By Christa Faust and Gary Phillips

Titan Books, out now

The ultimate encounter between the Clown Prince of Crime and the Dark Knight retold…

It’s a long time since I read the original graphic novel of The Killing Joke – probably not since the anniversary edition came out with the amended colouring. It’s one of those stories that I feel has become overly revered – even if there’s an interesting back story for the Joker, and his sheer mania comes to the fore. The treatment of Barbara Gordon I found unpleasant then – as no doubt readers were meant to – and as with so much of DC’s output, it seemed easier to assign it to another part of the multiverse than the mainline comics. I haven’t seen the animated version (although Nick Joy has reviewed it here for SFB), and came to this after enjoying Greg Cox’s take on the Caped Crusader in The Court of Owls.

Faust and Phillips are the creative minds behind Titan Comics’ Peepland, a well-told gritty take on New York in the 1970s and they bring that realism and demonstration of the underbelly to Batman’s Gotham.

As they explain at the start, they’ve set it in a recognisable late-1980s, showing the way in which the arpanet (the forerunner of the internet) could be used for harm – expanding Barbara Gordon’s humiliation considerably – and using the benefit of 30 years’ hindsight to spot the trends that were coming then.

Interestingly, they choose to take the story beyond the final panel, stepping inside Batman’s mind in the aftermath of the confrontation. I’m not totally sure that that works – one of the strengths of the original is that the ending is open to multiple interpretations – but it does give them opportunity to re-affirm Batman’s core beliefs, and to give Barbara some light in her post-traumatic darkness.

Verdict: An interesting expansion of the original – but I’d very much like to read the authors’ take on an original Dark Knight tale. 7/10

Paul Simpson