Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino provide a coda to their miniseries Joker: Killer Smile with Batman: The Smile Killer. And it’s unnecessary, kinda stupid and undermines the story its following!
This one is more Batman-centric than Killer Smile was. It’s another “Batman is Bruce Wayne’s hallucination and Bruce is an inmate in Arkham” story (there have been lots of these stories over the years, the most recent being the first part of Last Knight on Earth). I’m not opposed to this type of story - I actually like the idea and think there’s a lot of potential there - but Lemire’s take on it is really poor.
Basically he makes Joker so absurdly powerful in what he can make Batman think, as well as the traps he sets for him, that he comes off almost like a supernatural figure. And it undermines Killer Smile because that was a story about a cunning man - emphasis on “man” - psychologically manipulating another man. But Batman is no ordinary man and the way he winds up in Arkham is not convincing, nor does it make any sense. It’s a combination of shock value for shock value’s sake and contrived storytelling.
The concept of Bruce being a crazy guy does appeal to me, so I was never bored reading this, and Sorrentino’s art is really cool too and looks great on the large-sized paper, but Lemire’s execution is lacking and half-baked. Like its predecessor, The Smile Killer is another weak Joker story.
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