I've been owning the newly reprinted Deluxe Edition of The Killing Joke for almost a year now, and despite its short length I never got around to picking it up and actually reading it. Well yesterday I finally read it and like anything else I've read from Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, From Hell) it's absolutely bat-shit (pun intended!) insane amazing. It's not only the amazing story centered around Batman and Joker, it's also the stunning art-work from Brian Bolland as you can see for yourself, which completely makes this one of my all-time favorite comics that I have ever had the pleasure to read. I've seen some images of the original coloring of the first print of this comic and thank god that Brian Bolland completely re-did the coloring for this hardcover Deluxe Edition. Not only are the colors more subdued and use darker tones but they also manage to be really colorful in all the right places with a composition that is really stark and telling. In short, the presentation is among the best one I've seen in a comic book up until now.
This is the Batman that I love; the pissed off dark knight that you will never even think of laughing at, the one you see in Christopher Nolan's new movies, the one I experienced while playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, the dark lonely and moody avenger Batman with no campy side-kicks like Robin and Batgirl. This is basically the ideal Batman story where violence is not held back, where crime actually feels as horrible, ugly and brutal as it's suppose to. But just focusing on Batman would be unfair in a comic which is clearly centered around the origins of The Joker. However The Joker serves as an unreliable narrator as he admits to his own uncertainty of the single event that made him to what he is, or as he puts it "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice!" and much like Batman this Joker is also like a definitive Joker interpretation. This is not the nice campy funny Joker of say Adam West's Batman, this Joker is a psychopathic homicidal maniac with no regard for human life and when he's funny it's in a dark hopeless way.
