Twenty-eight years is a long time in superhero comics. Characters die, come back to life, and acquire new names, costumes and identities. Whole universes collapse and combine. History can be rewritten – more than once. But 28 years after the publication of Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s slim graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, this slight, dated story – which Moore has since disowned – is still being celebrated, adapted and retold.

A film version is scheduled for later this year, with a screening at Comic-Con in San Diego next month: fans successfully petitioned to get Mark Hamill, best known as Luke Skywalker, cast as the Joker. Warner Bros has announced that the film will be R-rated, remaining true to the “authentic” original story and its “blunt, often shocking, adult themes and situations”. President of the animated film division, Sam Register, promised he would live up to his responsibility to fans and reproduce the “violent, controversial” story accurately.



So far, so familiar: executives getting geeks wound up about a cartoon movie and touting its dark, edgy content. Why should anyone outside the comics community remotely care? Joker is going to hit Batman, Batman is going to hit Joker, and maybe there’ll be some blood and cursing to justify the rating. But The Killing Joke isn’t quite like every other superhero comic. Yes, it includes Batman-Joker violence, and then some sixth-form-philosophical stuff about insanity and evil, and whether anyone could turn into a villain if they just had “one bad day”. But the reason they go through that routine – before collapsing into laughter, in what might be a hug or a deadly grapple, on the deliberately ambiguous final page – is the sexual violation of Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon.

The violence between Batman and Joker shows nothing remarkable or graphic. Neither of them gets naked. Neither of them is tortured or humiliated or victimised. The “adult content” happens in an earlier, domestic scene, where Barbara – who has recently retired from being Batgirl – is helping her dad, Commissioner Jim Gordon, with his scrapbook and cocoa. The doorbell rings and she answers it, thinking it’s her friend Colleen from across the way, come to collect her for yoga. But it’s Joker and two thugs. They knock Jim out. Joker shoots Barbara through the spine, an act shown in painstaking, painful detail. And then, in an equally detailed sequence, Joker begins to undress Barbara as she writhes in agony on broken glass, promising he’ll take some snapshots for her father to see. An adaptation of this scene, described as “adult” and “controversial”, is being promoted in the same week that the sexual assault of an unconscious woman by US student Brock Turner is making international news. Reports now suggest that Turner also took photographs of her and sent them to his friends.

I have been a fan of DC Comics for 41 years. My PhD was on Batman. I’ve published three academic books about him. The media still calls me “Doctor Batman”. This week, I decided I could not ethically continue to buy Batman, or any other products from DC Comics. Other comics fans have not welcomed my decision. We need to see just how evil Joker is, they say. Batman rages when he finds out what Joker has done, and gets revenge. Gordon is also humiliated, they’ll point out – he cowers naked in a fairground, tormented by “circus freaks” (the depiction of people with disabilities in this comic is also crude).

This may be true, but Joker’s plan to drive Jim insane involves showing him naked pictures of his daughter. Jim’s nakedness is tastefully obscured and shadowed: Barbara’s is broadcast over multiple screens. The original art was even more explicit, as Moore asked Bolland to draw Barbara fully topless, breasts exposed above a gruesome gunshot wound in her abdomen. Batman visits Barbara in hospital, for a single page. She worries about what’s happened to her dad, and she is never seen again in the story. Batman sets off to rescue his old friend Jim Gordon, and after the punch-up he offers Joker much more time and generosity than he gave Barbara. Seeing a parallel between them, he even offers to rehabilitate his arch-enemy: “Maybe I’ve been there too,” he suggests. “Maybe I can help.” They share a joke in the rain as the sirens approach. It’s all very dark and edgy, and Barbara Gordon is forgotten.

Meanwhile, Joker emerges as the antihero of the story – it is his origin that we learn in the flashbacks, which explain that he turned mad and evil because of “one bad day” (his pregnant wife died). We are invited to feel sympathy for him, maybe even a grudging admiration. “Love that Joker,” one fan comments, posting the uncensored artwork of Barbara naked and injured. Mark Hamill is, deservedly, a fan favourite. Are we really going to pretend that the audiences at Comic-Con see Joker as a toxic example of violence against women, rather than a cool character to cosplay?

Times have changed since the comic was first published, and other creators, to their credit, have come along and picked Barbara up, telling more of her story, from her perspective. Gail Simone gave Barbara new friends, explored her PTSD and developed her into a disabled role model, while Brenden Fletcher, Cameron Stewart and Babs Tarr showed her overcoming her past and moving towards a new, confident lifestyle. One significant achievement of these new creative teams was that they subtly began to write The Killing Joke’s details out of history, offering new versions of events, which played down the sexual violence and erased the photographs.

DC Comics pull cover of Batgirl menaced by Joker after online protests Read more

Then March 2015, a cover image returned Batgirl cruelly to her Killing Joke trauma – she was shown weeping and terrified, the Joker’s hostage. This was met by protests from readers (and, again to their credit, the new creative team). The cover was retired. But now The Killing Joke returns again, with Batgirl’s sexual violation adapted to the big screen, all in the service of exploring the love-hate male bonding between Joker, Batman and Jim Gordon.



The comics fans who have derided my views about The Killing Joke were all male. But Batgirl has many female fans, who speak far more powerfully and personally about her than I can. Journalist and artist Samantha LeBas, responding to the 2015 cover, declared herself both a member of the comics industry and a rape survivor, and testified to her own experience: “I am left wondering why sexual violence against women is used as a device to glorify male characters, why it’s treated as iconic rather than horrific, and who owns the experience itself? Clearly, in this case, it’s not the victim. What does that say?”

Feminist scholar Samantha Langsdale, in turn, responded to the male fans’ excuses with weary exasperation: “The infuriating thing is, these types of comments, in all their seeming ‘reasonableness’, only provide further evidence of the ways in which patriarchal culture is capable of both controlling/engineering rape culture and erasing its prevalence, all at the same time. Rape narratives, when authored by men, are important plot devices that helpfully explore the kinds of trauma that launch heroes into heroism and villains into villainy … oh, and they draw attention to the fact that women get raped, so hey! Two-for-one.”



Twenty-eight years is a long time in superhero comics. It’s also 28 years, as Langsdale points out, since Catharine MacKinnon argued in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) “how the very definition of rape, of consent, of what counts as ‘evidence’ for rape all begin from a patriarchal point of view such that ‘real rape’ only materialises when men decide that it does”. Funny how that’s been forgotten this week, while The Killing Joke is still recalled, reactivated and celebrated. Funny how people listen to men, like Alan Moore, Brian Bolland and me, and ignore women, like McKinnon, Langsdale and LeBas. Well, DC can keep laughing all the way to the bank, but I won’t be helping them there.

