Batman: White Knight Presents – Generation Joker #1 // Review
It’s really difficult to teach your kids not to make the same mistakes that you did growing up. It’s a big world for them with a lot of distractions. If on the off-chance they actually hear what you’re saying, they might not think that your experiences apply to them. Jack Napier looks to try to keep his kids out of trouble in Batman: White Knight Presents – Generation Joker #1. The writing team of Sean Gordon Murphy, Katana Collins, and Clay McCormack continue their White Knight saga in an issue brought to page and panel by Mirka Andolfo.
Jack’s bringing his kids back to the place where he grew up. He’s trying to show them that there was a place before he became the Joker. His message might not be sinking in: there are clown decorations in his childhood bedroom. Jack made some serious errors in his youth, which he has been fortunate enough to move on from. Will his children learn to move on from errors that they’ve never made in order to find a more productive life in Gotham City? Given the fact that their mother was Harley Quinn, it doesn’t seem likely. Things have been unstable for Jack’s kids since birth.
The three-person writing team is juggling a lot. It's difficult to make a big, sweeping statement like the one that they're trying to make here. There's just too much history in all of the characters to make a very coherent statement on anything at all. The writing team does a pretty good job of telling a compelling dramatic story. The overall statement being made is about the stresses of one generation bleeding into those of another. Theoretically, an intricate and complicated exploration of that sort of thing could very well rest at the heart of this series when it's finished. As it is at the end of the first issue, though...there isn’t enough in the drama to really suggest that they’re going to be covering much of anything at all.
Andolfo has a distinct style that still manages to bring a variety of different moods, motions, and emotions to the page. She's really good with defining a wide ensemble of different characters in ways that feel very distinct without being ridiculously amplified. All of the emotion on the page feels organic. It seems to come out of the substance of the drama quite well. Andolfo never reaches for unearned dramatic impact. All of the passion on the page seems to resonate realistically from the conflicts that are being presented by the writing team.
The White Knight concept advances certain elements of the Batman mythos in interesting ways. It may feel more than a little bit like a weirdly insubstantial fugue on many of the central figures in Gotham City, but it’s managed to find the right angle on everything to give it fresh depth. Honestly, though, that may be a little more than it deserves. Batman and his extended ensemble have been around for a long time. DC might be served a bit better by exploring new characters altogether.
