Yes, I eventually link to where you can read the theory yourself, be patient.
So a long time ago on this site, when my blog was just barely four months old, I wrote a post outlining why the ending of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke could be interpreted as Batman killing the Joker. I laid out my reasons, got a few comments (on the now-defunct Haloscan service I used to have on my site), with some folks thinking it was interesting, some others fully onboard, and a few who thought I was way off base. And, fair enough — I said right there in the body of that post “I may be reading too much into this,” and that’s fine. We’re all just having fun.
About nine years later, in an interview, Grant Morrison comes out and says “Batman kills Joker at the end of The Killing Joke,” and because they’re a person who had slightly more fame and influence than a comic shop employee with a blog, everyone was all over this “sudden revelation” that I also had like a decade earlier.
In fairness, a few kind persons here and there piped up and said “hey, this Mike guy said the same thing a long time ago,” but again, comic shop dude, blog, no traction. But it was nice to be remembered.
I didn’t see at the time of the Morrison thing this solid refutation of the “Batman Kills Joker” idea, written by my now-pal-on-Bluesky John. Had I seen in back in 2013, would I have jumped into his comments and declared “NO, YOU’RE WRONG, BATMAN TOTALLY KILLED JOKER! READ MY POST!”
No, of course not. As I said above, we’re all just having fun, and as I note in my 2013 post, it’s just an interpretation, and not any sort of “proof” of authorial intent.
And besides, in a recent Bluesky discussion on a related topic, comics artist Chris Weston reveals
Thus does the long “Killing Joke‘s ending” saga come to its…well, end. Brian Bolland, literal Co-Creator of the Story, sez “negatory.”
Does that mean we can no longer read the ending of Killing Joke as the Joker’s death? No, of course not. Once art is out there, its meaning can be unmoored (er, so to speak) from the creators’ intentions, and anyone can see whatever they want to see in it. Even if it’s entirely…well, I hate to use the word “wrong,” but…wrong. Not all ideas are equally supported or of equal merit, but you can’t stop people from seeing what they see, feeling what they feel.
And that’s kinda that. I had a wild idea about Killing Joke, threw it out into the universe, and it met either approval, disapproval, or indifference. I felt no need to run around defending the idea against every naysayer, because I knew full well it was just an interesting way to read the end of that story. Plus, it’s not like I was necessarily the first to come up with it in 2004, 14 years after the comic originally came out. (And it’s coming out again in a fancy new facsimile edition on the 28th of this month, so you can read it yourself and see if me ‘n’ Grant are right!)
Why do I bring all this up? I mean, other to show off how great and clever I am?
It’s because another of my Bluesky pals mentioned in passing that there was someone out there challenging people who dared not to take his Watchmen theory seriously. That caught my attention, because as longtime readers of this site know, I do love me some ancillary Watchmen stuff, the sillier the better.
Well, said pal explained the theory to me, to which I reacted “huh, interesting, not really supported by the text, but whatever.” My ultimate conclusion in my response was that this was proof of the comic’s complexity and depth, allowing for such differing interpretations. No, I didn’t agree with the theory’s conclusions, but I believed I was even-handed enough in my reply.
In what is now an unsurprising turn of events, the proponent of this theory appeared in our discussion after presumably term-searching, initially thanking me for calling the theory “interesting,” but telling me to spend for than five seconds thinking about it to see that he’s right. Then the challenges began, demanding that anyone who denies his theory “prove him wrong.” The interactions become increasingly offputting, with his continual assertions that only he sees the truth and everyone saying otherwise just hasn’t put the proper effort into reading the comic.
I’m paraphrasing and generalizing, but the arguments come down to “he’s right, everyone else in wrong, debate me.” I eventually told him straight out “your theory isn’t the reason no one wants to talk to you about this.”
And that’s kind of the point of all this. Not that the theory is “wild and out there.” I’m perfectly fine with this guy having this interpretation of Watchmen. Like I noted on Bluesky, the text does not support it, and in fact almost explicitly counters the idea, but whatever, man. We’re all just trying to have fun, and as I said above, art is there for personal interpretation, even if it can be way off base.
That’s all well and good. But being pushy and aggressive about it is not the way to sell it to anyone. Here’s the theory (NOTE: please don’t harass the fella there or in the comments here), with illustrations, as he outlines it on Bluesky. He kicked it off with “Am I delusional? You tell me!” and then people told him and he didn’t like it. You can see his response to skeptics in his main feed, accusing others of “running away” when they dismiss his idea, thinking it’s because they can’t challenge his logic, when actually those folks didn’t see any need to deal with him.
Here’s a Reddit thread from some months earlier where presumably the same person got a better reaction to his ideas. You can see, though, the anger at the deniers creeping in there, and if this is the same person, I can imagine months of his theory not going over becoming more and more of a burden on him, resulting in his behavior on Bluesky.
And like me not being the first person with my Killing Joke idea, when I presented this theory to a friend who actually wrote a book on Watchmen, his reaction was 1) nah, and 2) he’d actually heard this years ago. Now was it from the same guy, or just parallel evolution in Watchmen theories? I don’t know.
Ultimately, I’m sympathetic to the guy, at least regarding this topic. I’m all for new ways to look at established works. I even particularly like his thought that maybe Moore was trying to prove that a “secret identity” in a comic could work on fooling readers in The Real World. Except, first, this level of theorized effort would seem to run contrary to Watchman’s ultimate metatextual purpose. Second, Moore already kinda does this with Rorschach in the early issues.
What was missing from all this is a little humility. Saying that only you know the truth and everyone else has missed it, and being kinda weird about it, doesn’t inspire debate. It inspires abandonment. Nobody wants to be browbeat about not reading comics the “right” way. To repeat a piece of advice I offered to this gentleman, one that I benefited from given my earlier more-uptight-about-my-hobby days: mellow out, dude.
