So this is really an attempt to do for the Joker what Milton did for Satan?
Right. The most boring thing you can do when writing Batman is to write Batman. Let's face it, Batman is worse than Dullsville or Smallville. He's a brilliant multibillionaire, who as a complete generality generally aren't very happening people. You can only make so much money before it starts making you, and worse, making your decisions for you. Bruce Wayne wouldn't be Bill Gates or Warren Buffett with a secret life, he'd be openly like Erik Prince crossed with Ray Kurzweil, which would be cool if the first half of that wasn't so frighteningly theocratic.
That's kind of a sweeping statement...
Look, all I'm saying is that you don't make money like that making friends or making the world a better place. Which is fine, neither of those are legitimate business plans. What I'm saying is that sooner or later you go public, you offer stock, and you aren't your own anymore. This is how people who can't stand Bush end up voting for him. This isn't what I came to talk about anyways.
Right, the Joker...
Is a lot more interesting to me. And the dullest thing you can do with him is make his hair green and have him constantly telling sub-Python non sequiturs. The guy I wished would have gotten to write the Joker is Robert Anton Wilson, or Dick. Somehow Grant Morrison hasn't ever really reinvented him in a compelling way, which boggles my mind. The Joker should be like a cross between Cristo, Netochka Nezvanova, Chris Morris, Jandek, people like that. To make him a serial killer who wears face paint or has a shitty outlook on life because he can't make lemonade isn't lazy, it's criminal in the waste of a good premise or waste of good restrictions to go wild with.
Your Joker is defined by your Batman to a degree though, and he's kind of the inverse Dark Knight from the Miller books. Superman actually comes off more like Miller's Batman than Batman.
Yeah, if you start from the premise that obscene amounts of money give you a reason to invest in the security state, it's not a hard decision to make. Combine that with his own sociopathy and it's really easy to make him an unlikeable vigilante, a face to do openly what the government does covertly or nowadays, not even covertly. I have him involved in extraordinary rendition, for example. And if Superman really is about truth, justice, and the American way, then that ought to make him sick, which it does. I just happen to make him aloof and embued with a justifiable superiority complex. The Joker then, becomes what Batman cannot be: the everyman who faced with ever decreasing, ever more meaningless ways to dissent and protest, ever increasing levels of surveillance and control, fights back the only way he knows how: with surrealism, with art, with the imagination.
