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Ed. Note: Spoilers for Three Jokers (and more or less the oeuvre of Geoff Johns) follow!

0. Let’s just get this out of the way: The Killing Joke is not that good of a comic. Even by the standards of bad Alan Moore comics, this sticks out in terms of its quality. Where most other trademark bad Alan Moore comics are bad for more interesting reasons (Neonomicon and later volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are bad for interesting yet horrifying reasons), The Killing Joke is perhaps Moore’s only major work that’s bad for the boring reasons most other comics are. It’s bad because it lacks ambition to be anything other than a story about Batman and the Joker. It’s bad because it treats Barbara Gordon more like a prop than a character. It’s bad because the environment it came out of was toxic to the point where Alan was explicitly told to “Cripple the b*#ch.”

In short, it’s bad in the same way comics like the Vigilante arc “Father’s Day,” the Violator miniseries, and Three Jokers are bad. [Read more…] about Theses on Three Jokers by Geoff Johns & Jason Fabok