The Winning Card is a retelling of Batman and Joker’s first encounter. In Tom King/Mitch Gerads’ version, Joker’s threatening to kill prominent members of Gotham society - and pulling it off, despite GCPD protection - but also targeting random civilians. Batman, still learning how to vigilante, must learn Joker’s methods to stop him from killing any more people.
Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke’s The Man Who Laughs is such a brilliant story of Batman and Joker’s first meeting that it really doesn’t need a retelling. I can see why DC would want to do it though for commercial reasons (Batman and Joker stories sell) and King/Gerads’ version isn’t bad either so, while The Winning Card isn’t going to supplant The Man Who Laughs as the definitive first time Batman meets Joker, it’s still a decent Batman/Joker book for the fans.
Framed from the beginning as “Year One”, The Winning Card follows the same four issue format of the original Year One and, as it’s set in the past, Gordon is only Senior Detective and Alfred’s still alive. Batman’s also relatively inexperienced and doesn’t know Joker yet so that’s why Joker’s able to surprise him and seem more formidable here than he sometimes does.
Like in The Man Who Laughs, Joker targets prominent Gothamites for assassination but King has him also go after random citizens to lend the character an extra edge of chaotic danger, which I think is a good touch - although I’m still not sure what Joker’s plan was in all of this. The vagueness of it makes it less memorable. It just felt like he was being Joker - scaring people by going around killing arbitrarily. Any point besides that? Something to do with a nursery rhyme maybe but it wasn’t clear.
And speaking of that, the third chapter has King deploying his annoying habit of repeating lyrics to a song in lieu of writing anything himself. So we’re subjected to the “knick-knack paddywhack, give the dog a bone” rhyme for most of that issue. Bah!
Mitch Gerads’ Joker is quite ghoulish and looked really cool and terrifying. His Batman looks great as well, although generally I’m not that big a fan of Gerads’ wide, murky panels. I liked that the Joker’s dialogue is mostly presented in the same way as silent movies’ dialogue was, to add to the flavour of yesteryear and Joker’s macabre, otherworldly air. And some of his jokes weren’t bad either (“I read a whole book about an immortal dog. It was impossible to put down”).
The title seems to be a clever way of signposting the book as a Joker story as the “winning card” in the game he’s playing with one of his victims is the joker of the pack. But what makes this “The Brave and the Bold” - a series where Batman teams up with other DC characters to defeat a villain, when this story seems to be just Batman and Joker? Apparently the other issues in this series include other DC characters, it’s just this book that collects King/Gerads’ storyline in one place.
Which is probably the best format to read this story in given that the publication of the singles was nonsensical - the first half appeared in issues #1 and #2, then Part 3 was in #5 and the final part appeared in #9. Makes perfect sense! Must’ve been quite frustrating to readers of the singles waiting for what seems to be the best story in this run of The Brave and the Bold.
And The Winning Card isn’t bad for a Batman/Joker origin story although it does feel unimpressive, especially compared to the vastly superior The Man Who Laughs. I kept waiting for King to give us something new and exciting in his retelling but the story he told was fairly unremarkable. Joker does bad things, Batman stops him. Meh. It’s not poorly written or drawn, it’s just an average Batman/Joker story - disappointing given that King’s written some truly fantastic Batman comics in the past.
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