The Killing Joke: My Trauma is Not Your Punchline

Content warnings: Abuse, sexual assault Bruce Timm. Kevin Conroy. Mark Hamill. With the confirmation of the legendary Batman the Animated Series trinity reuniting for one of the most influential Batman stories in comics’ history, Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, every Dark Knight fan from across the globe has been reveling in this fusion of peak nostalgia. As a survivor, it borders on terrifying. It’s not that the cheers are an act of outright violence in themselves. I don’t believe that the majority of people interested in the film look at other people with traumas that include sexual assault and a family history of multiple kinds of abuse, people like me, and say out loud, “You deserved every second of what happened to you.” But for every eager social media declaration posted without caveat, I also know there can only be willful ignorance or a cognitive dissonance that betrays the lack of importance of creating space for these kinds of scars. It’s the instinct to look away that feels so dangerous.

As much as Moore’s superb writing shaped the complex psychological relationship of heroes and their villains to come, not to mention the fan favorite for The Joker’s backstory, I find it hard to believe that any person who’s read the story can ignore the brutality that even the writer himself described in an interview as “one of the areas where they should’ve reined me in, but they didn’t.” In fact, it’s fair to say it’s near impossible not to read a plot description without encoun…