The Unfunny Joke: Analyzing Joker’s sanity in Batman: The Killing Joke Yuhan Dong College

The comic The Killing Joke is written by Alan Moore and drawn by Brian Bolland. It portrayed the events happened between the two rivals: Joker and Batman. When Joker broke out of jail again, he bought an amusement park to fulfil his sick desire of make other people insane just like him. Joker hurt Barbara and brought her father Gordon to torture mentally in the park, however, Gordon did not become mad or insane. Batman finally confronts Joker one on one and talked about their true feelings for one another. In this comic, I see a different relationship between Joker and Batman besides enemies. Both of them actually care about each other, but just have different perspective about the world. The two of them is very much alike in some ways. Joker is a sane and caring person and he clearly understands the situation of this world; although his actions of killing others are wrong, he had painful past of losing both his wife and his unborn child.

In the scene of The Killing Joke where Joker first had his flashback, Joker demonstrated his caring and gentle trait for his wife and unborn child. The author uses subject-to-subject panel transitions. The scene took place in Joker’s home with his wife. Overall, Bolland uses thin lines to...