"Killing Joke" Assessment

     My reaction to The Killing Joke is just plain out wow! I felt so bad for the Joker. I felt bad how he was just a simple man struggling to provide for his family and then all of a sudden his whole world came crashing down when his wife suddenly perished. Not to mention he was in too deep with some illegal business that he couldn't depart of. Life seemed to always be cruel and unjust to The Joker. He left his good-paying job as a lab assistant to pursue his life long goal of being a comedian. It is because of this that he had been struggling to find work. It is because of this that he got involved with crime to make money for his family. It is because of this that he loses his family. It is because of this that he ended up falling into a tub of chemicals that bleached his skin white, turned his hair green and made him looney. It is because of this, because of this one bad day that turned this simple man mad.

     The Killing Joke goes back and forth between flashbacks of the Joker before he went mad. The underlying theme of the graphic novel (at least what I got out of it) was that life is cruel and there is no such thing as a happy ending. How everything can be taken away from you in an instant and you end up losing your sanity. Prior to The Killing Joke we never looked at the Joker as a normal person with emotions and feelings of empathy. We see him killing people off for fun because he is just a crazy lunatic but underneath all that he is just like you and me. He had his hopes and dreams, a family, he had his life together. That is until one day where everything changed. Everything he loved in the world was taken from him and in an instant this simple man turned looney. Just like in the real world you could go out one night having a good time drinking with friends. Then the next thing you know you wake up in a hospital somewhere and the doctors tell you that you got into a serious accident. All your friends died in the crash except for you. To make it worse, you were the driver. Now you have to live with that guilt for the rest of your life. You just lost everything that night. This story of The Killing Joke though fictional is something that could easily reflect onto real life.

     It is hard to bring The Killing Joke into another form of media as there is already an animated film adaptation of this work. However I think that if it were to be brought into another form of media it could possibly be brought to virtual reality. With virtual reality things are much more immersive for the viewer that simply cannot be achieved through reading text off of a page. With virtual reality you can literally put yourself in a character's shoes and experience their life and world around them. If I were to bring this story to vr (virtual reality) I would change it so that the perspective is more so on the side of the Joker. Batman himself would just be a secondary character that you interact with in the vr experience. The user would put on the vr headset and actually become the Joker. You would start off in the past, living the normal life of the Joker as you slowly drift towards insanity. Everything the Joker does, when he hears about his wife's death, to falling into a tub of chemicals, to shooting Barbara Gordon. What was he feeling internally? Through vr I feel that we could dive deeper into the phycological aspect of the Joker.

Week 13: "The Killing Joke"

For this week’s reading I read Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke. This graphic novel tells one of the darkest (if not the darkest) Batman stories of all time. It is one of my favorite graphic novels that I tend to keep reading over and over again. I tend not to read something more than once unless. That however, isn’t the case with “The Killing Joke”.

This story focuses on Batman and Joker and how one of them is going to have to kill the other in the end, hence the name The Killing Joke. At the same time, The Killing Joke gives us a glimpse into the past through flashbacks of the Joker before he went all crazy. It’s nice to see an origin story for this infamous comic book villain as his origins, prior to this was shrouded in mystery.

The illustrations in The Killing Joke have a lot of interesting line work and coloring to them. It is very dark-lit and dramatic for such a story as this. The camera angles of each panel worked very well in the telling of the story. That combined with the beautiful illustrations made it very interesting to read. That is one of the main reasons, aside from the story of why I find The Killing Joke so enjoyable to consume. The drawings are quite detailed and have a sort of ominous feel to them which helps set the tone for the story.

If you haven’t read The Killing Joke I highly recommend that you should. It is one of the best Batman stories that I have ever read. The story sets itself up in a dramatic deathly tone. Aside from the story itself, the dramatic and detailed illustrations are very interesting to look at and are quite the page turner. We also learn about the Joker’s origins for the first time and how one bad day drove a simple man mad.

Week 10: Astro Boy

Astro Boy

      Astro Boy was one of the most popular anime’s when it first aired in 1963. The anime was adapted from a manga, based on the same name about 10 years earlier (Known as the “God of Manga”). Astro Boy was also the first anime to be broadcasted overseas and became a smashing success! In Japans alone it was watched by more than 40% of the population of people with TV’s.

      In the first episode of Astro Boy, a scientist loses his son in a car crash. He is devastated by this and as a result decides to make a robot in his son’s likeness. Realizing that he could never get his son back, and that this thing he created is not his son, it is a robot that could never age. The scientist, filled with anger sells the robot to the circus. The robot (Astro Boy) has to fight other robots in this circus.

      “Astro Boy” had a very clean-cut animation style to it. The show seemed to be heavily inspired by other, American animations at the time. This show would eventually set the standards for Japanese anime for years to come. This style of animation (anime) was used to caricature the American people. Anime heavily exaggerated the big, round eyes of Americans. At the same time the anime style is much more adult-oriented and realistically detailed than American animation.

      I was very pleased with Astro Boy. It was way ahead of it’s time, no wonder why it was such a smash hit when it first aired back in 1963. I was actually first exposed to “Astro Boy” when the 3D animated movie from 2009 was released. The movie itself seemed to be heavily based on the first episode of the original “Astro Boy” tv series. Of course in the movie, the robot runs away and the scientist spends the whole movie worrying about the robot instead of casting it away to the circus. It was interesting to see how true to the show the film was and how the differences to the characters from the show to the movie really change the feeling of the franchise.