Go Inside the Joker

I'm a big fan of the Mindless Ones and their completely unique, deep-dig take on pop comics. This piece on the Joker and Morrison's ongoing Batman run is a fantastic read. I love writers who can not only offer a cogent analysis of pop culture, but can do it with their own flair for language and style; the Mindless Ones deliver that in spades.

Here everything is inverted. Distinctions between inside and outside evaporate. His flailing hands, grasping for the seat of his identity, invert, and wind up groping away at a luminous void where a person should be. The smile becomes a branded logo, disinctions between subjecthood and objecthood no longer clear. Colour, neon, bleeding everywhere, eating… eating… In that vat. In the factory. Drowning in a sea of toxic information. Everything illuminated in the sickening dayglo of plastics and synthetics. This is acid ascendant, the chymical wedding of man and modernity, scorching a blistering, sparking hole in the soul.

This cover is the real origin story.

(and if that Quitely cover trick wasn't intentional as he claims, then holy shit, the universe is one fucked-up place)