This is not an ordinary book: it's a BookCrossing book! BookCrossing books are world travelers - they like to have adventures and make new friends...and every once in a while they even write home to say what they've been doing.

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Story by Alan Moore; art by Brian Bolland.

Hardcover with dust jacket; apparently the "Deluxe Edition". Some water damage, but I don't think it affects the readability of the book. From Goodwill.

This one is on my TBR list, but I have two copies...

Thursday, January 31, 2019: this book is heading for Virginia with a few friends.

USPS tracking 9549 0104 3302 9031 4212 88
ETA 2/20/19

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I'm so glad you've found this book!

Please take a moment to make a journal entry and let this book's previous readers know that it's safe with you.

How and where did you find the book? What did you think of it? What are you going to do with it next?

It's now your book, for you to do with as you please: keep it, pass it to a friend, or maybe even leave it where someone else can find it!

If you've ever wondered where your books go after they leave your hands, join BookCrossing and you may find out: you'll be able to follow your books as new readers make journal entries - sometimes from surprisingly far-flung locations.

BookCrossing: making the whole world a library!

Thank you for sending this great collection of graphic novels, hyphen8!
I'm so excited to dive in!

Later: Meh. I guess I'm not the target audience. Other than the movies, I haven't read any of the Batman comics. This is the first. It might have had more impact if I was more immersed within the world.

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Adding to the restarted ABC Bookbox.

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I'm claiming this from the Already Been Crossed bookbox! (My favorite Joker is actually the one in the LEGO Batman movie, but I've read enough of the comics to recognize this one.) [Oh, do check out the hardcover under the dust-jacket: it has its own cover-art, an embossed black-and-purple version of the "killing joke" panel late in the story.]

Later: OK, this is definitely NOT the LEGO Batman-and-Joker. Yeesh! I know the Dark Knight got even darker as the comics went on, but this story's among the nastiest I've encountered, with the Joker not only crippling Barbara Gordon and kidnapping her father the commissioner, but stripping them both for humiliating photographs. (That said, they're both made of tougher stuff than the Joker apparently expected; his goal was to drive them as mad as he is himself, and it didn't work.)

We do get a tragic back-story for the Joker here, one I hadn't seen before. There is the accident-at-the-chemical-plant that changed his face, but before that he seems to have been a decent enough guy trying to find work to support his pregnant wife, only to get blocked at every turn. Sure, he shouldn't have agreed to work for those mobsters, but he couldn't have foreseen just how bad things would get... That would have made for a more sympathetic story if his later actions weren't so heinous. And his confrontation with Batman was... kinda twisted, what with the "killing joke" of the title and all.

There's a bonus story here that's even more chilling than the main one, "An Innocent Guy": it's narrated by a cheerful nondescript fellow who's decided that he's going to shoot Batman - and then go about his life as if nothing had happened. Just to prove that despite being a good person he can succeed at one really bad thing. It rings horribly true, too.

The comment sections by the author and artist about the reissue with fully-recolored panels had lots of interesting points, but I still have to say this is the darkest Batman comic I've seen.

I'm taking this to today's BookCrossing Meetup in the Panera in Porter Square; hope someone enjoys it!

*** Released for the 2019 Keep Them Moving release challenge. ***

Nobody claimed this one at the meetup so I left it in the Little Free Library inside the mall; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in NH here.]

*** Released for the 2019 Keep Them Moving release challenge. ***