Die Laughing
Credits: Doug Moench (writer), Jim Aparo (penciler), Josef Rubinstein (inker), Richard Starkings (letterer), Adrienne Roy (colorist)
Summary: Joker and Scarecrow cause havoc at the Gotham River Tunnel, with Mayor Krol as their hostage. Batman arrives and is soon sprayed by Scarecrow’s fear gas. He fights his way through the effects and attacks the Joker, but their fight is ended when Scarecrow uses a rocket launcher to start a flood. The villains leave while Batman is left to rescue Mayor Krol.
Irrelevant Continuity: Jason Todd is still dead at this point, as he should be. The implication from this story is that this is Batman’s first meeting with Joker since the “Death in the Family” storyline.
Review:
This is Moench’s best chapter of the storyline so far, as he finds the
right balance between traditional superheroics and the heightened sense
of mayhem that’s needed to sell “Knightfall” effectively. Joker and
Scarecrow are given several pages to simply destroy everything in their
path, a bender that’s noticeably violent, but not graphic or terribly
dark. When Batman does confront the villains, Moench is able to convey
Batman’s frayed state of mind and guilt over Jason Todd’s
murder at the Joker’s hands without going overboard. Forcing him to see
visions of Jason through the Scarecrow’s fear gas is another smart use
of the characters, even if the scene is surprisingly short. And it’s
also great to see Jim Aparo, the definitive Batman artist of this era
and the penciler of “Death in the Family,” actually draw Batman’s
rematch with the Joker. A rematch that consists of Batman just
relentlessly beating him over and over again. This kind of stunt has
been done to death by now, but I think at the time this was one of the
few genuinely violent Batman/Joker confrontations in print.
3 comments:
Reading this for the first time as a kid, I had no idea it was Batman's first confrontation with Joker following Jason Todd's death. It really does add a new level to it when you realize that.
I don't think this is the first Joker/Batman confrontation since Death in the family. At the end of that storyline Joker was assumed dead in a helicopter crash but he starts Knightfall in Arkham. So unless his only appearance was in that miniseries where Tim Drake had to face his alone, I assume him and Batman met at least once.
The Joker did re-appear in the Bat titles as well, after Death in the Family and before Knightfall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_the_Joker
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