Do you remember the “You Make the Call” TV commercials? They were the ones in which you, the viewer, were shown some football replay, and got to guess what the ref said about it.
Well, it appears DC Comics just disgorged a product that might prompt you to “make the call” of a different sort. This pertains to the question of whether their writers, artists, and board-room decision-makers made a feckless attempt to get surreal, or they’ve bought into wokeness so much, they’ve created one of the cringiest comics to date.
They exposed suffering readers to The Joker, a male character, getting pregnant.
Batman News’ Theresa Campana reports on the bizarro move, and she seems less than happy that she had to read the comic.
“*Deep Sigh* You know what I miss? The feeling that when I pick up a comic, I might get a good story. Instead, I’m reading Joker: the Man Who Stopped Laughing, a book that continues to struggle to meet the lowest of my expectations.”
The entry is the fourth in Detective Comics’ recent attempt to focus an entire comic book line on the bad guy, which, as anyone who has worked in scriptwriting or narrative fiction could have told them, either will be very unappealing to people who have a set of normative morals, or will force the writers to reach the cliched inevitable: turn an adversary into an antihero.
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Either way, the attempt to go woke – or at least get bizarrely experimental – does nothing to serve the primary need of telling a good tale. It merely gets the reader thinking about the board room at DC and the possibility that the entire staff is mentally unhinged.
Campana notes that the “Pregnant Joker” comes as the “B” story in the comic:
“…it’s the back-up. This is probably the worst story I’ve ever read in my time of reviewing for Batman News.
Once again, we find ourselves in an homage to old-time comics. We find Joker in a dream sequence at the mercy of yet another female superhero he’s become enamored with, Zatanna. I really don’t get the running gag here. The Joker has never been defined as someone obsessed with chasing after women. However, that’s not what makes the comic insane.”
Enjoy:
“Joker wakes up from his dream and finds that he’s pregnant. I’ll repeat: the Joker wakes up in the morning and discovers that he’s PREGNANT. I didn’t make that up.”
Cringy wokeness? Failed attempt to get as surreal as Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”? You make the call:
“So the Joker goes to the hospital and PREPARES TO GIVE BIRTH. Then he winds up throwing up a mud monster instead. A violent, gun-filled chase commences, but then it is discovered that the mud creature has morphed into a child-sized version of the Joker. The Joker accepts the thing as his son and shows him off to Zatanna, taunting her over the family she could have had with him.”
Campana concludes:
“WHAT IN THE HECK DID I JUST READ?
This is one of those comics you can’t really review, because there’s no real story or artistic vision to pick apart. All you can do is describe, what I can only surmise, is the delusions of a comic writer on a very special kind of weed. Writing aside, however, there have been a lot of these little moments or stories at DC lately that make me go, ‘How the heck did DC editorial give that a green light?’
Is there any kind of oversight at that company now?”
The answer appears to be, yes, and the oversight team, like so many wokesters, doesn’t have the faintest clue about how to tell worthwhile stories.
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