Saturday, November 01, 2008

Joker Review

Recently reviewed by me at CBR: the Joker hardcover original graphic novel, about which I write the following sentences: "And Azzarello, notoriously uninterested in superheroes, brings in the street-level crime elements needed to make that kind of Joker work best. 'Joker' isn't hard-boiled in the Mickey Spillane-by-way-of-Frank Miller way that we saw in his 'Batman: Broken City' tale a few years back. Instead, it's like a Michael Mann film on paper, exploring the Joker's struggle to regain control of the Gotham underworld. Azzarello writes to Bermejo's strengths here, giving him a sleek but sullied world to illustrate, characters who slice a path through Gotham City like so many dirty razors."

Read the entire review HERE.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Azzarello actually said in an interview (was it an IGN interview?) that Bermejo put together the picture of the scarred Joker long before the production teaser images of The Dark Knight came out - as an early answer to people who might say that Bermejo was drawing this Joker out of some Heath Ledger legacy.

Who knows about the exacts, but it seems like a pretty stupid thing to lie about.

Timothy Callahan said...

Yeah, I know.

But it "feels" like a tie-in, which is why I said so in so many words.

I used "seems" a lot too.

Timothy Callahan said...

Plus, the scarred Joker goes back to Morrison's Clown at Midnight anyway.

Anonymous said...

I remember Wizard having a feature on Lee Bermejo when he was drawing Lex Luthor man of steel, where he said that some of the unofficial design work he had done for batman begins, (back when it was still being called batman: year one) had made it into the comic...which is true; a picture of Joker with the scarred grin is on one of the screens in the batcave in issue #3 of LL: man of steel, and that was in 2005...