The novel includes two chilling moments in particular – one involving the Joker's explanation of what he hates more than anything, and the other detailing an anecdote about a man who tries to drive around the world in one day – that are just as revealing and powerful as Heath Ledger's 'dog chasing cars' monologue from The Dark Knight. Instead, Azzarello puts the Joker on the psychiatrist's couch and let's his gullible narrator, Frost, ask all the questions while we sit back omnisciently and contemplate the answers. Trying to dive directly into the Joker's thought process would have been not only a foolish move, but a futile one as well, and would only have trivialized what has become the most complex mind in all of comics. Thank the comic book heavens that Azzarello didn't attempt to place us in the Joker's head by making him the story's narrator, as he did with Lex Luthor in his and Bermejo's Lex Luthor: Man of Steel miniseries. At the same time, he's more vile and depraved than any one of us, let alone Johnny Frost, his henchmen and the story's narrator, could possibly comprehend. Azzarello's Joker is a schoolyard bully who long ago traded nooggies and dead-arms for torture and dismemberment. Despite his similarly scarred visage and propensity for chaos, this Joker is not the same meticulous agent of anarchy seen in The Dark Knight, nor is he the typical scenery chewing, joke-spewing maniac found in most comics. What I'm saying is that for the first time since Moore's seminal exploration of Batman's greatest villain, Azzarello somehow manages to humanize and demonize the Joker at the same time. I'm not comparing the quality or merits of the two works.

Now I understand that comparing any work to The Killing Joke in the first sentence of a review can come across as the worst sort of hyperbole, so allow me to explain.

Joker comic brian azzarello