Batman: The Joker's Daughter #1

This font is called "A Sane Person's Version of A Crazy Person's Handwriting."

Crazy people do not write like children on a sugar high. This is how crazy people actually write:

Writing by Me. Words excerpted from "The Commuter" by Philip K. Dick.

Anyway, here we have been presented with a version of The Joker's Daughter which may not suck! I don't think we'll have the luxury of completely erasing Ann Nocenti's influence on the character, seeing as how she has the Smiley Face Creator Staff and the same old clothes. But we might get a coherent and interesting story about The Joker's Daughter anyway! Or maybe Marguerite Bennett will go the same route with Joker's Daughter as she went with Lobo! Rob Liefeld so tainted Lobo in his Deathstroke run that DC had to declare Lobo an imposter and create Twat Lobo to take his place. I don't see how this is any different! Ann Nocenti's fragrance ("Shit Writer" by Lobdell) is all over Joker's Daughter, so maybe Bennett will introduce us to the real Joker's Daughter now!

The first page shows a lot of promise and already blows away Nocenti's version of "I'm ugly but beauty is the true ugly and I'm going to make everybody ugly so that we're all beautiful like me who is ugly" nonsense.

Okay, so she falls back on the Daddy Issues thing that DC has a huge boner for. At least it's a more personal reason to go crazy than having a vendetta against the media portrayal of beauty.

A female character having Daddy Issues might be a bit of a stereotype and cliche but it's fine here in the DC Universe since just about all of their characters, male and female, have Daddy Issues. A few have Mommy Issues which is always a refreshing change of pace that barely feels like a change of pace (more like a reskin of Daddy Issues). I also appreciate that her addict need for a new rush causes her to ingest part of The Joker's face which she just fished out of sewage. It's grotesque enough to show she's really been pushed pretty far past sanity by her current circumstances rather than Ann Nocenti's manic crusader against standards of beauty.

To begin her pursuit of her "true father," The Joker's Daughter burns a busload of kids in front of a cosmetics store. Her main goal is to get Batman's attention because she thinks The Batman can help her locate Daddy. But burning children in front of a make-up store could be seen as an attack on our pop culture need to improve our looks by any means. Although it's really just a statement that says, "Hey Batman? I'm looking for a guy that wears make-up and murders people. Can you help me locate him?"

The title of this issue is called "GolGotham" which is too clever in that specific way that makes me think Marguerite has been dying to use it for years and finally found the right place. I bet Peter J. Tomasi is kicking himself that he didn't think up this one for his Arkham War titles. The other interesting thing about the title page is that it's an all female creative team if you ignore Georges Jeanty who penciled the cover and Mike Marts, Group Editor. But those two jobs are only peripherally important to the putting together of the issue. I hope Lois Lane's one shot gets the same treatment.

The Joker's Daughter didn't kill any children, unfortunately. She just loaded the bus up with mannequins, left a note so that Batman would think it was The Joker's doing, and blew it up around Batman's ears. After Batman's done investigating and browbeating the local police, he takes off with The Joker's Daughter following after on her Big Wheel with streamers. Those were the best.

Batman is probably leading Joker's Daughter into a trap because he's The Batman and she's never done any criminal masterminding previous to this. So she probably screwed it up completely and The Batman knew before even arriving on the scene that this was a copycat crime to make him think The Joker was back. He probably even knows the booby trap was rigged by a female with Daddy Issues that hangs around with an ugly cat because The Batman is fucking amazing at interpreting forensic evidence. Like the cat pus and cat tooth and drippy cat butt stuff and mangy fur that he probably found at the scene. And the note was obviously written by someone with a much daintier grip on a pen who has practiced their cursive for at least ten thousand hours.

Batman leads Joker's Daughter down into the Gotham Underground to the place where The Joker was last seen, to the place where he fell to his death (wink). He led her there because he knew she was following him because those fucking Big Wheels make that "tick tick tick tick ticktickticktick" sound as you ride them.

No way! A poor little lost drug addict girl didn't stand a chance against Batman? Oh yeah. That's how it should be! I forgot Nocenti wasn't writing this for a second.

Batman leads Joker's Daughter up and out of the sewers and into a trap by the Gotham Police. She's easily arrested and thrown in the back of a squad car with Ugly Cat. But she manages to escape although she isn't able to bring herself to kill the police. She wants to be Daddy's Girl but she's not even close to crazy enough yet. But maybe that's why she heads off to Arkham next. So she can learn the ins and outs of proper insanity and murder.

She's a fast learner!

The Joker's Daughter becomes lost in Arkham as she hallucinates from the mushroom spores she inhaled from Golgotham. So even though The Joker isn't part of Gotham's fetishization of Lewis Carroll's characters, it's time for Joker's Daughter to take a little trip through Wonderland.

This is the cutest picture of Ugly Cat so far.

The first crazy character The Joker's Daughter meets on her journey is The Anchoress. She's Arkham's first resident and the antagonist of Marguerite Bennett's first story for The New 52. I think it was in Batman Annual #2 and was called "The Night Nurse Cometh!" Or something. Anyway, The Anchoress does her thing she do and causes The Joker's Daughter to remember her past. Or not her past. Perhaps pasts that she wants to be her past, pasts that she's read about or seen on television or simply made up in her head when bored in her room as dad made dinner and mommy made her cry.

Did anybody else read "You don't know who you are" to the tune of the final line of Spider-man's cartoon theme song?

The Joker's Daughter's next stop is to the Dollmaker, the man who removed The Joker's face for him. For some reason. I don't think it was every quite adequately explained. I tried to explain it myself during The Death of the Family run but I never really felt convinced. I felt maybe The Joker was trying to expose his true self. People saw The Joker as an identity that he was hiding behind, so he cut off his face to make The Joker the mask. Now the only person he could be was the raw, tender, exposed flesh underneath the mask, as close to his true self as possible. It was a statement to Batman that he, and Batman, were their masks. Nothing mattered but who they were when wearing the masks. The Joker didn't give a shit about Bruce Wayne or Barbara Gordon or Dick Grayson. Those people were boring. Those people were the false identities. I suppose I should think it through better but who has time to write actual essays?! I'd rather just stick to "The Joker cut off his face because he's crazy!" Ah. Much better.

The Dollmkaer mentions how he's heard of The Joker's Daughter and that she takes philosophies and corrupts them. That's not a bad interpretation of Ann Nocenti's writing! I think that means that this takes place after the Catwoman story arc. And it must because Joker's Daughter has the Dollmaker sew the Joker's face to her face. The Dollmaker also has some of The Joker's blood that he collected. He keeps it in a jar in a cabinet so I'm not sure why it hasn't dried up but it hasn't! Because The Joker's Daughter injects it into her veins and kind of flips the fuck out. She heads back to her runaway hideout and tells her true story to herself.

We all do stupid things when we're young and trying to fit our fucked-up shaped selves into society's waiting round hole but most of us are lucky enough not to do anything permanently stupid like sew the rotten face of an insane clown onto our own faces. Joker's Daughter is going to have one hell of a story to tell the people she meets in her twenties.

Back in her shack, she comes to terms with her relationship to The Joker and decides he's gone for good so she'll have to become his heir and take Gotham for herself. But then she finds a note tied to Ugly Cat that says "Hello Beautiful" and realizes it's from Daddy. That we will eventually be back. And that the person she just came to grips with is a hollow shadow of The Joker and anything she does will be destroyed when he returns. So while she was searching for him to make her life exciting, she seems to have found herself. But she loses that person when she finally gets what she wanted and realizes The Joker is still out there.

Or something. Maybe I should have just begun this whole commentary not understanding anything instead of pretending I understood it! It's hard trying to make sense of crazy people.

The Joker's Daughter #1 One Shot Rating: I have yet to decide how I'm going to archive these one shots. Do they get their own page? Do I rank them against other One Shots? Do I just let them disappear into the archives? This was a good look at The Joker's Daughter since it's the only really coherent look at her and her motivations so far. DC seems to love this character for some reason. I suppose because the character was a fan favorite in the Preboot Universe and so she sold well when returning to The New 52 even if she was being written by Ann Nocenti. On the DC Comics All Access page, they write all sorts of nonsense like "Very few characters have made an impact on The New 52 quite like the murderess madwoman knows as The Joker's Daughter" and "the most deadly new location in the DCU -- The Gotham Underground" and "You should expect big things out of The Joker's Daughter this year." Who the fuck is running DC to think that The Gotham Underground and The Joker's Daughter have been exciting to anybody in the DC Fandom? For fuck's sake, they've been given to us by Ann Nocenti! Is anybody at DC reading her bile? Have they been paying attention at all? Apparently DC's decision makers don't give a shit about the execution of ideas; they just like getting smoke blown up their asses about some exciting idea a writer has come up with, even if it's as stupid as The Gotham Underground. I don't know who to blame because the small print list of DC's Employees and their positions at he bottom of the All Access page doesn't include the position of "Employee Assigned To Insert Straws Up the Asses of The People in Charge."