The first of two Spider-Man and Batman team-ups in the '90s. DeMatteis uses the hot new villain of the moment, Carnage, as the entry point, as a scientist who feels regular psychiatric treatment is futile with such people swears she's got a chip that can be installed in a person's brain to render them docile and conflict-averse. Cletus Kasady is the first, and the Joker's going to be the second. While it works on the Joker, the doctor neglects to account for the fact that Carnage is a team-up, and her chip doesn't do snot to the symbiote, and Kasady was simply eager to meet the Joker.
The story follows the basic beats. There's a brief initial team-up when things go wrong, but the villains escape. Batman, in his full 90s/2000s jerkass glory, then tells Spider-Man to leave, because Gotham has 'unique dangers', and he doesn't want Spider-Man getting hurt.
'90s Calvin rolled his eyes at the notion Spider-Man was in any danger from Batman's villains. Most of Batsy's enemies are roughly equivalent to Mysterio, and Spidey beats him all the time!
Whatever. Spider-Man doesn't leave, Batman reconsiders, they team-up, find the bad guys and save the day. DeMatteis doesn't try to put over the new guy as being better than the more established villain. He does outline the differences in the Carnage and the Joker. Carnage claims the Joker understands that life is absurd and meaningless, so insanity's the only proper response. From the Joker's, "Oh. . .that joke," I think we're meant to take he's already mentally downgrading his opinion of this guy. Later, Carnage loses patience with some elaborate scheme the Joker's got and starts ranting about how the point is to kill immediately, which the Joker dismisses as lacking style. DeMatteis doesn't pretend the Joker is above killing, only that he insists there be an art to it. It's like the difference between someone who sculpts hedges into animal shapes, and someone just hacking away with a weed-whacker.
DeMatteis' attempts to interject the sort of pop psychology stuff that littered his Spectacular Spider-Man run are intermittently successful. Suggesting Kasady is a serial killer because he's actually afraid of death, and kills in some bizarre hope it will somehow appease death into sparing him feels like a stretch. He presents each villain as becoming like an avatar of what the other hero fights against, starting with dream sequences where the killers of their respective parents shift to mimicking the villains. So Uncle Ben's killer sports a Joker smile, and Joe Chill transforms to Carnage's jagged tooth leer.
(I also randomly note that Bruce Wayne apparently sleeps in the nude, while Peter wears pajama pants.)
I don't know if it works. Maybe Carnage with Batman, as Kasady's whole thing is just to kill randomly, without pattern or meaning beyond the taking of life. That could be the sort of unthinking, unpredictable Crime that Batman fights but can never extinguish. (Having Carnage not particularly care about killing Batman beyond him being another body to stack on the pile is a nice touch.) But the Waynes weren't really killed randomly. It was either a mugging gone wrong or a revenge hit disguised as a mugging gone wrong, depending on which version they're using. But I guess from a child's perspective - and Dematteis was always writing about how childhood trauma infected one's adulthood - it all feels random, without cause or reason.
The Joker for Spider-Man, though, no. You can't spend a few pages having the Joker extol the virtues of elaborate plans and set-ups for his schemes, then compare him to a burglary gone wrong. DeMatteis tries to save it by having the Joker threaten to release a virus that will kill the entire city of Kasady doesn't release Batman, because no one gets to kill him but Joker, as 'the kind of madness, the kind of chaos,' Spider-Man always been fighting to prevent. Except that's not really what he fights. He fights guys who think the world owed them something, so when they get power, they decide to take what they think the deserve. Power without responsibility. Not really the Joker's shtick at all.
Guess with 48 pages, you do what you can.
I think this is Bagley's first time drawing DC characters. We don't see a lot of Gotham, or any established characters besides Batman, Joker and one page with Alfred, but he keeps everybody on-model. Joker's extremely tall and skinny (looks a head taller than Spider-Man), but I know Alan Davis among others drew the clown that way, too, so it's not unusual. He goes with a version of the Batmobile I associate with early Batman stories, with the big Bat face/shield thing over the front, rather than one of the sleek, sports car/jet plane models I thought were more common at the time. Don't know if there was a reason for that.
2 comments:
Bagley draws a decent Batman, based on that one image.
Please tell me that Joker and Spidey have a joke-off.
No joke-off. Their only interaction is at the end when Spidey pursues a fleeing Joker. The Joker makes a crack about hoping Gordon doesn't hear about the "Spider-signal" thing Spidey has on his belt. Spidey yells at the Joker about being a monster who tramples on everything decent, the Joker tries to goad him into committing murder, Spidey decks him.
Spider-Man does get a stone-faced reaction out of Batman with a couple of quips.
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