Tom King has proven already that he can write good Joker stories, and Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The Winning Card doesn’t disappoint. As we’ve seen before, King’s Joker is deceptively, disarmingly mad, just as likely to kill his victim as to leave his victim unharmed and kill the next person he sees. There’s a logic to King’s Joker, but it’s the logic of surprise — of saying “orange” again and again and then saying “banana” — that impressed me in DC Nation #0’s “Your Big Day” and in this book.

Notably in Winning Card, Joker goes toe-to-toe with Batman, really rather seeming his physical equal. That’s uncommon, I think, though for King’s story it helps to reflect the “Year One” setting, retelling Batman and the Joker’s first meetings. It’s not, I don’t think, that King’s Joker is stronger than Batman, so much as we see a Batman over-relying on violence here, not quite at the point yet where he doesn’t think with his fists.

It’s maybe hard for any devoted Joker story these days not to evoke The Killing Joke. Winning Card is not so overt as to echo dialogue or locations, a la some of the One Bad Day stories, though artist Mitch Gerads’ pointed use of nine-panel grids is unmistakable. Structurally, Winning Card functions a bit like Killing Joke in reverse, ending in the asylum instead of beginning there, and here too I think we see reflected Batman’s growth — not seeking to parley with the Joker at the end in this book, versus “I came to talk” in the beginning of the other.

Perhaps also like Alan Moore’s Killing Joke, King has earned his reputation as a writer whose “just left of continuity” stories often push the boundaries of what’s proper for the DC mainstream. I don’t mind that, a little wrong in my right as it were, and Winning Card is no exception, though your results may vary. A certain moment in the third chapter reminded me of King’s Mister Miracle, and I jotted happily in my notes, “This is unhinged.”

[Review contains spoilers]

To start, I’ll say Mitch Gerads is masterful in Winning Card simply in the moodiness, the blood spatters, the splash pages and the evil stars of the Joker’s eyes. But there’s some superlative composition here — see the nine-panel “Please don’t worry” sequence in the second chapter. First row, first panel is a dialogue box, followed by two panels that flow together; second row, first panel is another dialogue box, then two more panels that flow together; then third row, first panel is a dialogue box, second panel is a scene, and then in the third panel, for the first time, the scene moves. It’s A, B, B, A, B, B, A, B, C, the unique and special language of comics — enough, really, to make Will Eisner cry.

At Winning Card’s start, the police try to protect Henry Claridge, marked for death by the Joker in a reimagining of the Golden Age Batman #1, while in parallel Batman chases and then brutalizes a murderer. From that vantage, everyone underestimates the Joker: Jim Gordon, who believes he can stop a clown-faced villain without Batman’s help, and Batman, who believes the same fisticuffs approach will work with the Joker as it does with Gotham’s “cowardly lot.”

Each learn better in the book’s second chapter. After a bloody defeat, Gordon must admit only someone as “snapped” as the Joker might be able to catch him. Batman is overconfident again, using one of Gotham’s elite as bait, only to himself be beaten up by the Joker and then thrown off a bridge (also a la Batman #1). It is to an extent a comeuppance of the whole Batman premise, one that’s clear but not necessarily acknowledged day to day, that whereas Batman may be a terrifying figure among the Gotham criminal rank and file, that “weapon” doesn’t uniformly work against the “freaks” that rose in Batman’s wake.

This leads to that “unhinged” scene, reminiscent of Scott Free and Orion in Mister Miracle, in which Bruce charges Alfred with punching him, repeatedly, until Bruce is punished and/or toughened enough from his injuries to go back after the Joker again. King perhaps means this to also be horrific, the manner in which Batman tortures himself — though the sequence is so so ultimately wrong it can hardly be taken seriously, like something out of Frank Miller’s All-Star Batman & Robin. But we see here Batman still not getting it — still the violence, still justice by fist, inasmuch as that makes a difference to the Joker.

Rather, two things seem to mark a shift in Batman and the Joker’s relationship here. The first is that Batman approaches the Joker again with violence and the Joker manages to get a knife in Batman’s gut. The Joker then proceeds to sit there, neither escaping nor harming Batman further, until the unconscious Batman wakes up. Later, Bruce tells Alfred that he believes the Joker was too injured to move, but Alfred dismisses this as “balderdash.” The second is that once Batman awakens and attacks the Joker, Batman is so angered and on edge that he cracks a bad joke of his own. “You’re insane,” the Joker says, and it’s the first time we see the smile fade from his face.

Both of these moments inform the final, familiar scene of Batman visiting Joker at Arkham. Batman wants to know why the Joker didn’t kill him, but the Joker more wants to talk about Batman’s joke. Some back and forth ensues, the Joker says Batman’s joke wasn’t funny, Batman replies, “I could say the same about you” — and here, a flustered Joker smiles again. On Batman’s side, it’s the first honest “hit” he’s landed on the Joker, an inkling that Batman’s way forward will be with his brain and not his fists; for the Joker, it confirms what it seemed he’d already suspected, that he’s found himself a worthy opponent.

With that closing nine-panel page, we then arrive at Killing Joke. Alfred suggests in Winning Card that Batman and the Joker may find a kinship in shared madness, something Bruce rejects, but verily that’s the point of Killing Joke’s final “two guys in a lunatic asylum” bit. Not of course to bring everything back to Killing Joke’s most noted conspiracy theory, but take Winning Card’s arc as, at the start, from a Batman who uses violence to, at the end, a Batman who begins to reason, and then Killing Joke’s arc as starting with a Batman who reasons (“I came to talk”). Taken to it’s logical conclusion, we find a Batman back to violence at the end of Killing Joke, a vote in favor, as far as Winning Card is concerned, of Batman indeed strangling the Joker in Killing Joke’s finale.

Derive from Batman: The Brave and the Bold: The Winning Card what you will. Tom King’s Joker is among the character’s most frightening here, particularly when he takes up the tropes of urban legend — hiding in a toilet like the prodigal crocodile, or under a bed, or in the backseat of a car. King and Mitch Gerads are a powerhouse team, launching this Brave and the Bold series strongly; I doubt that makes any guarantees about what’s to come, but this itself is one DC ought get a deluxe and some other miles out of.

[Includes original covers]