Ever since Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke, DC have been desperate to produce something that has a similar gritty and hard-hitting impact as that book. This has meant that since 1988 we’ve had countless hot-takes on Batman’s relationship with his arch-nemesis, The Joker. Geoff John’s latest attempt to enter the top ten of Batman stories is The Three Jokers.

The premise is that The Joker is not one Batman villain, but a team of three, each representing a facet of the villain’s persona. You would think that this would allow for some classic exploration of the character; after all trinity’s are pretty common in mythology for precisely that reason. Instead, this is more the Three Jokers versus the Bat-Family, namely Red Hood and Bat Girl. The author can’t resist exploring previous Batman classics such as A Death In The Family and The Killing Joke and we get bogged down in lore and drama, rather than a story.

Artistic team Jason Fabok and Brad Anderson do very well turning the saggy script into something that is visually rewarding. They are plenty of artistic shout-outs to other work throughout and the art is moody and dark.. The various Jokers that appear in the story are particularly well done and it’s all very serious and gothic.
The fundamental problem with all of these ‘big’ stories is that less in more. The Killing Joke works because it does a single, big and terrible thing. The Three Jokers fails because it’s constantly trying to shock the reader with the next amazing lore-based reveal, which makes the reader care less about the story as it continues.

As an addition to the Batman canon, The Three Jokers will no doubt inspire many stories in other media. It’s just that this particular tale looks and feels like a shadow of other works; a doppelganger, but one without the grace of the things it copies. That said, a pale imitation of Batman is still good, just not great.