New Brevoort Formspring

>Hey Tom,

I’m sending this as a submit because I don’t think I can get across what I want to say in the limited characters for the ask box. Anyway, I really appreciate big-scale stories like Zero Year: Dark City where one villain like Riddler can take on the whole of Gotham City. It felt epic and awesome. But, at the end of it, we knew Bruce wasn’t going to actually kill Riddler. Riddler’s kind of a non-threat (physically) to Bruce, so it was satisfying to see Bruce apprehend him and send him to Arkham.

However, with this current Endgame arc, things are much different. Joker is more vicious than I’ve seen in comics in a long, long time and once again the scale is reaching Zero Year: Dark City levels. But, these are two archenemies going at it. Arkham will never hold Joker permanently and imprisoning him doesn’t do anything, so with every issue, it looks like Bruce is going to have to take drastic measures to defeat Joker this time, or everyone’s doomed. 

I love Joker, but don’t you think raising the stakes this high is making it inevitable that someone has to kill him? Otherwise, sending him to Arkham (again) is just anticlimactic. What concerns me the most is from the interviews, it looks like this is going to be a pretty “final” Joker story for the time being. Because the stakes are so high and the scale so large, I have a feeling it’s going to end with him dead or running away and leaving Gotham again. In that case, will we not see him for another year in real-time?? With the Suicide Squad movie coming out in 2016, do you think it’s a good idea to push him out of the picture and not have any stories for that long?

I know this is all just speculation, but some people are worried, especially since the tease has been that Joker’s origin story will be revealed. There’s already some speculation that he might be immortal or something, but I still think it’s a trick. 

Bottom line is: what do you think about raising Joker to such high levels? Do you think it will be a problem for future storytelling because if Joker comes back, he’ll have to keep topping his previous acts?

Anyway, keep up the great work! I’m really looking forward to Convergence and the new titles coming in June. (Black Canary finally gets a title!!). P.S. Where’s Red Tornado????>

I’m not 100% sure whether you’re pulling my leg here, so I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. But BATMAN is published by the other guys, not us, so anything that I could tell you is simply opinion, and in no way fact.

That said–and I haven’t yet read this week’s BATMAN issue–I don’t think it’s a problem for a big story to be big. That’s kind of what you want from a Joker story, isn’t it? And holding yourself back because you’re afraid that you won’t be able to top it later is self-defeating. It’s the job of your writers and creators to constantly be coming up with new stories, and new ways of seeing and experiencing these characters.

And I’ve been of the opinion that the Joker is unkillable for many, many years–that what climbed back out of that chemical bath was something more akin to a zombie or a homunculus. I don’t think that Batman should ever legitimately be trying to kill the Joker, apart from in a passing moment, but I also believe that the GCPD could pump round after round into him, and he’d just stand there laughing.