Originally published on Patreon
After spending a couple of issues in hospital, where the pace slowed to a crawl, The Joker is finally out and about in Gotham city once again, and is still trying to get some answers as to why this second Joker is pretending to be him. Luckily for him this Joker (we'll call him Fancy Joker) is in town looking for the other Joker (we'll call him Scruffy Joker).
The Scruffy Joker, who's been through a lot already this series, goes to confront the Fancy Joker, and the two of them end up finally coming face to face in a warehouse where the Scruffy Joker gets trapped in a cage. No one to take such things lightly, Scruffy Joker sets the entire building on fire (with them trapped inside), and sprays acid in the Fancy Joker's face.
After their fight spills out into the street, then under it, Scruffy Joker confronts his duplicate in the sewers and shoots him in the head. Which explodes into clay. Yes, Fancy Joker, who shot the Scruffy Joker in issue one, and has been sowing chaos across the US, has been Clayface the entire time! Except he's not. One of the Jokers being Clayface has been a popular theory, and this is Matthew Rosenberg shutting this theory down; as shortly after its revealed Fancy Joker is Clayface, he heads off to make a call to the real Fancy Joker who's still in LA.
Turns out that it was a trick, that the Fancy Joker had Clayface pretend to be him to take on the Scruffy Joker. So, this means that we still don't have an explanation for what's going on, and it seems like one of them being Clayface has been removed from the table. I know there are more than one Clayface, so it could still be the explanation, but it would be sneaky as hell to pull that move twice.
The rest of the issue sees Jason continuing his hunt for Joker, and meeting up with Steph, who tries to talk him down. I don't really like what's being done with Jason here. Him being the guy to go after The Joker is fine, it makes sense, but the way he's doing it here, throwing himself into bad situations, making poor choices, trying to kill The Joker, it all feels like a regression for the character in a lot of ways. It feels like his relationship with the Bat Family and his character growth are being thrown out the window because Rosenberg wanted someone to be gunning for The Joker.
The back-up feature for this issue one again sees The Joker lusting after another female character; Giganta this time. He tries to make himself into a better man to win her over, even going so far as to summon a demon for help (Etrigan). I'm struggling to get much out of these back-ups, and they're feeling weirder and weirder with each one.
Overall, this was kind of a mixed issue. It felt like things were moving forward with the mystery, that we were finally getting some answers, but ended up back where we started by the end of it. In some ways it feels like perhaps the series is being stretched out, and things are being thrown in to add extra issues and lengthen the pace because with the two issues in the hospital, and now this one, it kind of feels like the series is just treading water.
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