Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Book Review: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore

Welcome back to Musings of an Arthritic Artist! Today I am going to be doing another book review, this one for The Killing Joke by Alan Moore. 


This is a graphic novel I read pretty recently, so let's discuss it. There will be spoilers for this book. If you haven't read it and wish to, I'd recommend not reading this review. 


With that aside, let's get into it!


This was the first book I read in 2022. I read this in preparation for a future post I want to do later this year. I was very curious about how Batgirl/Barbara Gordon became Oracle, so I read The Killing Joke, the book where Barbara is paralyzed by the Joker in order to attempt to make Commissioner Jim Gordon go insane.

This graphic novel is dark. It's a mature rated graphic novel for a reason. It's very dark and gritty. It's very grim.

Everything with Commissioner Gordon seemed very short and wrapped up in a neat little bow. I didn't like that, if I'm being fully honest. The small plot device with Barbara also left me with many questions.

How long did it take for someone to find her? Shouldn't she have theoretically died from loss of blood as Joker shot her through her abdomen and back?

The backstory used for Joker in this graphic novel also doesn't fully make sense to me. I have so many questions regarding this. He wants to provide for his pregnant wife because he's a family man. Good and fine. He quits his job as a lab assistant to become a stand-up comedian. What? It's no wonder he failed. There's no hint that Joker had previously been a comedian. It just makes no sense. 

Why do the criminals he agrees to work with want to rob a playing card company? What are they going to fully gain from that? There were many things in this story that just didn't make sense to me. Maybe I read it so fast that I didn't grasp some of the motivations behind this, but I don't think so.

I rated The Killing Joke 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads. My main complaint is how short it is. It's only about 40 pages long. Because of the length it was a bit underwhelming if I'm going to be honest. I felt like there was something missing, and it's not just because there's a cliffhanger at the end of this story.


That's it for this review! I hope you enjoyed it! 


See you Thursday, 


Lexi K🖌

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