InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Congratulations universe."

stig (stig) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-07-27 13:04:00

A Screwy Follow-Up
Okay. A while ago, I got into a spirited discussion with thehefner over on this page about our conflicting views of what consitues 'The Joker'. I generally preferred the Manchester-Grin version as seen in The Dark Knight, Azarello & Bermejo's Joker OGN, and (to a different degree), Grant Morrison's Batman run; he is more in favour of the DCAU, classic Joker with the purple suit and generally wacky behaviour.

This post is a sort of a capstone to that, containing pages from one of the best stories I've ever ever read featuring that latter DCAU version, one which also explores, to some degree, his chaotic personality. It was a crossover with Dark Horse - oddly enough, crossing over two 'TV Series' incarnations of characters in a comic book rather than their comic personas - and it began with the Joker failing to blow up a museum due to incompetent henchmen...until he came across a small piece of wood.

What resulted is entitled Joker/Mask, and it may be one of the Screwiest, funniest books I have ever come across. The book I scanned from is 96 pages long; here are approximately 20 of those pages.

At this point, the Joker has already 'tested' the Mask on his one remaining henchman, tricked him out of it, and assassinated him. The Cops have surrounded the already-evacuated Gotham Museum of Art also.

(I'm not sure if the writers - Henry Gilroy and Ronnie Del Carmen - had the correct handle on the Joker-Harley relationship - he's never really abusive to her in the entire story unless he has the Mask on.)

(The henchman was a baseball fan, and briefly used his powers to give Harley a makeover.)

I love the wild, animalistic responses he gives her. "EEE!" ARR!"

After appearing to kill Batman by driving him off a bridge, Joker goes on a ridiculously successful crime spree, but everyone thinks it's just The Mask/Bighead. Commissioner Gordon brings in Lieutenant Kellaway, the one cop who was always after Bighead in the old comics, but as he explains how the only hope they have is to simply contain Bighead and then trick him into removing the Mask...

Who here isn't thinking of giving Bullock a wedgie right now? Be honest!

Anyway. I can't post too much, but after this moment, the Joker gets his own TV show in order to better get his message out to the world and performs a hilarious public crime spree as Batman recovers from grievous injuries. Harley, miffed at how corrupt he is becoming, calls in a favour...

Incidentally, where the writers didn't quite grasp the Joker/Harley dynamic, they were FANTASTIC with Ivy; the character is smart, funny and affectionate towards Harley, and the most sexual thing she does in the entire thing is be a grown woman lounging around in a swimsuit made of leaves. They also ramped up the Eco-Warrior aspect considerably...

However, once she gets him to remove the Mask he is no longer under her hypnotic control, at which point he promptly smacks her down. Harley protests that he's not funny; he retierates that the mask only made him funnier, and decides to prove it by tying Ivy, Harley and his Producer to a Nuclear Bomb named Bob.

Batman briefly interrupts, attempting to defeat the Joker several times before he morphs into a Superman analogue and beats him up with a giant boxer's glove, prompting the trippy climax:

The day is saved, the bomb is disarmed, but one little score is still left to be settled...

And in the final page, Lieutenant Kellaway visits the grave of its most famous owner - Stanley Ipkiss - and drops the Mask onto a corpse dressed in a soiled, baggy yellow suit.

The whole book is fantastically silly and irreverent, which is what makes it so great. If you can get a copy - do so! You won't regret it.

(Post a new comment)

	cardinalx 2009-07-27 12:52 pm UTC (link)
	Any chance of you posting that page of Joker singing the Lumberjack song? And a shot of Ivy in a leaf bikini wouldn´t be bad either. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	stig 2009-07-27 01:37 pm UTC (link)
	Your wish, my command...but no more requests. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	cardinalx 2009-07-27 01:45 pm UTC (link)
	Muchos gracias. That shot of Ivy lounging is HAWT! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	menagerie 2009-07-27 01:41 pm UTC (link)
	Brilliant! Wish the Mask had stuck around the DCU longer. The Creeper? Ted Kord/Blue Beetle, Darkseid! So many opportunities for comedy!! (Reply to this) (Thread)

	statham1986 2009-07-27 01:56 pm UTC (link)
	The idea of Darkseid with the Mask is great. Final Crisis would've been absolutely hilarious with him threatening to destroy the multiverse via an atomic wedgie. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	stig 2009-07-27 02:23 pm UTC (link)
	Given that Magic is his weakness, imagine it on Superman. I get the idea that he'd basically focus his will on it and become a hyperactive, green version of himself with a manic grin. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	statham1986 2009-07-27 02:40 pm UTC (link)
	Heh, given how ridiculous the 'SuperJoker' section of this series was, my brain can't fully comprehend just how awesome it would be to see Clark wearing the thing. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

stig
2009-07-27 08:56 pm UTC (link)

And of course there's the matter of Johns' recent Emotional Spectrum buildup, which the Mask fills pretty well - Green Mask creating things, Yellow suit causing fear.

If DC ever instigates another crossover, they could have the Guardians and Sinestro filing the cosmic equivalent of a joint patent infringement against the Mask's mysterious carver...only for it to fall into the hands or rather onto the face of, say, Doomsday. Or Mogo. Or someone possessed by a Starro.

This is fun!

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	jlbarnett 2009-07-28 12:23 am UTC (link)
	you know he'd appear as both Superman and Clark Kent with the Mask on (Reply to this) (Parent)

01d55
2009-07-28 12:59 am UTC (link)

Going off the movie, Darkseid wouldn't be a funny Mask.

If you remember, the bad guy got The Mask for a while and it didn't make him wacky - that's not what The Mask does.

What it does do is make you what you secretly wish to be - Stanley was a Loony Toons fan, the bad guy was a gangster, and their Masked selves reflected that. So, Maskseid probably wouldn't be wacky funtimes.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

statham1986
2009-07-27 02:09 pm UTC (link)

Excellent post! This is one of the first trades that I bought when I was first getting back into comics a couple of years back, and I absolutely loved it. It's a perfect idea for fans of a funnier Joker, which I am. I like my Joker like Jack Nicholson and the DCAU version. Funny, clown-like, but still quite creepy, sinister and deadly, and quite obviously mad. So this was perfect for me. The odd thing was that the book seems to take the idea of the DCAU Joker and mash it together with Dark Horse's actual Mask series, which was quite violent, gorey, and not really that lighthearted, but for people more familiar with the Jim Carrey movie (not so much that pathetic sequel with poor Alan Cumming, Bob Hoskins and Tea Leoni), I suppose it works fine.

I do love this book's version of Ivy, though, and I think it sets my standards for what I like to see in the character, with perhaps the exception of the green skin (which I prefer to leave up to a whim of the artist) - In that she's attractive, sexy, intelligent, and funny, and perhaps a little too ambitious for her own good at times. Also? I LOVE barefoot Ivy (foot-fetishist here, yes, but not because of that), because it just seems to make sense for the character, to me. She wouldn't wear some plasticky or leather boots or whatever, and the little elfin booties and the green tights never worked for me.

Also, I did describe her as sexy, which I think a character like Ivy should be, given who she is and what she does, but I do like it when she isn't used solely in a sexual purpose, like she was in say, Hush, where Loeb obviously took delight in implying 'HEHEHLESBIANSHENANIGUNS' with Selina. This, on the other hand, works really well because she looks great but that isn't all she's there for. The only time she acts sexually is trying to get more information out of Kellaway about the Mask.

So I loved this, and I'm glad to see someone else enjoyed it.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

	stig 2009-07-27 02:20 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, Ivy doesn't get very good press in regular comix - that's one of the things that turns me off Dini's "Sirens". In that, she's basically all sexual and physical, using vines on everyone for icky bondage scenes - as well as being generally humourless. And the last time Dini wrote her before that, she was raped by a haunted tree. Repeatedly. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

statham1986
2009-07-27 02:37 pm UTC (link)

Mm. I think Dini's lodged himself a little too firmly in the 'Charlies Angels' mindset for GCS, in that each of the girls is good at one particular thing, and for Ivy, it's interrogation, manipulation and kinda-sorta torture. She's got the sorta ice-queen thing going on and she's completely detached, I think. I don't get any of that warmth that I saw toward Harley in the DCAU, and I like to think that a woman in her position would have a sense of humour about what she can do, especially with idiot males tripping over themselves to get at her.

I do much prefer this version, although I think I'm a little bored of how serious mainstream comics in general are getting. Everything seems to be rape, death, war, these days.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

psychop_rex
2009-07-28 07:07 am UTC (link)

I agree - while the Ledger Joker was a truly inspired villain, he wasn't... well, FUNNY. He didn't tell jokes, and he hardly ever laughed. (True, this made it quite terrifying when he DID, but still.) I mean, why the hell would you call yourself 'the Joker' and garb your henchmen in clown masks if you're not even going to TRY being funny? I would have settled for a few more moments like the 'magic trick' with the pencil - that made me laugh, even if it just in a 'holy CRAP, did he really just do that?' way. In my opinion, the Joker SHOULD be both funny and scary, because that makes for a compelling combination - you're laughing at him because he's being wacky, but at the same time, you're gasping in shock - well, inwardly, anyway - because he's doing such terrible things.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

stig
2009-07-28 08:52 am UTC (link)

I'll just note that the traditional role of the 'Fool' character is seen as one that is able to challenge authority using the pretence of a joke; to that end, it becomes a symbol of anarchy and revolution, which is what Nolan's Joker was creating.

Literary examples would include the 'Fool' characters in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night", "King Lear" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (Puck), E. A. Poe's terrifying "Hop-Frog", and the real-life example of the Jester at the court of a French King Phillip who was the only courtier capable of breaking the news of France's defeat at sea without being summarily executed due to the fact that he could joke about it.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

psychop_rex
2009-07-28 08:47 pm UTC (link)

While you're quite right about that, and that IS certainly an aspect of the Joker character as a whole, I don't really think it can accurately be applied to Ledger's Joker. When did he make jokes? When did he even make the pretense of joking? The most joking he did were some dry wisecracks and general weirdness. Challenge authority he certainly did, but I wouldn't say he even tried to use jokes to do it - he didn't even use the DCU Joker's 'life is a joke, and I'm trying to make people see that' shtick, which would have fit in perfectly with the Ledger Joker's view on life. (Mind you, it's been a while since last I saw it, so I may have forgotten a few things, but I saw it twice initially, and have read countless quotes from it and dissections of it on the internet, so I'm pretty sure I'm right about this.)

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

stig
2009-07-28 09:38 pm UTC (link)

Sort of half-and-half, really. I mean, he doesn't use light-hearted fare, but he certainly uses a humorously cruel tone, utilising sarcasm, irony, dramatic irony and especially mockery, for instance:

* Tricking his gang into killing each other, ending in a bus crashing through the wall at the exact moment he says he was gonna kill the busdriver
* Tricking the bank manager into thinking he was about to die when he was really just using a simple gas bomb
* The extremely sarcastic 'pencil trick'
* The 'drop her? Poor choice of words'
* The supposed origin stories delivered as if telling a long joke
* Mocking of authority figures and authority itself - sarcastic jabs at the gang leaders ("You should like my suit. You bought it"), sarcastic criticism of Batman's interrogation technique, morals and personal philosophy, sarcastic applause as Gordon is made Comissioner
* Use of irony in his speeches - e.g., the final speech mentioning gravity as he hangs upside-down on a rope
* Near 4th-wall levels of jokes only the audience could appreciate - e.g., the walking away from an exploding hospital scene

Basically, the portrayal ramps up that aspect of the character that realises that life and aspects of order are very cruel and must thus be mocked with anarchic and ironic violence.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

psychop_rex
2009-07-28 09:54 pm UTC (link)

Mockery and 'a humorously cruel tone' does not translate to joking; it translates to quips. Stylish quips, yes, and memorable ones, but still quips, not jokes. Don't get me wrong - I think Ledger made for a terrific Joker in terms of overall tone - he's certainly one of the more convincingly insane ones - but one of the central tenets of the Joker is that he JOKES. He sees himself as a clown, a comedian, a performer - also a criminal, an anarchist and a murderer, but his central persona is a comedic one. He glories in terrible puns with a deadly edge - he outfits himself with practical jokes gone wrong - he's his own best audience, who laughs at all his own jokes. Without that comedic edge, I don't think Ledger's Joker can really be termed the definitive one - he's just A Joker, with a decidedly different take. Now, if he'd wielded some cream pies filled with acid, or exploding cigars filled with nitro - THAT would have been a different story.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	silverzeo 2009-07-27 04:42 pm UTC (link)
	Wonder what would happen if Two-Face gets his hands on that Mask. (Reply to this) (Thread)

psychop_rex
2009-07-28 06:59 am UTC (link)

My guess is that his good and evil sides would split off from each other entirely, and you'd have two people, both Mask-enhanced. One would be a sort of super-lawyer, acting not only as judge and jury (but NOT executioner, 'cause this is the good side), but catching them and bringing them to trial himself - the other would be a horrible, twisted, demonic gangster-figure who'd make the villain in the 'Mask' movie look like a fuzzy bunny. Batman would have to catch BOTH of them and bring them back together, since he could only remove the Mask once the two sides were reunited again.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	cowtasticism 2009-07-27 05:23 pm UTC (link)
	Yay, not-green Posion Ivy! (Reply to this)

	hearthemvoices 2009-07-27 05:31 pm UTC (link)
	So... does it state how Stanley Ipkiss died? D: (Reply to this) (Thread)

	statham1986 2009-07-27 05:54 pm UTC (link)
	Not in the book, as I recall. Dependant upon what continuity this follows - either the animated Mask TV show that popped up after the movie, or Dark Horse's comic books, something unknown happens to Stanley, or, as in the books, he gets shot to death by his own girlfriend about a third of the way through the first series, if I remember rightly. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	mullon 2009-07-27 05:46 pm UTC (link)
	Mmm...Harley in a cheerleader outfit. I anything the Mask seemed to make Joker less dangerous, not more. (Reply to this) (Thread)

statham1986
2009-07-27 05:58 pm UTC (link)

Some of the scans not included in this show the Joker blowing up tanks and the like, generally terrorising the police and stuff like that. Basically business as usual, only on a grander scale, I think.

Basically, to paraphrase Batman, the Mask has such an influence on it's wearer that it probably takes away from the creativity of someone like the Joker. He can do anything, but he'd most likely resort to the most obvious thing (like using a giant bomb to blow up Gotham), than anything truly imaginative.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

stig
2009-07-27 06:14 pm UTC (link)

It's in fact a continuation of the typical Dr. Faustus character, and a far more logical version of god-powered Joker than, say, the Emperor Joker story. No matter what incarnation he was, he wouldn't have a plan to take over the world and neatly order everything in his style; he'd just abuse his power as much as he could, do whatever he liked, get bored and then go back to normal.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	sir_razorback 2009-07-27 08:09 pm UTC (link)
	Man, I had a horible thought. The version of Joker where he's Joker Beyond? I bet he'd be a dead ringer for Michael Jackson right now. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	stig 2009-07-27 08:48 pm UTC (link)
	You have a twisted little imagination. On that topic, I've been asking people: when John Merrick's remains finally become the heap of dust which all of us turn to, whose skeleton will be the next most valuable? Rupert Murdoch (Rich)? Jackie Chan (Consistently Broken)? Jackson's own (Irony)? (Reply to this) (Parent)

	proteus_lives 2009-07-27 11:18 pm UTC (link)
	Harley is far too adorable in this. (Reply to this)

thehefner
2009-07-28 03:29 am UTC (link)

I'm only able to read this via iPhone currently, which is less than ideal for comic scan enjoyment, but once I'm at a proper computer, I'll give this the reading it deserves. I remember being very disappointed when it came out, purely because the teenage boy I was very much favored the ultra-violent-but-still-funny Mask by Arcudi and Mahnke (particularly LOBO/MASK), so at the time, I viewed this story to be a huge wasted opportunity of expectations and potential. The lack of magnificent slaughter made me sad. But I'm super-interested in giving this a read now, and I shall soon!

In the meantime, I've given our spirited discussion some thought, and it occurred to me that a lot of what you liked about Morrison's Joker... I've been thinking, that's what I'd like to see the SCARECROW be! The Joker as an unbridled nightmare made flesh bores me, but shit, that'd be a grand direction to take Jonny Crane! At least with the gas. Because when was the last time the Scarecrow was actually scary?

(Reply to this) (Thread)

stig
2009-07-28 08:56 am UTC (link)

The finger-collecting, showtune-crooning Scarecrow in "Crimson Mist" was vaguely creepy...I'm just wary of the writers. It's hard to build up a character to be genuinely scary, as with Geoff Johns' recent Black Hand revamp, and easy to simply do something akin to that "Scarebeast" fiasco.

Who knows, maybe a new character is in order? I recall Peter Milligan try out something with a "Mistress of Fear" a few years ago...

(Reply to this) (Parent)

	thehefner 2009-07-28 03:35 am UTC (link)
	Also, I would add that I wouldn't want my Ideal Joker to be purely wacky either. Really, my Joker is the Devil himself, a charismatic charmer who can burrow into your brain and manipulate you just as readily as slaughter millions in the funniest way possible to him. And in a way also, to us: his audience. (Reply to this)

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