Folks, all I can do is shake my head on this one. We must be living in a parallel universe, because a new Batman story arc places the Joker as the good guy and Batman as the bad guy.
While this sort of character swap has been done before to promote certain story arcs, the reason for this switch might make you pull all your hair out.
According to Heat Street:
Batman: White Knight, which will hit comic book stores in early October, features a Joker now cured of his insanity. He is suddenly aware of Gotham City not as a backdrop for cartoon psychopaths torturing the population but a hotbed of inequality, whose citizens are crying out for social justice.
You read that correctly. Joker is the good guy, because he’s trying to help SJWs achieve their utopia of a Socialist society, while Batman is now the bad guy because he’s a rich guy.
The new story arc’s writer-illustrator Sean Murphy, who, not surprisingly, has a bunch of anti-Trump/GOP tweets on his Twitter page, said in an interview with WIRED that the Joker will be “one of the people” who fights against the wealthy.
You know, because making money is horrible.
Murphy told WIRED:
My main goal was to undo the comic tropes while changing Gotham from a comic book city into a real city—a city dealing with everything from Black Lives Matter to the growing wage gap. [But] rather than write a comic about the wage gap, I gave those ideas to the Joker, who leads a kind of media war against Gotham's elite by winning people over with his potent observations and rhetoric.
In this instance, art is definitely imitating life.
Leave it to an SJW to ruin one of the reasons people read comic books — to escape the reality that they have to deal with on a daily basis.
Graeme McMillan, the writer of the WIRED article, introduced the interview with Murphy with the following:
Batman has been a hero for decades, constantly saving Gotham City from mad men and murderers. But take away the cape and noble purpose and he's actually a terror—someone capable of causing as much damage as he prevents. And seen through the lens of the 21st century, a time when it's understood that vigilante justice is dangerous, Bruce Wayne's actions don't look much more safe or sane than the Joker’s.
So according to McMillan and Murphy, Batman is just as bad as the Joker? Really?
While Batman doesn’t sugarcoat a damn thing for anyone, he does adhere to a code that doesn’t allow him to kill just anyone. Joker, on the other hand, still murdered hundreds of people with little to no remorse, insane or not.
But, as art is imitating life, it’s only fitting that Murphy would make a victim out of a murdering psychopath like the Joker.