The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #6 // Review
There’s no question that any L.A. comedy club can be pretty brutal. A hack comic can only make it so far. Given the right audience, the right material, and the right moment, things might go well. And then maybe an infamous psychopath might show up from Gotham City. And then maybe things get a little tense, as one comic discovers in The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #6. Writer Matthew Rosenberg concludes the Joker’s trip to L.A. in a fun bit of chaos that is drawn to page and panel by Carmine Di Giandomenico. Color resonates from the page courtesy of Arif Prianto.
It’s not exactly a perfectly satisfactory trip to the comedy club for the Joker. He’s got other places to be anyway. He’s got to catch a flight back to Gotham City...and he has to leave town out of LAX...ugh. Of course...he’s going to be dealing with L.A. traffic in his own way. With any luck, he’ll make it to his flight on time. Unfortunately...any chaos that may ensue on the way to the airport is going to make him wish that he might have stuck around a bit longer.
Rosenberg has a couple of really charming ideas for the Joker’s adventures in L.A. It’s been sort of fun, but Rosenberg has avoided any kind of a deeper inspection of the Joker or his personality or the nature of the joke that he’s been exploring all of these years. It’s all been a bit silly. The final chapter in L.A. plays out like a homicidal sitcom that was directed by Michael Bay. It’s all very pretty and funny and such, but it lacks any depth at all. That might be perfectly fine for a light, little Joker comic book, but a character with his level of appeal DOES deserve better.
Di Giandomenico gets the overall mood and motion of the issue down. It’s not easy to fuse comedy with action in a way that is earthbound enough to be terrifying while simultaneously being light enough that all of the death and carnage can be laughed off with light humor. Di Giandomenico finesses it all perfectly well. The artist’s mastery of the mood only makes the lack of thematic depth feel that much more vacuous. The Joker looks cool and everything. He’s just not coming across as being all that interesting.
The Joker has had a lot of close-ups over the years. Compare him against any of the other Batman villains who have their own titles right now, and...he DOES come across as being the least intriguing by far. This shouldn’t be the case. The idea of homicidal madness is truly horrifying on a very deep level, which could be a very fascinating thing to explore in a comic book format, but he’s just not being seen from an angle that takes advantage of the unique madness that is the Joker.
