Plenty of Fabok’s pages are worked to a nine panel grid, and his Joker reference is Brian Bolland’s from The Killing Joke. Johns references other elements of the Joker’s past, but he and artist Jason Fabok settle on a fixed point. Never mind three Jokers, there’s no alert about several Batgirls. Is that really Batgirl? Thirty pages later she’s entirely changed her tune, and again it bears asking if that’s really Batgirl. “Make Jason put the Red Hood and the guns away, Bruce”, pleads Batgirl, having failed herself.
One result is a strangely distanced Batman largely deaf to a whiny Batgirl, both personalities removed from our expectations even taking countless reboots into consideration. This is at least acknowledged later, but for a long while it’s indicative of a story continually battling an idea that it has to be meaningful and smart, with Johns paying more attention to those aspects than to others. One of the Jokers is labelled ‘the comedian’, another ‘the clown’, and the third ‘the criminal’, presumably to maintain the idea of each description beginning with a ‘c’ when others are more suitable. The health of both has improved considerably since the 1980s.
He killed the Red Hood back when he was Robin (see Batman: A Death in the Family) and crippled Barbara Gordon, unaware she was also Batgirl (see Batman: The Killing Joke). In it Batman shares the spotlight with two associates each of whom have very deep reasons to despise the Joker. How can there be three Jokers? It’s the mystery sustaining this entire graphic novel, Geoff Johns cleverly ensuring that each appears to be the genuine article in a story rife with references to the Joker’s previous schemes. At three locations across Gotham the Joker very publicly commits three atrocities.
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