People on the Internet Get Things Wrong: Comic Book Cover Edition

***Trigger Warning: Some of the images pulled from comic books depict assault and violence towards women.*** DC is celebrating the Joker next month with a plethora of variant covers devoted to him. The Joker, who by definition is a deranged, sinister and disturbed individual is shown on most of these covers the way he’s always been: scaring the shit out of somebody. One specifically that sparked a lot of outrage was where the Joker is cozied up to a frightened Batgirl for her cover. After a lot of people voiced their displeasure with the cover AND RECEIVED THREATS OF VIOLENCE FOR IT, the artist Rafael Albuquerque asked DC to pull the cover. Now of course, there’s the backlash to the backlash as many fans and creators are crying foul and constructing this as an evil feminist argument that ruins everything. Sigh. For some historical context, the Batgirl cover stands out as many have drawn parallels to the famous “Killing Joke” storyline, where the Joker shoots Barbara Gordon and paralyzes her, then strips her down and takes lewd pictures of her to show to her father Jim (there is some debate if the Joker actually sexually assaulted Barbara or not, but even if he didn’t, it doesn’t take away from the established trauma already present from the implicit images). The story itself is disturbing and traumatic, so any call back to it has the potential to be triggering.

Let me say that the Joker is one of my favorite fictional characters. In the right hands, he usually is my favorite…