Two Happy Returns

Today at First Age Comics in Lancaster, I learned of two "sudden and most strange returns" (to quote Hamlet):

after a Cosmic Convergence, the Superman of the (post-Crisis) DCU has been left stranded on the Earth of the (current) New 52;

Lucifer Morningstar has returned to Earth from the inter-cosmic Void.

Although DC superhero continuities make no sense, Lucifer's return could mean either Nothing or Something Big. Comic narratives of lasting value include the fantasy tetralogy:

Swamp Thing
John Constantine: Hellblazer
The Sandman
Lucifer

Will this new Lucifer monthly comic continue that legacy or not? How many fans will buy the monthly comic and how many will instead wait for it to be collected? - a practice that started with Watchmen but has since become standard.

The legacy of the Awesome Mage continues. He wrote Watchmen, the last Superman of Earth 1 story and The Killing Joke and his reconstruction of the Swamp Thing kick-started that fantasy tetralogy.

What THE KILLING JOKE Is Really About

"...Watchmen was something to do with power, V for Vendetta was about fascism and anarchy, The Killing Joke was just about Batman and the Joker - and Batman and the Joker are not really symbols of anything that are real, in the real world, they're just two comic book characters."
-Alan Moore, quoted in Gary Spencer Millidge, Alan Moore Storyteller (Lewes, East Sussex, 2011), p. 139.

I rarely disagree with the Awesome Mage but this is one occasion. The Killing Joke is about whether one bad day is enough to drive anyone mad. It happened to the Batman. It happened to the Joker. The Joker tries to make it happen to Jim Gordon - and fails.

Would one very bad day be enough to drive you or me mad? A very important question.

Addendum, 29 Nov 2015: I have addressed this issue before. See here.

Is One Bad Day Enough To Drive You Or Me Mad?

The previous post is a link to an interview in which Alan Moore again puts down the story, not the art, in his and Brian Bolland's The Killing Joke. Alan has said elsewhere that TKJ is not about anything substantial; it is only about a guy dressed as a bat fighting a guy who looks like a clown. I disagree.

TKJ is about whether one bad day would be enough to drive you or me mad. The Joker had a bad day but doesn't always remember it the same way. (Metafiction: the character has different origin stories.) He knows that Bats must have had a bad day to make him do what he does. (In fact, does the Joker ask whether it was mob killing spouse, which would be the Punisher's origin?)

The Joker does a song and dance routine (of course he does; why did no one else write this?) about why we are not obliged to be sane and even about why any response to life other than insanity would be crazy. He tries to prove his point by giving Jim Gordon a bad time but fails. Gordon tells Bats to bring the Joker in by the book. Would you or I stay sane and legal like Jim or become criminally insane and homicidal like the Joker?

A fellow comics reader said that the ending made no sense: why should Bats share a joke with the Joker? I took it to be just release of tension. (I once burst out laughing twenty four hours after a difficult situation as a teacher.)

Alan Moore has also said, I think, that his graphic fictions are unfilmable. I think that a good attempt could be made at scrupulous transference to screen but each work would have to be serialized.