The Four Color Media Monitor

I almost missed this aggravating news from the SDCC: Scott Snyder, the current writer working on Batman, has made the following announcement of how he's going to depict the Clown Prince of Crime:

Snyder on the Joker: “The Joker story is one I’ve been working on for the last six months intensely. It’s my love letter to everything I love about this character, I really think he’s the best villain of all time.”

Snyder collaborated with Tony Daniel on Detective #1 and Joker cutting off his face, all to help set this up. “It’s going to be the craziest, darkest, probing Joker story ever.”

“Its a story that really is an exploration of what makes the Joker special as a villain. He’s coming back and saying “Batman, you forgot me and I am going to punish you for it” “He will rape and kill and mutilate and do everything to your world to bring it to you. You think you’ve faced me, but you haven’t. I’m coming for you, I’m coming for all of you” That’s how Snyder talked about the Joker looking at the Bat Family.

“It’s the biggest, craziest and most f***ing twisted we could possibly do, I promise”

By now, we're way past the point where this could be seen as anything other than crude shock value, which seems like the only thing anyone in charge of the Bat-franchise can think of doing today. Back in the Bronze Age, when Denny O'Neil revitalized Batman's world, whenever he and other writers contributing at the time would do a Joker story, there'd usually be a much more interesting and better written plot surrounding everything. But by the end of the last century, they'd lost their way as evidenced in No Man's Land, when the Joker was turned into a near-genocidal/infanticidal monster who slew Commissioner Gordon's ex-wife Sarah Essen. After such a long road strewn with tons of corpses, you'd think it high time someone in Gotham would put the Joker to death to at least spare the city any further tragedies perpetrated by the Clown Prince of Crime. But no, even then, they couldn't do it, and the knee injury Gordon did inflict healed pretty quickly too. Now, to make things worse, they're going to add defenseless women who'll fall prey to sexual assault by the Joker to the list of his many victims?

If this is the first time the Joker ever resorts to rape, if not mutilation, it's much too late to consider it significant. All it does is give a clearer picture of how bankrupt DC's stable of writers have become, and can no longer think of crime dramas with real intelligence to fuel the story.

Labels: Batman, conventions, dc comics, dreadful writers, misogyny and racism, violence