RETURN OF STRIP MANIP!

[Alice Macher]

[speaking in wingdings]

Now that's one coordinated prank, if ever I saw one. Ah, Marie, you and your puzzles.

[Mr. Brightside]

I only saw the Zodiac signs, and thought for a moment that the joke was again that they were talking Homestuck.

[thebitterfig]

The reason P&A didn't take place in Baltimore:

[sgtrock]

[speaking in wingdings]

Now that's one coordinated prank, if ever I saw one. Ah, Marie, you and your puzzles.

Somebody care to translate? Or point me at an engine that can do the translation for me?

[Captain LeBubbles]

[speaking in wingdings]

Now that's one coordinated prank, if ever I saw one. Ah, Marie, you and your puzzles.

Somebody care to translate? Or point me at an engine that can do the translation for me?

It's a font in most word variants. If you have the patience (I don't) you should be able to work out what it's saying. (Do share once you figure it out.)

[sgtrock]

[speaking in wingdings]

Now that's one coordinated prank, if ever I saw one. Ah, Marie, you and your puzzles.

Somebody care to translate? Or point me at an engine that can do the translation for me?

It's a font in most word variants. If you have the patience (I don't) you should be able to work out what it's saying. (Do share once you figure it out.)

Oh, I know what wingdings are. I'm just as lazy as you, though.

[Captain LeBubbles]

[speaking in wingdings]

Now that's one coordinated prank, if ever I saw one. Ah, Marie, you and your puzzles.

Somebody care to translate? Or point me at an engine that can do the translation for me?

It's a font in most word variants. If you have the patience (I don't) you should be able to work out what it's saying. (Do share once you figure it out.)

Oh, I know what wingdings are. I'm just as lazy as you, though.

Any not lazy people out there? Us lazy people are curious. And lazy.

[Alice Macher]

[Otaking]

utter blasphemy about Greedo shooting first

LIBIDO FOR MARIE KILLED

THANKS A LOT @#$@%

[Zanosuke Kurosaki]

I'm confused. I just read The Killing Joke a couple weeks back, and nothing in it suggests in any way or form that Joker died at the end of it. And (unless the New 52 has changed it) it was very firmly in canon, too, since Barbara Gordon was then wheelchair-bound for years afterwards. So... where in the world did this blasphemy come from? ?_?

Also, Wall-Crawler totally accidentally killed Gwen. It's why he web-snagged all of Mary-Jane's major joints, when they were put into a similar situation (only real difference, MJ was awake for the fall.)

Marie, your geek-fu is weak. You need to train more.

[Shadrach]

Zanosuke--I don't agree with that theory about The Killing Joke myself (and I'll explain why in a bit), but I can tell you it's a fairly common one--common enough for Brian Bolland to tease the reader about it in his afterword to the 20th anniversary Deluxe Edition. After mentioning he has a strict 800-word limit, he notes that many readers found the last page "ambiguous" and promises to reveal what really happened in it. Then, at the very end of the afterword, he writes: "[A]s our protagonists stood there in the rain laughing at the final joke, the police lights reflecting in the pools of filthy water underfoot, the Batman's hand reached out and......" And that's the end of the afterword. Cheeky fellow, isn't he?

So anyway. Why do some readers think Batman killed the Joker at the end? If you take a look at the last page, you'll note that in the fifth panel, the Caped Crusader, in the midst of the shared guffaw with his enemy, does indeed take hold of him. Then the view "pans" down in the sixth panel to show them from the wrists down (more or less) and in that panel, we see the laughing sound effect one last time. In the seventh panel, we see only their feet and the police siren sound effect. Then all we see is the puddle beneath their feet and, in the very last panel, mirroring the opening one of the book, ripples of rain.

The fact that the laughter abruptly cuts off suggests to some readers that Batman has moved from apparently bracing himself on the Joker's shoulders to throttling the Joker. But why would he do such a thing? The explanation, as I recall it, is that the Joker's joke hasn't merely tickled Batman's sense of the absurd; it's also driven home to him the futility of ever doing what he's just attempted to do, namely rehabilitating the madman. Batman realizes in that moment that, contrary to what he'd said moments before, the only way out of their situation is for one to kill the other. And since, these readers say, Batman can't let the Joker keep on escaping and claiming or ruining more lives, he seizes the opportunity and strangles the Joker then and there.

That's more or less the argument as I remember it from when I first encountered it years ago. But yeah, it doesn't hold up. First, as you say, Zanosuke, the book is part of regular DCU continuity. And it's not just with Barbara's injury: there have been other references to the events of that book in many other Batman titles.

Second, those who've read Moore's script for The Killing Joke (photocopies of it have appeared for sale on eBay) claim that the last page doesn't say a thing about Batman killin' no Joker. Now, one could say "death of the author" and all that, but...

Third, and most important IMO, if Batman had killed his archenemy in the end, it would invalidate the whole point of the novella. As Jim Gordon puts it: "I want him brought in...and I want him brought in by the book [...] By the book, you hear? We have to show him. We have to show him that our way works." And Batman himself tells the Joker, after informing him his plan to drive Gordon mad has failed, "So maybe ordinary people don't always crack [...] Maybe it was just you, all the time." So how could the crimefighter then do a complete 180 and kill the Joker in cold blood after he's surrendered?

Some, though not all, advocates of the "Batman kills Joker" theory claim that after hearing the joke, Batman simply "snaps" and goes mad himself. But come on. Hearing an existentially hard-hitting joke is hardly as dangerous to one's mental health as losing one's wife and unborn child, nearly being shot dead, and getting permanently disfigured in the space of a day. Nor, for that matter, as losing both one's parents to a petty thief as a young child.

Tl;dr: Yeah, the theory doesn't hold water no matter which way, in-story or externally, you approach it.

[Freemage]

The continuity argument in that one isn't really valid--it was never meant to BE part of DC's official continuity, but it was just so well-received that it got ret-conned in (and, of course, this is the point of the True Believers--that this was supposed to be the speculative story about how the Batman finally kills the Joker, and thus 'loses' in a way he never has before, and that when DC changed it so that it became canon AND that the Joker lived, they were pulling a "Greedo Shot First"). That said, the rest of your analysis is pretty damned solid.

[Alice Macher]

The continuity argument in that one isn't really valid--it was never meant to BE part of DC's official continuity, but it was just so well-received that it got ret-conned in

Do you have a source for that? I ask because although it was designated as for mature readers (for obvious reasons) and released as a "Prestige Format" softcover rather than as, for example, a Batman Annual, my impression is that it was always meant to have been continuity. There's the infamous anecdote, which Bolland obliquely corroborated in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, in which Moore phoned Len Wein, then the editor on the project, to ask whether it was okay to have the Joker paralyze Barbara. (How Wein allegedly and notoriously gave his approval is the subject for another discussion and, frankly, not worth repeating here.) My point being, if The Killing Joke had been meant as an out-of-continuity story (of the sort DC later would call "Elseworlds"), I'd think it wouldn't have been necessary for Moore to ask if it was okay to permanently alter a major supporting character's status like that. Any more than (I imagine) Frank Miller would've had to ask permission, in scripting The Dark Knight Returns, to have the Joker in fact killed off, since that story was clearly out of continuity. But I could be wrong; thus my asking if there's a source for that.

[Freemage]

The continuity argument in that one isn't really valid--it was never meant to BE part of DC's official continuity, but it was just so well-received that it got ret-conned in

Do you have a source for that? I ask because although it was designated as for mature readers (for obvious reasons) and released as a "Prestige Format" softcover rather than as, for example, a Batman Annual, my impression is that it was always meant to have been continuity. There's the infamous anecdote, which Bolland obliquely corroborated in DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore, in which Moore phoned Len Wein, then the editor on the project, to ask whether it was okay to have the Joker paralyze Barbara. (How Wein allegedly and notoriously gave his approval is the subject for another discussion and, frankly, not worth repeating here.) My point being, if The Killing Joke had been meant as an out-of-continuity story (of the sort DC later would call "Elseworlds"), I'd think it wouldn't have been necessary for Moore to ask if it was okay to permanently alter a major supporting character's status like that. Any more than (I imagine) Frank Miller would've had to ask permission, in scripting The Dark Knight Returns, to have the Joker in fact killed off, since that story was clearly out of continuity. But I could be wrong; thus my asking if there's a source for that.

Well, damn. Further investigation has led me to discover that this was a fan-meme that I'd swallowed without sufficient skepticism.

[Alice Macher]