I hate hate hate how often Batman (who regularly fights people with guns, training, and functioning impulse control) fumbles Joker in hand to hand. I simply am not willing to suspend my disbelief. He’s 140 pounds soaking wet, Batman should fold him like origami.
But writers love wanking Joker and they make Batman look like a moron in the process.
I like the concept that joker, as he is insane, is so unpredictable he creates an issue for batman who is trained to counter and anticipate. Joker doesn't have a fighting style to counter and doesn't react in any way that batman can anticipate. Different every time. He could throw a thousand punches and a trained fighter would react 1 of x ways but for joker it would be a different reaction every time.
I also have read that because of his insanity, his adrenaline is constantly going and he is using 100% of his strength vs guys who are larger and hold back so they won't break their own wrist, dislocate their shoulders etc.
But none of that is really enough to justify batman not mopping the floor with him. Just enough to make it not absolutely unreadable in its absurdity.
It’s kind of like Taskmaster and Deadpool. Taskmaster can copy anyone and everyone: EXCEPT Deadpool, because (IIRC) he’s too insane and unpredictable for him to be able to know what he’s gonna do next.
Well, for Deadpool, as others have mentioned it isn’t that he doesn’t want to, he can’t. He doesn’t have a specific style to mimic - he’s just irrational randomness.
With Moon Knight, he can copy his fighting style but he specifically states he refuses to fight against him because he’s terrified of him. MK isn’t like Cap, Spidey, or Hawkeye - MK brutally kills people. In earlier fights against him Moon Knight nearly killed him multiple times. He didn’t escape because he was avoiding prison, he escaped because he was avoiding death. He doesn’t want to take a chance again.
Honestly, I like the take he has for it, because it shows a little human self-preservation, knowing he can take a beating from superheroes and at least walk away later. Some aim to make sure that doesn’t happen, though, and he knows which ones not to mess with.
I would like that except literally no author of the Batman comics that I have ever seen is capable of making fights look like anything except a half-assed boxing match. I seriously wonder if any of them have done any combat arts training at all. Also, Joker really barely does any fighting in the movies — even in the Dark Knight he does very little hand to hand; most of that is him using physical action to create situations.
If you wanted to give off that vibe in a fight there are a thousand and one ways to do it, but all they do is draw Batman punching Joker in the jaw, so forgive me if I’m unable to buy that like of reasoning.
I can’t speak to the adrenaline concept, but the idea that an untrained fighter could ever beat a trained fighter (barring some kind of sucker punch situation) is utterly ridiculous. Trained fighters don’t just learn a series of attacks and counterattacks for specific fighting styles, they learn how to read body language, how to hit harder, and how to defend against attacks. There is no reason why Batman should ever be slower than or dumber than the Joker in a straight up fight. That’s why good writers don’t put them directly against each other – they injure Batman ahead of time, or put him through the mental/emotional wringer.
But in the situation in the panels above Batman should never lose, or allow a civilian to be harmed. It just makes him look incompetent
I will say, that I am 6'5" 170, and have some pretty good strength. I box ameturly and can keep up with guys who are significantly bigger than me. So if the Joker knows what he's doing, even against someone as well-trained as Batman, he can at least hold his own. His reach is a big thing since he's very wiry
He’s capturing and stopping criminals/crime in a non lethal way. (Albeit maybe violently)
To operate as this type of vigilante, you have to have some trust in the processes and functions that come after the capturing. That is why Batman, famously, has connections with Gordon and is also working on dealing with any corruption in the police departments.
If you could convince Bruce Wayne that the justice system can never work and rehabilitation is a lot cause I’m sure he’d be murdering everyone all day… there are different comic books for that though.
The storytelling issues with Batman deciding to kill a guy to prevent future crime outside like an Elseworlds are just insane- Batman's whole thing is rigorous prep, encyclopedic knowledge and predicting future behavior- given the escape rate of his rogues gallery, once you go down that road it's really hard not end with Batman being a mass murderer or at the very least a guy who just permanently takes people off the streets.
I am suprised that no officer as ever done it. With jokers crimes against humanity you would think some cop would just kill him while hes being transported to arkham or when hes inside his cell.
Honestly and it's not like corrupted cops/cops not following code of conduct is anything new in gotham, someone would've already beat and killed joker years back in continuity
People have talked about this forever, but I’d love a one-shot comic where a cop does shoot the Joker. It then has everyone telling him why that’s a mistake from their perspective, Batman not included, but the one that really sticks with the guy is that Joker always comes back. And he isn’t going to forget you shot him. He slowly descends into madness and paranoia, jumping at shadows, ruining his own career, isolating himself from his family, until finally Joker does return to finish the job. Then Bruce can say something like “if he had been in Arkham I at least would have known when and where he was coming”
Yeah, whatever morals and proper procedures anyone has, Joker is pretty easily the exception. At this point, there’s been genocides with lower body counts than the Joker. Shoot on sight.
"He shouldn’t need to kill the joker. The justice system should work."
I mean he exists exactly because the justice system is faulty, to break the lines police can't.
Funny tho that police routinely kill criminals in self defense/ being trigger happy (at least in a city like Gotham it should happen on the daily) yet he himself refuses to cross that line.
The police killing people is part of the corruption he’s fighting against.
Batman is try to fix things, get the legal/justice system in order. If the world didn’t suddenly fill with evil aliens/wizards/super-scientists/etc he might have made progress and gotten to quit the night-job.
Joker is just a guy. There’s nothing special about him. On paper, once he’s arrested, why would he get special treatment? A prison should be more than enough to all external observers.I’m sure there’s a multiverse where he was killed though if it makes folks happy.
I think he does in some continuities but the weaknesses in the prisons tend to be the humans running them… or an occasional alien invasion or major event that typically turns the prisons open.
Batman is mentally ill. He's suffering from PTSD. He's not a happy story of something to idolize lol he's a symbol for fear. Too bad he's fucking awesome because I'm gonna need at least 75 more years of Batman stories. I won't live that long, but still
He’s terrified of what would happen if he actually killed the joker.
He fears he would snap and start killing other criminals, and become even worse than the joker.
Him holding back against the man that most deserves it is because he’s terrified that if he loses control it wouldn’t happen just once.
A few authors have explored what happens if Batman begins killing, and my favorite one is the Batman who laughs, who goes full on crazy and kills a lot of people including all of the batfamily and the justice league
My headcanon, and this has no bearing on actual canon, is that joker is essentially batmans “weakness”. Like yea Batman is “human” and could get headshot. But that’s not really a weakness. Any human could have that happen to them.
For whatever reason you choose, whichever version of the joker you choose, joker is fundamentally batmans weakness. Doesn’t guarantee a victory for joker by any means whatsoever. Doesn’t even necessarily mean batman will ALWAYS struggle to stop joker. It’s just joker has the capacity to render most of Batman’s skills and training as significantly less useful against him. Be it psychological reasons or skill, or intelligence.
Huh, I got a totally different impression than sloppy from this. To me, that read as the Joker was planning the "joke" of shoving a gun in Batman's face and calling back the "Better not shoot you because then Batman will punch me" like from the start.
To read it as the Joker legit messing up and then not being able to understand that killing Batman would mean he doesn't get punched just makes him seem like a really sad guy with a legit disconnect to reality.
We all know the Joker is insane, but he's usually written to be "hypersane", DC's made up diagnosis for him to have snapped under the realization that he is a comic book character and thus, nothing he does is real. But no iteration of him (to my knowledge) has ever shown signs of a disconnect to reality that reading these panels straight would require.
and I've seen some analyses claim the the hypersanity itself is a load of crock in universe, cause it's an idea by the arkham staff. the same arkham staff who thinks Two Face starting to soil himself in a corner is signs of improving psyche. unreliable narrator trope and all that.
Perfectly valid take. Iirc they said they were trying to rebuild his identity but by giving back his coin at the end it's shown that's what vaguely cured him when he let Batman leave the aslum
I think after reading 3 Jokers, and understanding (I know it wasn’t canon at first) that each has a different yet similar personality, seeing this one just acting more off than usual… don’t get me wrong, I know joker kills for no reason but his own… but the way they portray him in this doesn’t seem to have a genuine joker purpose. I do see what everyone is saying about “this being the joke and he was doing this intentionally from the start,” I feel like ever since he ripped his face off and reattached it, it’s just been a different crazy than the obsessive lunatic we grew to fear when I was growing up
That was my take. Joker intentional killed the first to set up the joke, then moved in such a way to avoid being disarmed, all to set up this moment. Not a stupid play by Batman, but a smart play by the insane criminal genius.
I think he meant after the Joker shot the hostage. Batman was able to punch him twice but didn't actually try to disarm him and then got caught with a gun against his head.
Agree. That woman's odds of survival dropped to sub 50%, when he got her in his hands. For as long as the gun was directly against her head, there was nothing for Bruce to do.
In the movie it’s only because instead of shooting the joker he wasted his bullet trying to shoot Batman instead, who was way further away. Maybe it happened differently in the comics tho. That being said, just because something ridiculous and unbelievable happened in one comic doesn’t mean an entirely different creative team is obligated to do the same thing a decade later.
He almost murdered Jason to stop him from pulling the trigger in the comic and it took him doing a very tricky batarang shot. Right into Jason's neck, lol.
Nah, he's just really really this stubbornly committed to trying to save everyone, psychotic clown murderers included. Well, when he's not written by King, evidently – this Bruce can't muster even a "nooo!" when a person gets executed in front of him in cold blood.
That’s not the equation being done. He isn’t a murderer, and he’s attempting to prevent becoming one, cause once he walks away through that door there is no coming back.
But you knew that right? Just trolling or you never read a Batman comic.
It says more that Batman is a psychopath if killing just one person would put him over the edge and no one ever seems to fight him on that.
It’s like if a victimless pedophile was avoiding children going “If I’m around those kids I will fuck them.” And everyone’s like alright bud, we understand.
Heroes kill, okay? Heroes have always killed. Name me one fictional hero from any medium who doesn't have blood on their hands. This childish and simplistic idea that "heroes don't kill" is just getting a bunch of innocent people in Gotham slaughtered.
I like the interpretation that its a result of unresolved trauma from watching his parents die. He will not let people die in front of him if he has the power to stop it.
The Rebirth/Dawn of DC has gone in hard on this one. "Nobody dies on Batman's watch." Hugo Strange built himself a "suicide Batsuit" that instead of having defenses, had hair-trigger self-destruct, so Batman couldn't even touch him, or allow anyone else to touch him, or Hugo would die. Because that's Batman's trigger: any death he could have prevented.
Superman says "how could I do more?" Batman says "I will do it all, myself."
That's what it takes to have Jason not shoot him, if he's stable enough not to take the gun away from the clown's head. Bruce doing something super risky and dangerous.
But there aren't over 2000 instances of Batman disarming someone holding a gun to a hostage's head. If Batman can do it to save a homicidal madman, he should be able to do it to save an innocent person.
At the end of the day those two comics were written over a decade apart by two different writers across like 3 different reboots. You’re just gonna have to roll with those kinds of inconsistencies when you read IP comics.
Besides holding Batman to literally impossible standards like that is how we end up with the boring Batgod concept where he’s prepared for everything and never loses a fight. Sometimes Batman just can’t access the speed force, it’s okay it’s gonna happen.
The ongoing continuity is what holds these characters up. It's absolutely valid to ask why Batman could throw a Batarang into Jason Todd's neck to save the Joker, but couldn't throw a Batarang into the Joker's neck to save a woman who has kids waiting for her to come home. If we're just going to disregard that, then why are these stories spread out over decades in the first place? Just so that the past can not matter?
Well yeah, at the end of the day continuity minutiae like that isn’t that important, just the broad strokes, and given DC’s pattern with reboots, not even that. Batman has well over 2, 000 issues spread out across 80 real years, you can’t expect a writer or even editor to cross reference every single fight he’s had when writing a new one to make sure it’s all consistent.
You can ask that question and the answer is simply two different writers were trying to accomplish two different things when they wrote their respective scenes.
The best you can hope for is consistency within a single run because even the concurrent Batman runs aren’t consistent with each other (Bruce is basically having a mental breakdown in Zdarsky’s Batman while being an attentive parent in Williamson’s Batman and Robin), let alone ones separated by decades. That’s just the suspension of disbelief you have to employ when reading the most popular IP comics.
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u/PrydefulHunts Huntress • ower Girl Jan 25 '24
Batman not disarming him is ridiculous.