The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #8 // Review
There’s a Joker in a sewer. There’s a Joker in L.A. They’re different Jokers. (Kind of. It’s probably a long story.) The story continues...as does the joke in The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #8. Writer Matthew Rosenberg continues the disjointed adventures of an anti-hero. The twin realities of L.A. and Gotham City are brought to the page in stereo by artist Carmine Di Giandomenico. The pairing of stories on both coasts is clever, but Rosenberg doesn’t deliver them to the page with enough style and wit to make the issue seem anything other than lopsided.
The Joker is hanging out with Solomon Grundy in the sewers of Gotham City. There’s a monster down there with them. The Joker might be in a bit of a compromised state, but even HE is more intellectually deft than anything that would be lurking beneath Gotham, so he’s going to be slumming it, as the Joker is getting drowned in a stream somewhere along the highways of L.A. There’s a hero there who is trying her best to deal with him, but she’s losing the moral high ground, as she has the guy about to asphyxiate in a disgusting stream of water in southern California. She turns her focus for a moment...and he strikes.
Rosenberg struggles to keep the stories distinct, but there isn’t enough contrast between the two Joker stories to make them seem all that interesting. They both have a certain appeal on their own, but there isn’t enough tying the two together thematically to make them pair together terribly well. It’s really too bad. A bi-coastal Joker issue has the potential to address so much about contemporary American consciousness...and it’s not like Rosenberg isn’t reaching for that in paired settings of a highway and a sewer, but nothing thematically compelling ever manages to come of the pairing.
Di Giandomenico has the opportunity to get truly atmospheric and immersive in a pair of lives that are playing out in two different settings...from the constellation of human travel that is the L.A. highway at night to the squalid darkness of the sewers beneath a city of theatrical, crime-ridden madness. While Di Giandomenico does manage a competent rendering of the two settings, there isn’t enough in either to make them feel like powerful contrasts to each other. To his credit, Di Giandomenico does manage to sell the squalid drama of it all between the two Jokers. This is particularly impressive with the Joker with his face in bandages in the sewer. Di Giandomenico manages breathtaking dramatic expressiveness for the faceless Joker.
The series continues to make its mark in squalor, madness, and darkness. It’s a milieu that has been explored pretty extensively over the decades on the comics page...particularly in those comics set in Gotham City. So it’s not exactly new ground, but it IS still a bit novel to hang out with the face of madness for a few more pages.
Grade: C+
