Who here’s read The Killing Joke? Uh huh, seeing a lot of hands. Okay now, who here remembers the part where Batman kills the Joker? You don’t? Well, maybe you just weren’t reading closely enough.
Recently Scottish magician and dabbler in comic book writing, Grant Morrison, dropped the theory that Batman actually kills the Joker at the end of The Killing Joke. Don’t worry, no mystical mumbo jumbo or time-travel theories involved — Morrison’s scenario is actually pretty logical and convincing. Hit the jump to have your mind blown…
Yeah, wow, okay — I don’t know if Batman killing Joker is actually what Alan Moore intended, but it’s pretty much a 100% valid reading of what we’re shown in The Killing Joke. For the record, here’s how the last page is described in Alan Moore’s script…
Well, nothing definitive there, but then again, if Alan Moore wanted to secretly tell the final Joker story, he wouldn’t have explicitly written “NOW BATMAN KILLS JOKER REAL GOOD” in the script.