The Clown At Midnight

[severalsmoked]

Read today on Twitter, can't remember who posted, maybe The Mindless Ones, that Batman 663 was not in fact narrated by the Joker. I'm not sure where this comes from, so I'm curious, is this true? And if so, where did we find this out? Or is it just his logic that I'm not keen to and so I thought his opinion was fact?

[Personamanx]

I thought this thread was about the Crappy Horror movie for a minute:



As for the actual thread discussion.... No comment I have not read it.

[zur en arrh]

What an amazing issue that was.

[AJM]

Read today on Twitter, can't remember who posted, maybe The Mindless Ones, that Batman 663 was not in fact narrated by the Joker. I'm not sure where this comes from, so I'm curious, is this true? And if so, where did we find this out? Or is it just his logic that I'm not keen to and so I thought his opinion was fact?

What's the confusion? The issue was written in the third person, so of course the Joker didn't narrate it. Grant Morrison did.

[severalsmoked]

What's the confusion? The issue was written in the third person, so of course the Joker didn't narrate it. Grant Morrison did.

Hm. I'll go back and re-read it tonight but I thought that there was some discussion about whether or not it was a character from within the universe that wrote/narrated 663. I know that I've read theories that it was Joker or Bruce or in one case Alfred (in a theory to prove he was the Black Glove which clearly isn't the case), but I didn't know that it was basically accepted to be Morrison.

[Retro315]

Read today on Twitter, can't remember who posted, maybe The Mindless Ones, that Batman 663 was not in fact narrated by the Joker. I'm not sure where this comes from, so I'm curious, is this true? And if so, where did we find this out? Or is it just his logic that I'm not keen to and so I thought his opinion was fact?

It could not have been narrated by Joker, because it transferred from an omniscient POV to Joker's inner monologue, and to Batman's inner monologue.

"Rain went clickety-clack-tack". The "hard, gritty" method of storytelling is not that different from the "narrative voice" that Bruce says he adds to his notes so that Alfred will enjoy them more when he reads and archives them - a hard-edged "Private Eye Novel" kind of voice.

It's possible that "Gotham City itself" was the narrator, although the hardest, truest possibility is just that it's Morrison-as-narrator, trying to capture the feel of Gotham and of Joker's madness, but that the fact he's narrating because it's prose isn't that important except in establishing mood.

[Perkele]

It was third person definitely. But why say it was narrated by Morrison? All my lit teachers kept hammering into my head that narration is not necessarily ever the point of view of the author's persona, but merely narration, more of a 'voice' of it's own. Besides, there's no limitation on what sort of perspective is being used in narration. A writer can switch instantaneously between an omniscient narrator and a character's thoughts. There's no need to assume any absolute form of narrator.

[nepenthes]

One of the best Joker stories ever written, up there with Goin Sane, Slayride, Killing Joke, Joker, Batman #1 imo

[T Hedge Coke]

I figured it was an entry Bruce wrote up for Alfred in his journals. It reads really close to classic Bat-prose shorts, too, though.

[nepenthes]

I figured it was an entry Bruce wrote up for Alfred in his journals. It reads really close to classic Bat-prose shorts, too, though.

Except it narrates events that Bruce would have no experience of i.e. the Harlequin and Soloman Sheba scenes.

[T Hedge Coke]

Except it narrates events that Bruce would have no experience of i.e. the Harlequin and Soloman Sheba scenes.

Bruce lies all the time. Look at SpoileRobin.

Actually, I figured he just extrapolated those parts from evidence and presumption. You may be right, though.