- [HBomberguy] So The Killing Joke movie came out.
Great! Adaptations of Alan Moore's work, they've never been bad!
[sound effects added in a mocking tone]
(laughs) What is that sound effect?
What?
(laughs)
What the fuck is this?
Okay, so it's not very good.
It's not very good at all.
Most fans of Batman or Batgirl at this point knows that it adds, among other things,
a scene where Barbara and Bruce have explicit sexual tension, followed by sex,
followed by awkwardness, followed by Barbara taking out these feelings on a criminal
by beating him completely senseless, followed by her quitting.
It's lazy, and it's poorly written, and it's boring.
But before we get in really getting to how and why Batman Colon The Killing Joke Colon The 2016 Film is so bad,
and at least learn a little lesson of some kind,
from it, we have to talk about the comic industry.
We have to talk about Batman: The Killing Joke: The 1988 Comic.
And we have to talk at least a little bit about Alan Moore,
also known as the Rasputin of the comics industry.
Because he has a huge beard,
will never die, and killed comics!
##
Okay, when I said Alan Moore killed comics,
I've probably got to qualify that.
It's more that in the 90s, comics committed suicide,
and it was Alan who handed them the rope.
Moore is critically acclaimed for a very good reason.
And in the mid-to-late 80s, he, along with
Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman, Mark Wade, Garth Ennis, Frank Miller
(in the brief period when he was properly medicated)
and a good half dozen others formed a cabal of excellent writers
that collectively ruined comics for the rest of time.
No, seriously for a second.
These writers are good, and that's great.
Their work read well and did well critically,
but unfortunately, it also sold well.
And art doesn't make the comics industry go round, money does.
And everyone wanted a piece of the pie.
Everyone wanted to make the next Watchmen.
To do Dark Knight Returns' numbers.
And everyone thought they knew exactly how best to imitate those works themselves
and create a timeless piece of art.
So for every gritty, but thoughtful and interesting look at Batman,
or every well-explored morally ambiguous Rorschach,
or every cool moment that Wolverine did,
There would be:
Those early comics were good because they were unique.
They were nuanced.
This early panel in The Killing Joke highlights the attempts at levity from the people who
work in Arkham Asylum.
It also sets up that in order to really deal with the bullshit of the people who end up there,
you probably have to be a little insane yourself,
the point being that Batman, the guy with parental issues who dresses up as a bat
while he's getting people put in there, might have some issues to explore himself.
A little jokey sign on a table sets up the story's themes,
but also the characters of the story and their attitudes.
Alan Moore was famous for writing pages and pages of descriptions for everything in his panels
for the artist; the stuff on their desks and what it says about them.
The quality of the motes of light, stuff the artist would never actually draw, but which perfectly set the mood for
the artist to then get across how they see fit.
If you want to know what makes a great comic work,
don't just look at the basic plot, the important monologues, the writing, as it were,
look at the desks, and bookcases, and bedside tables of Moore's world.
That's the real writing.
And then flip through a copy of say, Youngblood,
and look at how barren everything is.
These comics are supposedly set in a grimdark world
where heroes are anti-heroes,
but quite often, they just simply tell you that.
And then show you shots of characters monologuing about how complex they are in empty,
character-less rooms, or just straght-up blank voids.
This comic is drawn by Rob Liefeld.
He's a bad artist, and a bad writer, and bad, bad, bad!
And everything wrong with the comics in the 90s.
Here's Rob and Todd McFarlane designing a character from scratch during the taping of a show
Stan Lee used to do.
But I highly recommend you watch the whole thing for yourself, it's on YouTube.
It's very informative about the problem with 90s character design as a whole.
Because despite ostensibly, being 30 minutes of these guys just designing a character,
no designing actually happens.
Stanny boy gives them the name "Overkill"
and Rob, seemingly on auto-pilot, begins making a variation of Cable,
one of his other characters.
- [Rob Liefeld] "He's gotta be a guy, he's gotta be huge."
- [Stan Lee] "Thick neck, broad shoulders..."
- [RL] "Thickest neck! Thickest shoulders!"
- [SL] "Are you gonna give him the usual shoulder pads?"
- [RL] "I don't know. I'm not real sure, yet."
"What do you think, Todd?"
- [Todd McFarlane] "I don't know."
- [SL] "A Liefeld character without shoulder pads is almost naked."
"How would you say that his personality would be different from most of our other tough guys,
"like Wolverine and all the others? And Cable?"
- [RL] "Somehow he's half man, half machine, he's fighting that inside,
"he's partly a cyborg, he's a combination of technology and brutality."
- [HBomberguy] Cable was conceived by Liefeld as a darker, edgier X-Man to lead a new team
into the era of gritty comics, a repackaged collection of tropes pioneered in the good comics of the late 80s.
But Cable himself got so popular that during the taping of this show, a year later,
Rob is already cannibalizing his own work.
Nevermind everyone else's.
And unfortunately, during his hey-day, he never bothered
to learn how to draw the... feet...
These kinds of creators read Watchmen,
read The Dark Knight Returns,
read The Killing Joke,
works that presented characters as flawed, but real,
and used even desks as characterization and world-building.
Works that had, to put it in one word: ideas.
But these creators didn't see that stuff when they read those comics.
They saw the darkness, the edginess, the grittiness on the surface, and tried desperately to recreate that.
The appearance of depth mattered more than the real stuff.
Todd and Rob's company literally called itself Image Comics, which I feel is a really
ironic name given their obsession with looking interesting without actually being it.
This character they're designing shows up in McFarlane's Spawn comics,
as Overtkill.
Yeah, they called it that!
Comics pioneered the expanded universe concept, finding new ways to tack more things for you to spend
money on onto initially decent ideas.
- [SL] "Now you're now doing an X-Factor book, I believe?"
- [RL] "X-Force."
- [SL] "X-Force, that's right."
- [RL] "Everyone confuses them. Factor, Force, Men..."
- [SL] "How many X books do we have?"
- [RL] "I think there's, like, eight, ten, now? I mean, everything!
"There's the team books, and each member of the team has their own book,
"People get all confused all the time."
"There used to be one X-Men book, and one Spider-Man book, and there's five Spider-Mans and five X-Men, so."
(Stan Lee laughs)
- [SL] "When we get a good thing, we don't let it go, do we?"
- [RL] "That's right! No."
- [Hbomberguy] But with stories as complete, self-contained, and final as The Dark Knight Returns,
or Watchmen, they couldn't do that.
They had to recreate the tone in other stories.
It took decades for them to finally say, "Fuck it,"
and make needless prequels to Watchmen, and for Frank Miller to so utterly lose his mind,
that he decided to make The Dark Knight Rides Again,
a comic that seems to have forgotten that Batman being kind of fascist, was a bad thing.
With all of that out of the way, what makes the movie adaptation of this comic so bad?
Well, to start off with, the first 28 minutes have nothing to do with The Killing Joke.
They're purly focused on Barbara and her relationship with Bruce.
Things come to a head with the stuff I already mentioned, and then she quits.
It's a little more than padding, because The Killing Joke is too singular and short to be easily forced
into the narrative of a full feature.
The last moments of Barbara being Batgirl are used as uninteresting filler.
Which, in a way is kind of fitting, isn't it?
And reflects how Batgirl was treated in general in the comics, and the reason why she came to be
viewed as narratively expendable in the first place.
I could talk at length here about how the killing, or serious injuring of female characters
for easy dramatic effect, is a problem that has and continues to plague comics.
But if you need ME to say that comics have a history of  bizarre treatment of female characters,
you probably already think I'm wrong, and comics don't need to have characters relatable to women,
because, half the planet's disposable income is apparently not worth having!
And everyone who already knows this, doesn't need to be told again by me.
So, why bother?
Needless to say though, Barbara getting shot and paralyzed and then literally objectified
in order to hurt her father's feelings is, while well done and genuinely shocking,
still weirdly cliche for Alan Moore.
It's also prbably worth mentioning that even Alan Moore has his misgivings about The Killing Joke at this point.
- [Alan Moore, in conversation with Stewart Lee] "Probably the work of mine that I'm least fond of,
"because there's a lot of nasty things happening there, and Brian Bolland did a wonderful job on the artwork,
"but as for my writing, that's not one of my finest hours."
- [HBomberguy] So if you're planning on leaving a comment talking about how wrong it is to criticize
such a masterpiece, magic comic, in comic history, and Alan Moore's a genius, well, maybe listen to what
Alan Moore has to say about it nowadays if you think he's so fucking smart, ya piece of shit!
The new opening section has Barbara doing voice-over for some reason.
I don't know why, and I don't really see what it adds.
- [Barbara Gordon] "I really was done with that part of my life. A week later, it wouldn't matter anyway.
"A terrible storm was moving in, and we'd all be in for it by then."
- [HBomberguy] Oh, a storm's coming in, how fucking deep. Let me tell you about the weather, my name's Batgirl!
Having sex with Bruce, and having mixed feelings about it, and  feeling bad for taking those feelings
out on a criminal are attempts to give the character some issues to really grapple with,
and I wish I could say I at least appreciate these attempts.
But it's just not very good, or original.
Depth comes from within, from the ideas that a writer wants to impose on a story.
It doesn't spurt from the wounds of your enemies or Batman's dick.
These complexities are raised, and then she quits and gets shot.
So what was the point in even raising them?
It also adds a post-credits scene setting up that she becomes Oracle.
Ooohh! One day, something interesting might happen!
That was worth watching a fucking entire film for.
I could stop right here, because an adaptation of a very good work opening with 28 minutes of bad,
unrelated filler is usually enough of a deal-breaker, critically speaking.
There's a reason the Killing Joke opened where it did, and not with pages and pages of bullshit.
But even the real thing is adapted poorly once it starts.
Remember the receptionist's desk I waxed lyrically about for like, five whole minutes?
The desk here is empty.
It's a desk. With a computer on it. Like a flat plane.
This film is the new textbook case of a bad adaptation of a comic for me now.
It starts will nearly 30 minutes of pointless fluff, and then when the story starts, all the actual stuff that made
it worth adapting is gone.
It's like they didn't even understand why The Killing Joke worked so well.
By being a story that was very careful with particulars and mundanities.
So when you turn the page, and The Joker is now shooting Barbara,
it's sudden, and shocking.
The comic uses the bars of a cell to separate both sides of Harvey Dent.
And in this comic, each side looks looks a little bit like Batman and The Joker,
setting up the dynamic of the story.
Gordon tries to push past quickly, but when he realizes Harvey's watching him,
he can't help but look back at his old friend as he passes.
It sets up how once-good people really can just go insane.
Which, I don't know, is maybe kind of the point of the fucking story?!
In the animated movie,
Ohhhhh look there's a coin.
Remember the coin?!
He dropped his coin!
Through the bars of his cell!
Somehow!
And Gordon just walks past.
If I was going to adapt The Killing Joke,
the one thing I would definitely think to flesh out, was to build on this moment, where Gordon is looking back
at a man who, he later, might have just ended up becoming after being subjected
to The Joker's torment.
This adaptation UNfleshes out the characters, it takes OUT character that the original comic had!
It's kind of amazing, that they managed to adapt a comic so badly, that they added half an hour of pointless
filler to pad for time, while taking out the most interesting parts!
Is this The Joker's real trick?
To, ya know, piss off and troll fans of Batman by adapting a comic so poorly?
The flashbacks into The Joker's potential past used very precise colors,
highlighting seemingly random objects as everything else is silhouetted in darkness
and noir-ish black and white.
Usually there's something that would form a very big piece of the person's memory,
like the smell of a shrimp, or the tint of the red hood that covers his face,
and plays a part in the metaphorical coloring of his worldview.
The Killing Joke movie just uses semi muted colors.
Which is THE generic flashback-looking effect, isn't it?
And the really striking cuts between memory and reality that were stark and direct and shockingly
personal for such a seemingly insane character?
In this it just fades to a random shot of The Joker with his hand against the glass,
looking incredibly dopey.
Seriously, what even is that face?
What emotion is trying to be conveyed here?
Who drew this? Did they commission Rob Liefeld to draw this?
What the f-?
I bet if you search DeviantArt, you'll find a better drawing of this exact moment than in this movie.
Although, The Joker will probably be fully nude, but that doesn't really detract from the emotions of the scene.
I feel.
And then in the climactic showdown, where The Joker suddenly pulls an earnest face,
and you realize that what he really wants is to prove to someone else his perspective is correct,
so that he can finally feel justified in it, and maybe, because Batman isn't responding,
he has to consider he's wrong?
Like Gordon, he's trying to show Batman his way works, and Batman doesn't believe him.
For a moment, even his faith in his beliefs is shaken.
It's at that moment that Batman appears and attacks him, seemingly a manifestation
of The Joker's own self-doubt.
- [The Joker] "WHY AREN'T YOU LAUGHING?!"
- [HBomberguy] In the movie, he's just saying these lines as he has a punch fight with Batman.
Apparently, the hall of mirrors scene wasn't weird and cool enough for the creators of this adaptation.
They had to have an extra section where Batman and The Joker fight in a recreation of his apartment
but with the furniture glued to the ceiling,
because his life was flipped, turned upside down!
And I'd like to take a minute, just  sit right there!
I'll tell you all about how I became the clown prince of crime!
The writer behind the adaptation, Brian Azzarello,
is also the guy who wrote some of those Watchmen prequels I talked about earlier.
Between this and the 30 minute opening, it appears he specializes in the production of needless preamble
to actually good stories.
Which is a shame, because I remember really liking what I read of 100 Bullets and his run on
Wonder Woman was apparently good, though, I could never bring myself to read it,
because they're the best superhero, and I don't go out of my way to read things I expect to disappoint me.
I'm not THAT kind of masochist.
To put it simply, The Killing Joke movie's real problem isn't poor writing, or low-budget animation,
but don't get me wrong, it has a fucking trowel-full of that.
Its central issue is the same problem all the stories that aped the original comic so badly had.
It's THE problem, the one that's plagued comic history for all time.
The endless commodification of good work, but in a manner that renders its copies devoid
of meaning, sold based on the mere resemblance to that good stuff.
All these problems have finally come home to roost within the fabric of The Killing Joke
itself in the form of this lazy, cash-in adaptation 25 years later.
Like with Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns before it,
it's been transformed into an expanded universe, coming attached with its very own vestigial worthless
prequel, and all its beautiful imagery has been stripped away.
The art is quite literally, gone from The Killing Joke.
- [AM] "You see what those bloody corporations do?
"They take your ideas and they suck them! Suck them like leeches,
"until they've gotten every last drop of the marrow from your bones!"
- [HBomberguy] While it could be dismissed as garbage to be left by the wayside,
what makes it WORTH looking at, is how emblematic  it is of all these wider problems.
Accidentally, it's the ultimate modern demonstration of the problem with comics.
At least until one of Rob Liefeld's comics get an adaptation!
I hope they adapt the arc where Sexdeath orchestrates her own murder to hurt Strongshot's feelings
and he puts Valiant Comics out of business by refusing to work for 12 months.
