Batman: White Knight Presents – Generation Joker #2 // Review
Family road trips are always capable of great stress. Bryce and Jackie aren't exactly happy with the whole concept of going back to where their parents met. Normally, it wouldn't be anything more than a slight embarrassment. But when your parents are the Joker and Harley Quinn, things are going to get more than a little bit awkward...and dangerous. The road trip adventure continues in Batman: White Knight Presents – Generation Joker #2. Writers Sean Murphy, Katana Collins, and Clay McCormack continue a strangely satisfying journey into a skewed future DC under the power of artist Mirka Andolfo. Color splashes the page thanks to the work of Alejandro Sanchez.
She’s the daughter of the Ventriloquist. The dummy’s the same. It’s a younger person holding onto it, though. The little wooden figure of Scarface is as gruff and brutal as ever. Scarface has a vendetta against the Joker. The little dummy isn’t particularly moved to accept the idea that Napier is a different person entirely. It might decide to go ahead and get brutal anyway. Bryce and Jackie will have to think fast if they’re going to get out of the situation. Meanwhile, Harleen continues to catch up with Pamela. It’s not likely to go well. The two know each other from way back.
DC has been playing with concepts of legacy for decades now. It's kind of hard to imagine that any story featuring descendants of characters would come across as being anywhere near as original as this one is. The two kids of Joker and Harley come across as really interesting people in their own right. It DOES feel more than a little strange that certain unsavory figures continue to haunt the world well after their prime, but if heroes can continue through multiple generations, so too can villains.
Andolfo is a seasoned professional who has a really solid and inventive grasp on how to mutate this standard and familiar DC universe. It's clear that she's not just rendering a story in the second issue of the series. She's clearly having a great deal of fun with it. The writing team may be forcing her to move things along a little bit more quickly than she would want to. One senses that with the cluttered nature of the panels and the fact that there's a great deal of expressiveness that gets washed out when sharing the page with so much else.
As fun as the idea is, Generation Joker doesn't really have any right to be anywhere near as entertaining as it is. After all, this is just a few different elements that have been fused together into a road trip action comedy sort of situation. Andolfo’s art brings together a three-person writing team in a way that makes it all feel so vibrant and full of life. It's just too bad that the artist doesn't have more room to explore a more dynamic visual range. There's just way too much going on in every single page.
