After boring readers with his tedious recounting of how Bruce Wayne learned the skills in his youth to become Batman (he trained with masters of multiple disciplines around the world - whodathunkit!?) in The Knight, Chip Zdarsky does a truncated version of that same, needless story with The Joker. Yup, unfortunately Zdarsky’s Batman run still isn’t improving in this third volume, The Joker Year One.
The first half of this book sees the Batmen of Zur-En-Arrh and Failsafe make a return and, considering they were in the first couple books which were terrible, I expected a rehash to be just as bad but… this was the one part of the book where I wasn’t totally comatose with what Zdarsky was doing.
Joker wants to meet Zur-En-Arrh, who is happy to oblige, and the encounter is intriguing because Zur doesn’t have the same qualms as Bruce about killing Joker. But this interesting angle is short-lived as Failsafe quickly takes centre stage and it’s more Batman vs (essentially) the T-1000 once again. Which means lots of splosions and running - ho hum.
Then we’re into the title story where we learn that one of Bruce’s mentors from The Knight also decided to train the Joker as well for some reason. Meanwhile, Gordon battles corruption within the GCPD (just like in Batman: Year One) and, in the present, Batman deals with an audible virus spread by laughter that’s turned everyone in Gotham into Jokers. None of which was at all interesting and has mostly been done before and better by others, while the mentor thing was, like in The Knight, irrelevant and dull.
The book closes out with the backups from these issues where Vandal Savage returns to Gotham and is hinted that he might become the new commish, and the other story is Failsafe and the Batmen of Zur-En-Arrh doing some pointless posturing.
Jorge Jimenez’s art is as good as it’s ever been - his art in the first half of the book is fantastic. Andrea Sorrentino’s art is ridiculously good - far too good for the crappiness of Zdarsky’s story - and, drawing the Joker Year One pages, Giuseppe Camuncoli cleans up his art a bit to pay tribute to David Mazzucchelli’s art style on Batman: Year One.
As solid and consistent as the art on this series has been, it’s not reason enough to be reading Chip Zdarsky’s unremarkable Batman stories in this dreary run. His one idea for his Batman seems to be “constantly reference previous, better stories and provide unnecessary origins” - The Joker Year One matches that vision to a T. Crappy stuff yet again - no wonder Batman’s sales these days are losing out to Transformers.
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