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Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo's Joker is a deeply disturbing and completely unnerving work, a literary achievement that takes its place right alongside Alan Moore's The Killing Joke as one of the few successful attempts to scratch beneath the surface of the Joker's impenetrable psyche. It's also a hellish decent into the bowels of the most foul and reprehensible city in all of fiction, with its most foul and reprehensible citizen as our tour guide. Even with its straightforward plot and an onslaught of extremely graphic violence, Azzarello and Bermejo's story somehow manages to achieve a level of subtlety rare to any Batman comic, let alone one starring his deadliest and most flamboyant nemesis. Joker is a true stroke of twisted genius, a masterpiece of chaos, gore, grit, guts, filthy gutters and unimaginable insanity. It demands multiple readings, even if you're stomach might not be up for a second go around.

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. I'm not comparing the quality or merits of the two works. 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. 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. Azzarello's Joker is a schoolyard bully who long ago traded nooggies and dead-arms for torture and dismemberment. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

If there's one other significant similarity between this Joker and Heath Ledger's besides their appearance, it's that both are catapulted into the mix with little or no explanation. In this instance, the Joker is simply released from Arkham Asylum without us ever really learning why or how. You would think this would be a problem, but it's not. Azzarello doesn't need an excuse to set Joker on his journey of chaos, because this story is all about that journey, not why it happened or what it means. It's all about watching the Joker brutally reclaim the pie that was divvied up by Gotham's underground in his absence, and witnessing how even a villain as heavy as Harvey Dent trembles at the mere thought of a Joker unleashed.

Thanks mostly to the work of Bermejo, this book crafts an entirely unapologetic and haunting vision of Gotham City, one that resembles a cross between the gothic metropolis found in most comics and the run-down slums seen in Batman Begins. In a lot of ways, "Gotham City" would have been a sufficient title, as the city itself is almost as much a star of the story as the Joker. Coupled with Azzarello's deft characterization, Bermejo's take on Two-Face, Killer Croc, Harley Quinn and the Penguin likewise provide a mix of the familiar and completely fresh.

Bermejo's art is stunning for the most part. My one complaint is that the book transitions from lavishly painted pages to traditionally inked and colored ones for no apparent rhyme or reason. Is this due to DC's desire to push this book out to the public while The Dark Knight is still fresh in everyone's mind? I have no idea. All I know is that there's a stark difference between the gorgeous painted pages and the more traditionally crafted ones, and the book would have been better served had everyone involved given Bermejo the time needed to paint the whole thing. But alas, when considering a work as brilliant as this, such a complaint is relatively minor. What matters is that Azzarello allows his artist to do much of the heavy lifting in terms of storytelling, and Bermejo doesn't disappoint. Just look at the subtlety of some of these scenes, particularly the one where Joker looks up and cryptically addresses the sky. Is he talking to God, or Batman? Or are they the same thing in his depraved mind?

Writers and artists have been exploring the world of Batman and the Joker for nearly seventy years now, with most creators trampling clumsily through its streets and select few creeping methodically through its back alleys and dark corners. Joker is one of those rare works that doesn't just creep methodically through this world, but gets down on all fours and crawls through its gutters and drainpipes, sniffs at its rotten corpses and leaves us all with the knowledge that although we love reading about this place, we'd never, ever want to go there or meet any of its citizens.

Buy this book. Read it twice in a row. Then put it on your bookshelf right next to The Killing Joke, Grant Morrison's prose issue and your bootleg DVD of The Dark Knight, and try to sleep well tonight.

Dan's Score: 9.8

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Originally posted by Kovacs86
That sounds pretty awesome. Though there is a Batman forum, you know. It's pretty annoying when Batman threads are stuck in this forum...