Everybody’s favorite Batman villain is getting an all-new miniseries with Joker: Killer Smile, a mature, dark, and “horrifying” new story released under DC’s prestige Black Label this Halloween.
According to io9, “Joker: Killer Smile follows the Clown Prince of Crime as he has a fateful encounter with a mental health professional that radically alters the course of a number of lives, and while that premise sounds familiar, the story isn’t about Harley Quinn.”
“Over the course of working together on things like Green Arrow and Old Man Logan over at Marvel, Andrea [Sorrentino] really developed a great chemistry and shared visual language. We’re always looking for new challenges, and Andrea was the one who suggested that we do a Joker project,” writer Jeff Lemire said. “I think he really tends to gravitate towards darker stories with a lot of psychological and dramatic underpinnings, so the Joker’s right up his alley.”
“I wanted to tell an intimate story about how the Joker’s evil is something that can devastate a normal family or a relationship as much as it devastates society as a whole. That the idea that really grabbed me, that sense of terror that would come from letting something like the Joker into your family,” he added. “As someone who has a family myself, that kind of chaos and darkness infecting my personal space is the scariest thing I can think of, and so I started there.”
DC is boosting up its focus on the Black Label line heading into 2020. Recently we learned DC is closing shop on its long-running Vertigo imprint at the end of the year, with all future mature readers projects falling under the DC Black Label banner. That includes the Sandman Universe line, which is set to add a new series called John Constantine, Hellblazer, and Joe Hill’s Hill House Comics horror imprint.
Joker: Killer Smile, by Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino, goes on sale Oct. 30.
Source: CBR
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