of the artists who've approached him recently assume there is no top over which they cannot go. But he's such a brilliant creation, such a representation of the appeal of the madness, that they may be right. But notice the story's title: this is not really the story of the Joker's 'going sane', it is the struggle of the vengeance-stoked Batman to regain his sanity, and not surrender to the Joker's world. Mitchell's heavily-inked lines remind me of Frank Robbins, and serve here to remind us of the harsh borders of the world these two antagonists inhabit, and the equally wide lines that delineate order from chaos. It's that response to chaos that makes this such a touching, and indeed powerful, story.

Appended to it is a story called 'Gotham Emergency', written by From Hell artist Eddie Campbell and Darren Sears, and drawn by Bart Sears in a style nearly as dramatic but somewhat slicker as Going Sane, which draws on the thing that has lain at the centre of all Joker stories—the Batman's need to inhabit the Joker's mind in order to defeat him—this is Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter stuff, and like Lecter the Joker is the more flamboyant character. The other connection with Going Sane is the presence of an attractive woman doctor who is drawn to the Batman, and who can be used, if only for an instant, to establish his own somewhat tenuous humanity.

With the Joker stowed away safely at Arkham Asylum, it was another stroke of brilliance to make him the narrator of short stories. These stories work best when we remember, or indeed forget but are reminded, that they are told from the Joker's own unstable and untrustworthy perceptions. In Volume Two of Joker's Asylum the most impressive tale features the Mad Hatter, and is drawn by Keith Giffen and Bill Sienkiewicz in a wonderfully tormented style that only dimly recalls Tenniel. Like Going Sane, it revolves around the Hatter's efforts to make himself 'normal' through love, and of course it fails for the same crazy reasons the Hatter is what he is. What brings it to a bravura conclusion, however, is the Joker's own presence as narrator, as writer Landry Quinn Walker catches his function perfectly. In other stories the Joker presents you with a riddle in a story about the Riddler and leaves you to figure it out...or not. Penciller Andres Guinaldo reminds me a lot of Gil Kane. There's also a little comic relief from James Patrick and Joe Quinones, when Harley Quinn breaks out of her asylum to spend Valentine's Day with the Joker, and a rather familiar film noir version of Beauty and the Beast with Killer Croc playing, of course, the Beast. I was also taken with Kelly Jones' art in Kevin Shinnick's tale of Clayface, 'Midnight Madness'. But it's the Joker who unifies all these stories, and makes them work.

Batman: Going Sane DC/Titan Books 2008 £9.99 ISBN 9781845768638
Joker's Asylum, Volume 2, DC/Titan 2011 $10.99 ISBN 9780857681676

BLACKMARK: THE ORIGINAL GRAPHIC NOVEL?

Blackmark: 30th Anniversary Edition
by Gil Kane (with Archie Goodwin)
Fantagraphics 180pp £ 13.99

At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, I remember reading the late Gil Kane’s BLACKMARK when it first came out, in 1971, in a mass-market format Bantam paperback. At the time, I was a massive sword & sorcery fan: Robert E Howard’s Conan, Bran Mak Morn, and Solomon Kane, Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and John Jakes’ Brak the Barbarian in particular. I had read Kane’s HIS NAME IS SAVAGE, a magazine-format graphic novel that was part Richard Stark and part Donald (Matt Helm) Hamilton, and knew Kane was trying to push the envelope in terms of comic book story-telling.

But even at the time, I knew there were limitations. Kane’s artwork is extremely fluid, and, at its best, elegant, as seen in his work on Green Lantern. But the geometrical nature of his faces meant the emotional range was strong at the ends but somewhat weak in the middle—his characters spoke better through action than in portrait. And although Kane was always an outspoken proponent of more literary content in comics, the quality of the prose and the use of it within the layout, more illustrated book than graphic novel, didn’t necessarily break new ground. Even within the limited literary bounds of the sword & sorcery universe, Kane (despite the talented Archie Goodwin doing the actual scripting) came a lot closer to Gardner Fox than Fritz Leiber.

Given those limitations, when the original BLACKMARK came out, the small paperback book format worked against Kane’s greatest strength as a comic book artist, his sense of movement. The panels were cramped into tiny pages, the flow was disrupted severely. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to see the book reprinted in a larger format, with spacious clean page layouts. This volume also includes what would have been the second BLACKMARK book, had not Bantam pulled the plug, and this brings the story to a better finish. The package is completed by an informative afterword by Gary Groth, tracing the history of the project.

Having said all that, BLACKMARK still doesn’t really work. Goodwin’s prose is made to seem more hokey than it is, because it’s too often left out on its own, marooned in a sea of empty page. And Kane’s art, though dynamic, and given space to breathe, simply can’t provide enough richness to fill the static moments. Rather than transforming the rather static beauty of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant into something with the dynamic flow of his Green Lantern, Kane appeared to have instead wound up with the weaker points of each.

Since Gil Kane’s experiments, the graphic novel has come a long way. Writers like Alan Moore and Neal Gaiman have found ways to integrate quality pulp prose with art work that provides both depth and movement. They, of course, were helped by a different atmosphere in the comics world. Perhaps Kane was simply ahead of his time, and was let down by the way the system treated his trailblazing ideas. Or perhaps he didn’t set his sights quite high enough. Either way, BLACKMARK remains more than a curiosity, and it’s nice to have it back in print in a quality format at last.