"THE JOKER'S 5-WAY REVENGE"
WRITTEN BY DENNY O'NEIL
ART BY NEAL ADAMS
EDITED BY JULIUS SCHWARTZ
If NIGHT OF THE STALKER represents the very best Batman story, surely THE JOKER'S 5-WAY REVENGE is the most influential and imitated. Batman, for our purposes, pretty much begins with O'Neil and Adams' entrance onto the book in late 1969 and their combination of pulp moxie and moody, innovative artwork acted as a broom to sweep away absolutely everything that could possibly remind anyone of the 1966 BATMAN TV show. The extent of the house-cleaning is shocking: Robin, was relegated to occasional guest star, Wayne Manor was discarded for a penthouse loft, the old Batmobile was replaced a simple black sports car with an insignia on the hood, Batman often left Gotham for international adventures, and most radical of all, the vast majority of the Batman's rogue's gallery, and any who had been featured on the TV show, were put on hiatus in favor of anonymous gangsters, monsters like Man-Bat or pulp masterminds like Dominic Daark and Ra's al-Ghul.
You can only keep the greats on the bench for so long, though, and after a four year hiatus the traditional villains began trickling back into the story in leaner, sharper, form. This story is the pivotal turning point for that movement. Denny O'Neil returns the Joker to his original form in precise fashion: The Joker announces that he will kill and then kills, no matter what countermeasures are taken to prevent it, leaving only a hideous rictus grin on the face of his victims.
Save THE LAUGHING FISH, no Joker story following this one has lived up to the diabolical menace of the first act of this story: The Joker, freshly escaped from a pre-Arkham insane asylum upstate, is on his way back to Gotham and like the villain of HALLOWEEN, he is Death made flesh. The Joker blames his old gang of five anonymous ruffians for getting him captured, and has decided to exterminate them all. He's so ruthlessly efficient that by the time Batman has found the first corpse, the Joker has already laid the trap that will kill the second and is moving towards the third, who he will dispatch with instantly.
A lesser story would make it explicit but O'Neil and Adams are smart enough to allow us to infer from the brief bits of characterization that these flunkies had nothing to do with the Joker getting caught-- they're either old washed-up crooks or credulous idiots. Joker is just killing them because it's what suits him at the moment. This all builds to a spectacular climax with a novel death-trap, and a twist at the end that lets the story be resolved while keeping the Joker strong for future appearances.
Halfway through writing this, I realized that what I really wanted to use this review to talk about was how perfectly The Joker is utilized here, and in its immediate follow-ups, and how the character has largely been ruined today out of the need to continually escalate the violence and sadism in the Batman's world. This has been coupled with a thematic decision to present the Joker as he was in Frank Miller's legendary THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS as a character whose primary objective is to destroy Batman by making him lose control and kill him.
Unfortunately these two developments-- the escalation of Joker's sadism and intelligence along with the idea that the Batman can never kill have conspired to turn Batman's best villain into the most idiotic discussion on deontological ethics that you could ever imagine. If the Joker can escape whenever he wants, and only escapes in order to kill hundreds of people at a time so he can provoke Batman, then Batman must be morally retarded to not just snap the man's neck and call it a day. There's literally no other way for society to protect itself from a mass murderer who kills people on the scale of a small war whenever he gets the itch just to make Batman grumpy.
(The only notable exception to this idiotic Kabuki dance is Grant Morrison's recent depiction of the Joker as an OCD murderous performance artist, which at least returns to the character a kind of horrific spontaneity that he's been missing since the 80's.)
A lesser story would make it explicit but O'Neil and Adams are smart enough to allow us to infer from the brief bits of characterization that these flunkies had nothing to do with the Joker getting caught-- they're either old washed-up crooks or credulous idiots. Joker is just killing them because it's what suits him at the moment. This all builds to a spectacular climax with a novel death-trap, and a twist at the end that lets the story be resolved while keeping the Joker strong for future appearances.
Halfway through writing this, I realized that what I really wanted to use this review to talk about was how perfectly The Joker is utilized here, and in its immediate follow-ups, and how the character has largely been ruined today out of the need to continually escalate the violence and sadism in the Batman's world. This has been coupled with a thematic decision to present the Joker as he was in Frank Miller's legendary THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS as a character whose primary objective is to destroy Batman by making him lose control and kill him.
Unfortunately these two developments-- the escalation of Joker's sadism and intelligence along with the idea that the Batman can never kill have conspired to turn Batman's best villain into the most idiotic discussion on deontological ethics that you could ever imagine. If the Joker can escape whenever he wants, and only escapes in order to kill hundreds of people at a time so he can provoke Batman, then Batman must be morally retarded to not just snap the man's neck and call it a day. There's literally no other way for society to protect itself from a mass murderer who kills people on the scale of a small war whenever he gets the itch just to make Batman grumpy.
(The only notable exception to this idiotic Kabuki dance is Grant Morrison's recent depiction of the Joker as an OCD murderous performance artist, which at least returns to the character a kind of horrific spontaneity that he's been missing since the 80's.)
In many cases the desire to turn comic book heroes: adventure characters for the young and young at heart into venues for hyper stylized violence and sadism on the level of say, Thomas Harris' SILENCE OF THE LAMBS has led to the narrative equivalent of a dead end-- mining for bedrock. In Batman's case it's actively caused a cave in upon the most reliable of all comic book villains-- may he be fixed one day.