Batman: The Killing Joke gets an expensive prestige edition designed like a camera

Digital Camera World wrote about a special edition of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, that's designed like a camera and comes with a possibly unshocking price tag:

The most iconic Batman serial of all time, The Killing Joke, is getting an oversized prestige edition themed like a film camera (with removable lens and leather case) for an eye-watering €15,000 – approximately $17,500 / £13,000 / AU$24,400.

While other caped crusader comics are arguably better (check out The Dark Knight Returns and Year One), what makes The Killing Joke the most iconic Batman graphic novel ever is its cover – featuring a rictus-grinning Joker pointing a camera at the viewer.

Drawn by Brian Bolland, it's one of the greatest comic book covers the medium has ever seen – and it reflects the Joker's twisted use of photography to psychologically torture Commissioner Gordon, in what serves as the villain's most widely accepted origin story.

The 1988 comic, written by similarly iconic Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), has inspired everything from action figures to an animated movie – and now the essential Batman story is being presented in the most prestigious of prestige editions, styled after the Joker's fictitious Witz film camera.

Described by publisher Argent Comics as "the world’s first giclée-printed comic book," only 52 volumes will ever exist – 47 for sale to the public, with 5 archive copies for Argent and DC.

If memory serves, it's also the story where Barbara Gordon was turned parapalegic when the Joker shot her, and what Moore may not have intended as canon per se was soon turned into just that by the editors, with the earliest appearance Babs made in a wheelchair I can recall possibly being an issue of John Ostrander's Suicide Squad, at least 2 years after the Killing Joke was published. While there were decent stories that followed where Babs was in the spotlight like Birds of Prey's first several years, some could reasonably argue whether it was a good idea to just take a potentially questionable story and shoehorn in into continuity proper.

For now, this is yet another speculator market farce in the making, and nobody should be buying this photographing joke just because of the silly design they used on the cover material. And seriously, is Moore really that "iconic" a writer? Not really, and he hasn't been in a long, long time.