Why exactly is The Killing Joke considered a top tier Batman story...

I don't care to explain it all to you. But it's deserved and its portrayal of Batman and Joker is one of the most mature in these characters' history.

The actual storytelling is above average. The art is amazing. The concept/idea is cool. That's it.
Not one of Moore's best.

That's a really dishonest description of the story, the story main point is Batman and Joker relating to each other, in the end Batman try to help Joker just like he try to help other villains just for Joker to remind him he refuse to seek help and change as well because both are comfortable with their current situation by using their hero and villain lifestyles as a way to cope,Batman aknowledge his argument and basically say "fair enough"

You have to look at things like this in context.
>All that's in the story is Barbara gets paralyzed then Batman starts laughing at the end, also Alan Moore giving The Joker a definitive origin was a mistake.
Back then, comic fans read pre-crisis Batman comics. In those stories, Joker had a definitive origin as a thief and a gangster. The Killing Joke origin story was subverting the already-famous story, making him sympathetic. That’s the significance of the line “sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another.”
Nowadays, comic fans and writers almost never read a single thing written pre-crisis, and they write off entire eras of the character as embarrassing jokes, so they often are surprised to find out the Killing Joke didn’t invent the Red Hood, and it comes from a 1951 comic.
A premise of The Killing Joke is that the Joker can’t be stopped because he makes up his own origin and motivation, but it’s slowly taken on a new meaning as “the Joker’s real backstory” like in Three Jokers, even Joker 2019 is kinda based on it. But that was never the intended point. The Joker goes in and out of Arkham Asylum, meaning that he must be found not guilty by reason of insanity a lot. The Killing Joke depicts his own mental state creating a justification for his crimes, which is rarely shown in comics.

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>Joker shoots Batgirl in the spine and rapes Gordon
>Batman laughs about it at the end

What did Moore mean by this?

What's wrong, user? You don't like Joker blowing something up for the 500th time while talking about society?

this. Add some more of the detective shit too. Hell wouldnt even mind if there were some of the psycho villians too, just in concert with mafia stuff and acting within that system. with the mafia being smart too and it all being a back and forth.
I want to see society. Not people talking about it.

You don't read comics do you.

>You don't like Joker blowing something up for the 500th time while talking about society?
How many times this happened?

I mentioned it in another thread, but I kinda want harly to somewhat get involved in this kinda stuff as a driving force again. Like its her proffessional interest as a psychologist that atracts her to people with idiosyncratic narritives and stuff. Like she goes around and tries to record the stories of people she fonds fun. By testing them in joker esque ways. Kinda making her jokers little monster, but with her own initiative and goals.

mad lad

That's already Dr Hugo Strange thing.

That's never, ever been Hugo's thing.

it's definitely because of the ending where a lot of people like to assume Batman either kills Joker or the cycle continues because the last panel is the same as the panel on the first page

While we're talking Batshit is White Knight worth continuing? I liked the beginning as a sort of unique spin on a Joker story but something about them making Jason the first Robin annoyed me, not that it's that big of a deal but if Bats' first attempt at a Robin fucking died he wouldn't try it again. It throws off the whole dynamic of sidekicks imo

It literally happens in this very comic.

No it's stupid

TLH is boring. Only has good art.
It establishes a kino relation between Batman and the Joker in very few pages. Can't believe nigs are filtered by this comic.

Cripple the bitch

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trash story but amazing art

It's celebrated because it was one of the first times Batman stories were "dark" and "had consequences." Even though that has nothing to do with whether it was a great story or not, it made fans in the '80s feel grown up and sophisticated for reading it. I don't hate it, but it's pretty damn overrated.

TLH is really good.

Even just the character and thematic stuff is enough to make up for the fact that it doesn't actually even work as a mystery story. Having the murders as this backdrop for the story of how Gotham changed from a mob city to a city of freaks, the downfall of Harvey Dent, and the maturation of Batman, makes it a fucking GOAT story.

It's funny, I keep on thinking about how the movies and the comics need to switch.

Having two "grounded and realistic" solo Batman film interpretations in a row feels stale. I'd be down to do something less realistic now.

But in terms of the comics, I'd love if they started doing hardboiled-inspired street-level crime shit with Batman fighting mobsters and serial killers, instead of every single story arc being some villain exploding or taking over the whole city or turning everybody into Jokers or some stupid shit. Also, I'm tired of all the villains targeting Batman himself due to some personal vendetta, rather than just doing evil shit that Batman intervenes to stop because he's a hero.

Remember the Klling Joke mosaic? That was a fun month. We should do that again

It was a crap mystery story

Because Moore wrote it

>definitive origin story
He's had one since 1950.

>and has lasting consequences.
Only for Barbara as per "fuck this character" editorial fiat. And she isn't even a character in this story.

Batman is a piece of shit because he let his foster child's murderer live. Batman can rot in hell.

Because even if Alan Moore writes a bad story, it's still better than every other capeshit story.

TLH has great art but it has incredibly stupid writing and dialogue and situations outright lifted from The Godfather. The difference in skill between Moore and Loeb is night and day.

Everything Moore writes seems to have purpose in his stories.

Because it is just a Joker wank story that casual fans eat up.

>Jason kill by Joker
>Barbs crippled by Joker
at the very least he'd have gotten the Joker put on cryo sleep or something in arkham. The only story where Joker had some kind of long-term stay in Arkham was The Dark Knight Returns right?

I don't really know either OP. I guess it's mostly to do with the fact that it was the first modern comic to make Batman really dark and almost realistic, at least in terms of the plot. But I feel that darkness is just there for the sake of it. It's a nasty book with no real resolution. There's god tier art from Bolland, but aside from that and a few standout moments I don't think it's anything to really write home about. Even Moore himself doesn't like it all that much:
>"The Killing Joke is a story about Batman and the Joker; it isn't about anything that you're ever going to encounter in real life, because Batman and the Joker are not like any human beings that have ever lived. So there's no important human information being imparted...Yeah, it was something that I thought was clumsy, misjudged and had no real human importance. It was just about a couple of licensed DC characters that didn't really relate to the real world in any way."

Yeah, I guess I am not a big fan of TKJ, because there is a difference between being dark and being mean-spirited. TKJ was very much the latter on top of being just nihilistic. Everybody loses, nothing matters, everything sucks, why should I care?

This, it also lifts from Silence of the Lambs
The fact that a story with such heavily derivative elements like TLH is considered one of the best Batman stories shows how low superhero storytelling standards are

>muh """"street level"""" muh detective muh crime

Nobody gives a shit about this stuff and haven't in DECADES. It's not interesting. The movies go for it because it's easier than the superheroic type stuff to depict on screen but in the comics where there's no real life constraints Batman fighting the mafia and random street crime is boring as fuck. Nobody reads Batman to essentially watch an episode of Cops.

The Dark Knight Returns predates The Killing Joke, but it established there was a large market for darker Batman stories.
Joker's theory about human nature is literally proven wrong, it's not a " Everybody loses, nothing matters, everything sucks" story.

Aren’t Year One and Long Halloween some of the most highly regarded Batman stories ever

user those stories are decades old and one of them features almost every single Batman villain sitting in the same room.

I fucking hate Alan Moore when he writes capes. That skeezy old fucker should stick to writing erotic fanfiction about characters from Victorian literature.

>Joker's theory about human nature is literally proven wrong
I am sure Barbara will be very happy to hear it. Sure, some nihilistic grand concept that barely held any water in the first place was debunked, but everybody lost trying to debunk it, so that's that's not much of a win.

Yeah, at the very end. Most of it is the Falcones and Moronis.

Gordon won and Batman won by defeating Joker. Barbara survived, which made her better off than the usual Joker victim.

Just about every issue of The Long Halloween has Batman fighting a member of his rogues gallery. The Grundy issue, the Joker issues, the Poison Ivy issues, the Mad Hatter and Scarecrow issue, and so on.

>Gordon won
He survived more like. And Batman failed to redeem the Joker and then he realized that he's about as crazy as him.
Barbara's still fucked.

This. Also from being on Yea Forums for awhile can tell the people talking about street-level heroes are hipsters who don't read comics. There is no such thing as a street-level superhero.

Not giving in to despair is still a win. Batman can never actually win given the nature of the medium, so you might as well say golden and silver age comics are also nihilistic with that reasoning.

Street-level simply means a hero fighting local threats in contrast to heroes who fight world or galaxy-sized threats.

>my skin color was “normal”
…basado??

Well, we are slowly getting into the "all that dispair could've been avoided if Batman just did his fucking job" territory.

Yes, and that literally does not apply to a single modern superhero. Every single one of your precious 'muh street' hero has been to space, other dimensions, various mythological / religious realms, met or fought aliens gods mutants and creatures. There is no such thing as a street level superhero.

I didnt happen before of after that not even turn into his thing

Batman does his job by bringing people in when they escape. It's not his responsibility to be a murderer or hold people against their will in violation of the law.
There are still street-level stories, but sure, I don't think there's a long-running hero in a shared universe that hasn't inevitably been dragged into some higher-level conflict.