Don Kramer - Detective Comics 826 p15 - Robin Joker

Detective Comics 826, as soon as the issue hit I knew this gallery wouldn’t be complete without at least one page from it. I ended up with two! (So thank you Mark Hay at Splashpage art!)


Writer Paul Dini, penciller Don Kramer and inker Wayne Fauchner firing on all cylinders with a Christmas story with a distinctly Gotham-y difference; When accepting a lift from what he thinks is a passing Good Samaritan, Robin finds himself instead a prisoner of the Joker, who ties him up with Christmas lights and gags him with a Christmas tree bauble, before taking him on a literal slayride through Gotham. The Joker hit-and-runs passersby at random, with the sole purpose of seeing Robin’s reaction.


Best of all, this is Dini's Joker, you can hear his lines in Mark Hamill's voice, and it doesn't get much better than that.


Here The Joker is shown as being utterly insane, not by killing masses of people (as too often happens) but by killing as many or as few people as he needs for maximum effect. There's also a darkly hilarious scene at a drive-through restaurant.


Plus Robin is brave, cunning and resourceful in escaping his fate and it all ends with literally crushing irony for the Joker that will have you cheering.


On this page the Joker gloatingly reveals the full extent of his evil, after originally surprising Robin by telling him he'll let him live (Because it's Christmas, and this was a spur-of-the-moment kidnap), and Robin finding a toy car he can use to cut through his bonds, we find out the Joker planted the car to give him a few minutes of false hope, and that he has no intention of letting his captive live.


Every once in a while there's an image of the Joker which sets the tone for years to come; Marshall Rodgers in "The Laughing Fish", Neal Adams in "The Joker's Five Way Revenge", Brian Bolland in "The Killing Joke".


Kramer's half splash of the sheer, unimaginably gleeful insanity in the Joker's face here might well be the next such definitive shot IMHO.

This was the story which Dini pitched to DC to get the Detective Comics gig in the first place and, even though Batman only appears for about three pages at the end, it’s a treat on every level.


If there's a tiny little disappointment, it's that the text is missing. What with lettering being digital nowadays, it's never actually applied to the art. On the other hand, that means more art to be seen!