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I asked a GR friend: Marvel or DC?

Her response made me think. She said, “Marvel over all. But DC has the better villains.��

Whu - ?

Well.

Yeah, I’ll be damned, I think she’s right.

Looking at all of the Marvel villains, I think maybe only Red Skull or Bullseye come close to matching the lunatic force of DC’s lineup. Magneto and Doctor Doom are powerful and bad, but also have some incongruous redeeming qualities. Lex Luthor, Deathstroke, Brainiac, Bane, Harley Quinn and all the Batman bad guys headlined by The Joker are more nefarious, scarier, and just plain bad.

I think a cogent argument could be made that The Joker is THE comics villain. He’s evil, insane and damn it all interesting as hell.

Just as Milton’s most enduringly intriguing player is not God or the Archangels but Satan, DC has in The Joker created an enigma (Sorry Riddler) of a criminal source that defies logic and is simply an opposing force for our heroes, motives and reason be damned. The Joker is a personification of the chaos waiting out in the dark beyond the firelight, and his is a blindly malevolent force. As Michael Caine’s Alfred in the 2008 film The Dark Knight said, “some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.��

“All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.��

In his attempt to madden Gordon and lure Batman to his doom, The Joker also provides a tenuous connection to humanity. Just as Shakespeare’s Richard III is all the more terrible because he is a man, so too is The joker all the more villainous because for all his insanity and bad intent, he is one of us and closer than some Melvillian beast or Lovecraftian old god. In the context of the Batman story, the theatrical irony the reader gets is that Joker and Batman are more alike than they realize, both transformed from what they would have been by a traumatic loss.

Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s 1988 sympathetic backstory to the Joker’s origin story is a MUST read for Moore fans, Batman devotees and all enthusiasts of the genre. The influence on later comics and even on the films (particularly Tim Burton’s vision) is unmistakable.

Grim, violent, sometimes difficult to look at, this is nonetheless a graphic novel at the apex of the genus. Moore’s writing is engaging and relentless, Bolland’s art is mesmerizing.

Highly recommended.