Everything Old Is Still Old: Joker’s Daughter / Batman: The Dark Knight 23.4 Review

Of just about any of DC’s VIllains’ Month titles, there has been an inordinate of interest in Joker’s Daughter – the thing came out the day before yesterday and copies with the 3D cover are going for $100 on eBay, for Christ’s sake. Even I couldn’t get a copy with the 3D cover at my local comic store, where they know me by name and ask me that if I insist upon screeching that I want to see crazy girls in 3D that I do it outside where the police can hear me.

So the obvious question is whether the comic book is actually worth the interest. Sure, a lot of the demand seems to be based on the fact that DC egregiously underestimated the number of people who wanted this book with the 3D cover, Which is fine, and a prime example of the free market and supply and demand in action, but in no way addresses whether the book is actually worth reading or not: after all, 20 years ago, Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man #1 with the polybagged chromium cover was going for hundreds of dollars for the same reason, but a lack of supply still couldn’t make that book anything but a pile of shit by a writer who gave us a legitimate hint by repeatedly showing readers the word “doom” in big letters.

Well, having a regular old 2D copy means that I can actually open and read the book, and see what’s going on on the inside. And what’s going on in there is… weird. It is supervillain origin story as goth cautionary take by way of indictment of female body image via on-the-nose Greek tragedy. And it is a difficult book to review, because I am not 100 percent sure just how I feel about it; the book is certainly more ambitious a venture than I would have expected for a character spun off from a dude whose origin is being kicked into a vat of acid, even though I think it is a long yard away from sticking the landing. And it certainly goes in an direction and tries for a complexity that I would not have expected for a character joined at the name with a dude whose M.O. is to make people laugh themselves to death.

Oh: and Joker’s Daughter beats Jesus up. So there’s that.

Joker’s Daughter is making her way through Gotham’s sewers, looking for an underground community of nutjobs to hang out with. When she gets there, she finds a pile of Arkham Asylum escapees (normal folks, not supervillains, proving once and forever that Arkham’s chief of security should be keelhauled for the good of society) who are living in a hardcore patriarchy: the dudes do nothing and reap all the benefits, while the women, who are paired with the men by community leader Charon, live on scraps and take beatings when they get out of line. Joker’s Daughter is appalled, and convinces the women to pull a Lysistrada, withholding all effort and services (wink-wink, nudge-nudge, Bob’s your uncle, Jane’s your aunt, and Jane’s not fucking Bob until she gets the vote) until the men abdicate their power. Joker’s Daughter then confronts Charon, regaling him with tales of a childhood filled with a love of knives, horror and self-mutilation, before violently deposing him and taking over the community… and that’s pretty much it.

Writer Ann Nocenti is clearly swinging for the fences here, putting some serious elements of Greek tragedy into this little 20-page comic book origin story. Besides explicitly namechecking Lysistrada, look at what we’ve got here: a hero venturing into the underworld, overcoming obstacles starting with moving through the realm of the damned (Nocenti tells us that the sewers are built on an old town that was flooded, so Joker’s Daughter literally swims through the living rooms of people who were wiped out by catastrophe), then liberating the condemned and convincing their oppressors to love the oppressed, before destroying the leader… and that leader is literally Charon. Named after the ferryman to hell, he appears in a boat (ferry, anyone?), wearing a vest made of pennies (fare for the ferryman, anyone?).

On top of that, Nocenti gives Charon a heaping helping of Jesus. To start, Charon looks like Jesus, with his pristine face and his post-Use Your Illusion / pre-Chinese Democracy Axl Rose haircut and beard. He also preaches forgiveness and inclusion and acceptance of the wretched refuse, and spits out a fair amount of subtly modified Bible quotes, as if he was auditioning for a pundit gig on Fox News. So there is no question that Nocenti is trying to add some literary and religious weight to the origin of Joker’s Daughter… the problem is that the ambitions don’t quite work in practice.

First of all, a lot of the dialogue in the book reads like the English translation of an old Greek play. The sentences are short, simple, and expository… God, are they expository. A lot of the dialogue is actually the character describing the things that we can see happening to them, and while this was probably fine several thousand years ago when the Greeks were inventing sequential entertainment for people who had never seen anything like it before (and were probably easily distracted by their rolling lice infestations and the crippling knowledge that 14 was middle-aged), but in the 21st Century, it reads like a backyard play put on by children. It’s just strange to see in a modern comic book… and yet I have to believe it’s intentional; this kind of dialogue almost forces the reader into the mindset of reading a Greek play, so as a device it is effective… but man, is it distracting.

And the Jesus vibe from Charon is just a little on-the-nose for my tastes. First of all, the dude looks like he stepped into this comic book, living and breathing, from the kind of velvet painting you can buy from the back of a van in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn right off the interstate. And Charon has infinite understanding, even as Joker’s Daughter tries like hell to spoil those good looks, and even drops a variant of the old, “they know not what they do.” Okay, fine; Joker’s Daughter is beating on Jesus… but dropped in the middle of a Greek tragedy riff, which brings the tone of stories told sometime around 500 B. C., and it gave me a certain amount of temporal mindfuckery that kinda kept me only on the surface of the story.

Georges Jeanty’s art, coming so soon after his run on Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Nine, is a really good match for a story that, at least on some level, is about a girl who has been damaged repeatedly since childhood. He draws good young and beautiful people, and his work on Buffy means that he can also give good grotesque monster, so he’s a good dude to have drawing someone like Joker’s Daughter. And maybe it’s just the association I carry between Jeanty’s art and Buffy, but the use of similar visuals to that book to show a truly fucked-up and tragic childhood made Joker’s Daughter’s story seem that much darker.

Nocenti is trying some really ambitious stuff with this story, and it is admirable, but it also prevents the book from being wholly satisfying as a story. The archaic, stilted dialogue prevents almost all the characters from seeming completely whole and human, and the effort to turn Gotham City’s sewers into an epic story of gods, men and the underworld doesn’t really fit into a street-level Batman book. The fact that Nocenti was able to get all this stuff into a regular one-and-done is impressive, and I respect the accomplishment. But it turns the comic into less of a satisfying story and more of an intellectual exercise. A somewhat impressive one in a technical achievement kinda way, but an intellectual exercise nonetheless.

However, it is an intellectual exercise where Joker’s Daughter beats up Jesus. But if that doesn’t thrill you, well, just remember that there is still a captive audience for your copy just waiting on eBay.