Batman: The Killing Joke

Batman: The Killing Joke is Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's 1988 graphic novel, one of the most acclaimed and controversial Batman stories ever published. In the present day, the Joker escapes Arkham Asylum, shoots and paralyzes Barbara Gordon (Batgirl), kidnaps and tortures her father Commissioner Gordon, and tries to prove that a single terrible day is enough to break any sane mind — including Batman's.

Interwoven with this present-day siege is the Joker's own possible origin: a struggling stand-up comedian, desperate to provide for his pregnant wife, who agrees to guide criminals through the chemical plant where he once worked. A single disastrous night costs him his family, his identity, and finally his sanity, ending with his fall into a vat of chemicals that leaves him the ghost-white, green-haired figure Gotham comes to know as the Joker.

Told in Moore's tight, literary script and rendered in Brian Bolland's meticulous, painterly art, the book is a meditation on the thin line separating comedy from tragedy and heroism from madness, and it permanently reshaped Batgirl's and the Joker's places in Batman continuity.