Batman and The Joker are one of pop culture’s most well known and bitter rivalries with a history dating back all the way 80+ years ago to the very first issue of the Batman comic book. It should be no surprise then that one of the biggest stories in comics in the last couple of years is Batman: Three Jokers from DC writer Geoff Johns, artist Jason Fabok and colourist Brad Anderson. At the Fan Expo Canada convention in Toronto, Fabok and Anderson held a panel discussing how Three Jokers was created, the process behind it and even teased a potential sequel they may develop in the future.
Batman: Three Jokers follows Batman, Batgirl and Red Hood as they investigate the possibility that there has been not one, but three different Jokers they’ve fought with throughout their crime fighting careers. Now the three Jokers are planning something big and the trio have to find out what it is and capture the madmen before they can exact whatever it is they have in store for Gotham City.
Batman: Three Jokers was a project long in the making, first teased in the final issues of Johns’ Justice League New 52 run in 2016, but it wasn’t until 2020 Three Jokers was actually published. Part of the reason for the series’ long development was due to Johns becoming more involved in DC’s film and television slate, but it also went through several iterations of ideas as Johns first envisioned it as a Justice League story prior to DC’s Rebirth initiative after the New 52 ended.
“Originally it was going to be more of a Justice League thing,” Fabok said. “There were going to be tie-ins to Justice League but it still would have been Batman centric. There was a version that had Nightwing in it and Harley Quinn and a couple other characters, we had designs that I had done for those characters. Then we really stumbled upon this idea that there were three Jokers so there should be three main heroes that juxtapose with them and clash with them and they should be characters Joker has had a traumatic effect on so obviously Batgirl and Red Hood. We whittled it down to where it finally was.”
After getting the story down to its essence came the long art process which took a long time as Fabok would gain a few pages from Johns every now and then before they really started working on it, but both Fabok and Anderson wanted to make the book the very best it could be. The trio had a long partnership as Fabok and Anderson were the artists on the final arcs of Johns’ Justice League, including the climactic event The Darkseid War which closed out Johns’ New 52 run. It was clear to Johns that Fabok and Anderson were the perfect pair to bring Three Jokers to life.
“Brad really understands what I want without me even saying it. He just hits the colours right or I’ll give my two cents and he just goes with it. It always works out the way I want,” Fabok said.
“Geoff also has so much in his script environment-wise so I set up my scene and play off that. Jay’s really easy to work on because he always has his light sources there, the backlight on his faces. It’s really comfortable for me to work on,” said Anderson.
One question which arose in the panel was whether they set out to match the same legacy as Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s The Killing Joke, often hailed as the definitive Joker story and on a list of top graphic novels. Fabok opened up on how Killing Joke was a major influence, so much so he included several easter eggs in his artwork that called back to that story, but that their main objective was the focus on the characters and themes of the book.
“I think that answer Geoff would give is that the best stories are always the ones that have a lot of emotion to them and character,” Fabok explained. “When Geoff and I talk about story, I just want to draw cool stuff, like ‘let me draw Batman beating up this guy or driving this car through a wall!’ Artists in general want to draw cool stuff, but Geoff understands story and the best stories are the ones that deal with characters and there’s a change in them from beginning to end. We knew we wanted to touch on the history of a lot of these characters and see these character’s growth good or bad, like in the case of Red Hood.”
“The theme of Three Jokers is really forgiveness is freedom and forgiveness vs vengeance,” he continued. “If you choose vengeance, the path will always lead you down Red Hood’s path, a dark path that will destroy your soul, but the path of forgiveness which is Batgirl’s path leads to true spiritual freedom. Batman’s kind of caught in the middle. The forgiveness path is the one Joe Chill is taking and Bruce has to make a decision.”
As for the future, fans may see more of Three Jokers as Johns, Fabok and Anderson have discussed a potential sequel that would pick on where they left off. However, it may not come for a long time as the trio are working on something else and, depending on the success of that, may come back to Gotham City.
“We’re going to do a little thing coming up that kind of hints at where the story is going to go,” Fabok teased, “then we’re doing something totally different and we’re hoping to one day come back and maybe do that sequel. The sequel we had planned is so awesome, it’s way better than Three Jokers, but we’re going off and doing something different and if our new thing is really successful we might not be able to do the sequel for a while!”
Ricky Church – Follow me on Twitter for more movie news and nerd talk.
