I’m going to start this entry by talking about The Killing Joke, a one shot graphic novel written by Alan Moore that tells what is probably the most well known story featuring the character of The Joker. See I recently wrote a post on this blog praising the film Joker, which features the character (kinda), in fact it was the second longest post I’ve uploaded so far. Now for anyone who’s read this graphic novel, you’ll have noticed the small influence that it had on the film. Indeed in the various threads on /tv/ quite a few people were quick to point out where the film was inspired by this story. Now I’d argue that the film is much more sophisticated than this comic. The film simply took some elements from the comic books, but mostly used the name and aesthetics of the character of “The Joker” to bring in a bigger audience for what is actually an entirely original film.
Indeed the film is simply called “Joker”, and the character of Arthur Fleck (a name entirely made up for this film, not one taken from any comic book) never refers to himself nor is referred to by any other character as The Joker at any point during the film. He is Arthur, and early on his clown name is Carnival, then later he becomes merely Joker (there is no “the”) when he puts the costume and make up on towards the end. The colour scheme and make up he uses in the film is also quite unlike that of the comic book character of The Joker as well, a bright red suit rather than the iconic green and purple. The comic book character is in most cases not depicted wearing make up either, rather his pale skin, bright red lips and green hair are a disfigurement from being dropped in some chemical substance.
Sure it is still a “comic book movie” ultimately, it was put out by DC Comics’ movie studio, but it really doesn’t feel like it. It honestly feels like they took an already existing but unused script, something which pedowood has in excess I’m sure, and then just tacked on the comic book elements. All the references were completely superficial, surface level, I think I may have actually already said this in that post I wrote about the film. Instead of a generic mental hospital it’s Arkham Asylum, instead of a generic rich old guy archetype it’s Thomas Wayne, and so on. Indeed the only similarities that are any deeper than that that I can think of, are the plot elements and ideas which are taken from the story The Killing Joke.
Like the film, The Killing Joke also tells something of an origin story for the character, although contrary to popular belief it’s actually not the first time an origin story was attempted. In fact the story being told in TKJ (which is something of a side plot, mostly told in flashbacks, until it all comes together in the final sequence) that The Joker was the Red Hood (initially an old batman villain from the 50s) before being transformed into the Joker character we all know is as old as the character himself almost. What’s funny is that TKJ is really where this idea or meme that The Joker has no real concrete background in the DC universe canon started. The line “If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice”, is from this book.
Now you might think that me being able to recall all this trivia about comic book characters is rather “cringe”, surely someone my age really should have moved on from reading picture books about men in coloured tights and capes. And I have, it’s been a long while since I read any superhero comic books. Really since the age of about 16. I have forgotten a good 90% of the useless information I once would have been able to recite on cue about the thousands of characters from the two fictional universes presented in most Marvel and DC comic books, and that’s a good thing. I have replaced that useless trivia with useless trivia about ancient history and religion like a good grown up.
In recent months though, following a decision to include my graphic novels in this series, I’ve been skimming through them all while thinking about what I might say in the post (or several) about them that I write, and naturally this has jogged my memory somewhat. Now not all of my graphic novels are capeshit, indeed in that post just linked I mentioned purchasing a copy of The Incal by Jodorowsky and Moebius. I don’t have any problem with the comic book medium as a rule, in fact quite the opposite I think it has a lot of potential and there are loads of thought provoking and beautiful looking comics to find out there already. I’ll be talking about some of them in a future entry, today the subject is superheroes though.
See I’d say a good two thirds of the graphic novels I own are capeshit, and that’s just the graphic novels, I’m not going to be talking about the piles of actual indiviudal comic books I have. If I did that this series would never end. Now in fact most of the “graphic novels” I have are actually just reprint collections of stories that were initially published in serialised form comic books. So technically they aren’t graphic novels they’re trade paperbacks, but everyone just calls them graphic novels and I will also for the sake of simplicity. However I believe The Killing Joke is actually a graphic novel proper, and wasn’t ever released in serial format. Which brings me back to the subject I started out writing this post about, the similarities between this book and the film that recently came out.
Most significantly is the idea that the character’s memory about his past, about how he got to become the character we all know, is something that can’t be trusted. Indeed this story is so influential that in various reviews and discussions about the film I watched before I went to write my own response I heard this factoid repeated as criticism. “This film is silly, the whole point of The Joker is that he doesn’t have a backstory”, totally shallow and uninteresting take but exactly what I should have expected from most of these people. I mean, most of the videos I found were from the kind of “self proclaimed nerd” nu-male faggots who’ve made an entire career mindlessly droning on about the latest shitty Avengers movie. There’s no interest in what the film has to say, or is trying to do, just whining about how it’s not like the comic books.
I can’t say anymore because I will get drawn into a several thousand word tangent about these literal NPCs, but I’m sure you know who I’m talking about. I was looking for discussion about the film on it’s own terms, but so many people were just looking to see how it compared to the source material. Which doesn’t really make much sense to me, because I believe the film really owes very little to any actual depiction of the character in comic books as I’ve already said multiple times. In fact there was even a quote from the director that was posted in one of the /joker/ threads on /tv/ (that might be made up, but would be big if true) where he talked about how comic book movies were trash and he was just taking advantage of the name recognition to get more people to see his film.
Indeed Martin Scorsese (the director of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy) was considering directing Joker for a while before the man who ended up directing it, a guy called Todd Philips, took the position. I wonder if the script was already decided, or if it would have been different and the influence from those two movies was put in the script after Scorsese himself left the project. Either way, it’s just kind of funny because Scorsese has recently been in the news for saying that comic book movies are not real cinema. Or something to that effect. Interesting given the timing, and his involvement with Joker which I actually see as kind of an anti “comic book movie” movie in a way.
Quite a large portion of my entry on the film was about how it managed to create this feeling of doubt with the medium in some very clever ways. The way it made you feel like you couldn’t trust the very events unfolding in front of you being one of those ways. The Killing Joke doesn’t really do that, it just has that famous multiple choice line after a series of pretty reliable seeming flashbacks, as if to throw them into doubt retroactively. TKJ was incredibly influential, as I said this idea that the character’s history is murky and impossible to ever know started here and batgirl gets shot leading to her being depicted as wheelchair bound for twenty years following the publishing of this story. It wasn’t until this film though, that something actually interesting and meaningful was done with that idea. Before this film, the ambiguity of The Joker was just some more of that useless trivia I was talking about before.
Now The Joker is one of the more famous comic book characters, most people on the planet would probably recognise him. You go to a third world country like Bangladesh or Vietnam and even people there would probably recognise a picture of him, thanks to the films and the old batman TV show. He is an icon, and until pretty recently that was really only true for a handful of comic book characters. Batman, The Hulk, Superman, Spiderman, etc. Now though, thanks to the very marvel movies Scorsese has been shitting on recently, many much more obscure characters that only losers like me knew about a decade ago are becoming household names.
It’s quite weird to see it happen actually, these superheroes have very suddenly become completely mainstream. In fact the tipping point, the release of the first Avengers film, was about the time that I began to lose interest in those films and comic books more generally speaking. I remember the hype and build up for that film lasting years. I think the first of these films, Iron Man, came out in 2008. And so that is four years of set up which feels much longer when you’re 11 years old than when you’re in your 20s. Yet by the time the film came out, I was really over it. I went to see the film, but I didn’t really enjoy it that much. At this point the films still felt kind of empty compared to the actual comics they were inspired by, it’s really only after this first major team up film came out that they went into overdrive releasing several films a year all with cameo appearances and also with much less well known characters.
Of course as I said a few of them (the ones who were given TV shows or films like Batman, The Hulk, Spiderman and a couple others) have been major pop culture icons for decades, but there are thousands of these characters. Thanks to the success of the recent “marvel cinematic universe”, whatever you may think about it, these once obscure characters are now all entering the popular culture. Now I don’t really like most of the films in this MCU project/ series or whatever you want to call it, they have this awful shitty American humour that I just don’t find funny most of the time and just like the overwhelming majority of actual comic book stories from Marvel I just don’t think they have anything interesting to say. They’re kind of mindless, and I’m not against escapism or fiction that exists simply to entertain but these films aren’t even that entertaining.
Some are, I think Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was really clever and actually funny and Ant Man used a song from The Cure which was cool, but overall these films just feel very empty. I haven’t seen all of them to be fair, but I’ve seen quite a few because my friend always invites me to go see the major ones and I was really interested during the first “phase” in this project. The ones I have seen though just feel kind of soulless, like a product designed in a board room rather than a work of art. I generally agree with Scorsese, these MCU films and DC’s far less successful attempt at a similar project aren’t cinema. Sam Raimi’s Spiderman films from the early 2000s are, Ang Lee’s Hulk is, whether you think they’re good or bad they are genuine films that simply use a famous character from a comic book.
The one thing that I have to say though, is that with these new MCU films they’ve recreated the experience I had when I was regularly reading comic books as a young teenager, in a way that all the one off films that have been made over the decades never did. Me and my friend would go to this big megastore in the centre of the city every Friday after school just to hang out in the comic book section when we were like 13 or 14 years old. It was one of the few shops where you could get the actual genuine thing, local shops only sold reprints of American comics that were years out of date. Reading the new releases every Friday, it was like returning to this other universe and you could forget about real life. I first became friends with this guy because we would swap comic books actually, so I kind of owe that friendship to them.
These MCU films, they’re more like a comic book or graphic novel than a film. They’re incredibly self referential and all build on one another, you go to see whatever the next release is without ever having seen any of them before and you’ll be completely lost. The characters all appear in one another’s films, and then they often all appear together in these special big events every few years. Whatever you may say about them, it’s really quite interesting how they’ve managed to recreate this experience that I thought was really something that only worked in the comic book medium on film. I originally intended to make this post about normies moving into a niche space, but in thinking about it it’s more a case of a niche space moving into normies, if that makes sense.
This post would have had a pretty cynical tone if I had stuck to the original plan, but I’m actually getting a little nostalgic. I did used to love comic books, I would think about them all the time. It wasn’t just a thing relegated to Friday after school, me and that friend would also talk about them constantly in every class, and at break too. We’d hang out in the library during lunch near the graphic novel section, and then go to the public library after school often and do the same thing. Every night we’d be looking up obscure information on wikis to share with one another the next day, it actually got a little competitive as we would try to one up another regarding who knew more. It was kind of obsessive looking back, but those were some of the happiest days of my life.
What really started it, was when my dad gave me this huge book in 2008 (or maybe 2009) as a birthday present. At this point I hadn’t yet become friends with the guy talked about above (who is one of my few friends that remains to this day), we knew one another because we hung out in the same group in the playground but never spoke much, and I was reading those re-releases that were a few years out of date you got from the local shops and graphic novels from the school library. It’s called Marvel Chronicle, and it is essentially a year by year retrospective which documents the evolution of the company and the world they built. It covers every major storyline, and every new character introduced, all in chronological order. I loved it, it took me months to get through it all and I would spend hours reading through it some days. I haven’t picked it up in years though, I think the last time I even opened it was probably six or seven years ago.
It really revealed this whole new world to me, just as I was going into the second year of secondary school. I was good friends with two other boys in that first year, but because of my bad behaviour I was taken away from the main school and kept in this unit for behavioural correction for half a year. So when I got back, those two friends had completely stopped talking to one another because I wasn’t there to hold the three of us together and we were deliberately kept in separate classes. Then one of them got expelled anyway that same year, a bit later on. So I was really without friends for the first time, and I’d just go to the library to escape into the Marvel universe. It was in the library that I found this new group of kids, and gradually ended up becoming part of that group myself. Which is how I met the two friends I still have to this day.
It really felt like there was just so much to get lost in, a whole incredibly complex continuity to follow. A canon, not unlike a mythic canon for ancient religions actually. I mean there is some truth to what I’ve heard a few people say about how these films are almost giving people the same thing that ancient myths and legends gave to people in antiquity. I’d argue that most ancient myths have a lot more hidden esoteric meaning, but it’s not like there is no moral value whatsoever to these big blockbuster comic book films coming out today. There is definitely a case to be made that these modern films are the modern equivalent to the tales of Perseus and the Minotaur, or Bellerophon and Pegasus, or Heracles and the twelve labours. Someone more intelligent than me can make that case though, in fact they already have I’ve read a few articles like that.
Now both of the big two (Marvel and DC) have a non-canon line, and in my opinion most of the few genuinely great works connected to these companies are in these, but I’m going to go through the graphic novels I have that are in those non canon series in a separate entry. The best way to describe the stories that these elseworlds/ what if? comics tell, would be to make another comparison to the recent film Joker actually. Think about what I said about how the version of the character was nothing like the comic book character, and how the film was essentially an original work. That’s what a lot of these alternate universe stories are like, the writers and artists are much more free and unconstrained and because of this you actually get something kind of thought provoking in many cases.
So I’m going to be getting rid of all of the canon graphic novels I own from both DC and Marvel, which are pictured in the header. I wanted to use this shitty fan made wallpaper I set for my dad’s laptop back when I still had to go and visit him where he lived, but I couldn’t find it. It was just the first thing I found on google images at the time, but now I search and there’s loads of really professional wallpapers, ones that have been drawn by actual comic book artists. The one I used looked like someone simply did a cut and paste of various images onto a purple background, it was totally amateur but it had a certain charm. I’m not saying that comic books were particularly niche in 2008 when I was reading them, they were already a growing thing, but compared to what they are today they were still kind of seen as something for losers/ nerds. Back when nerd meant a socially awkward young boy and not a thot in a slutty cosplay outfit.
So, I have less than I thought when they’re all laid out like this. I did actually already threw quite a few away a few years ago I forgot about that, but I have no idea why I kept all these green lantern ones. I have literally got nothing to say about them, they looked really pretty I suppose. Incredibly colourful, that is what initially drew me to that character. The same goes for those two red hulk graphic novels, that was a new character they added exactly around the time I was first starting to get into comic books actually. That’s what I was looking for back then, I had simple tastes. Does it look pretty, are the fights cool, stuff like that. I’ve already talked about The Killing Joke, not much else to say there. The version I had was recoloured actually, and I’ve seen what the original colouring looked like and I think it looked better before actually.
Days of Future Past is a classic X-Men story, which was told over issues 138 through 143 of Uncanny X-Men. You may have heard of the film of the same name, which I imagine told a similar story though I never saw that one. Then I have a reprint collection of the first twenty issues of Tales of Suspense which feature Iron Man, first released in the 60s. If you had actual original copies of these you might be able to make some real money with them, but the comics themselves are pretty boring. Quite a few characters who are major figures in these new MCU films were introduced in these issue though, which I found pretty cool at the time. Lastly I have a similar reprint collection of Hulk stories, in this case not just the first twenty but a similar number of classics featuring the character from over the decades. From the first time the character ever appeared in the 60s, through to a story from the early 2000s.
I don’t really have any problem getting rid of all of these ones I just went through, the only one I’m having a hard time deciding to let go of is this giant “Marvel Chronicle” tome. I know that I should though, there’s no good reason to hang onto it anymore. I’m going to take it to the charity shop, at least maybe some other kid will get to take it home and maybe get the same enjoyment out of it that I did. This post is tonally all over the place, it’s ended up going in a completely different direction than I originally planned. I hope you’ll forgive me nostalgiafagging so much this week, I will be back to my usual bitter self next time.
Ramblings of a neurotic mess 