Contrary to popular opinion, the Joker is not my favorite Batman villain. A lot of the character’s heft comes from 70-odd years of inertia as a great concept (the unpredictable madness as a perfect counterpoint to the Dark Knight’s methodical logic), a striking iconic look, and memorable portrayals and depictions. There’s a reason DC had to make sure to let panicky fans know that The Killing Joke would remain intact when they launched the New 52. These days, the Clown Prince of Crime is this impossible force of nature, claiming to be crazy while meticulously out-thinking every great thinker at every turn, until it comes time for him to flake out for some reason in order to give the story an ending. That’s my general gripe – any Joker story now either has to be An Unforgettable Event In Which Someone You Love Dies or some story where he does all these amazingly terrifying things but then just kind of peters out on a technicality or something before his final master plan goes off because it’s time for the next crossover or what-have-you. Still, he’s a roller coaster thrill ride when he’s around.
Now imagine what the Joker would be if he had none of that inertia going for him. If there wasn’t a snazzy purple suit, or any Cesar Romero charm, Jack Nicholson presence, Mark Hamill fun or Heath Ledger edge. If he had no reputation and didn’t strike fear in the hearts of anybody. If he didn’t have any of his cunning or motivation or experience. If he was just some weird, broken, jittery kid. That’s close to what you get with Joker’s Daughter #1.
Basically what happens in this issue is a disfigured, mentally damaged teenage girl finds the Joker’s discarded face, eats part of it, then tries to trick the Batman into leading her to the Joker, with whom she’s obsessed. That doesn’t work, so she goes and sees the Dollmaker, the guy who cut the Joker’s face off in the first place, and convinces him to sew that old flesh onto her own face, and eventually she overcomes her hesitance to actually kill people, which may or may not have actually earned the attention of the Joker himself – enough so that she convinces herself that she’s the prophet of her Father-God figure.
Writer Marguerite Bennett makes an effort to keep this girl’s origin story as conflicted and unknowable as the Joker’s, but it comes at the expense of letting us give a damn about this character. In fact, she’s defined more by what never happened to her than what actually did. At one point, we see three different potential traumas – three of a dozen – that she’s stolen from others to weave into her own life story, but as revealed by the Anchoress of Arkham Asylum, they’re all false. She’s known no actual trauma and she’s not even actually crazy. She’s just a gross little pretender. She’s just awful and irritating.
Artist Meghan Hetrick does some impressively freaky things with layout and imagery, though. The post-surgery version of Joker’s Daughter is striking (and the pre-surgery gruesomeness is, too), as is the sequence where Batman leads her to where the Joker fell to his apparent death, and you can see his ghostly glare in the waterfall. The moody solitude at the end helps to illustrate her desperate loneliness.
If you enjoy watching the creepy be creepy for the sake of creepiness, you may dig Joker’s Daughter #1. She takes the place of psychotic Joker groupie that was vacated when Harley Quinn graduated beyond flunkie-dom, taking it to a new level of ick. Some people are into that. If so, knock yourself out, you’ve got a new book to read. If not, you probably won’t dig this book too much.
