8 Biggest WTF Comic Book Moments Of 2020
4. Three Jokers
Geoff Johns' DC career is in a bit of a weird place at the minute.
The occasionally compelling but deeply frustrating Doomsday Clock saw the writer - who was at the forefront of the DC Universe for well over a decade starting with the mid-to-late noughties - reckoning with his own legacy on the page, but also with the legacies of other creators like Alan Moore, whose own impact on DC Comics and the medium more generally should really go without saying.
While Doomsday Clock's shortcomings were exacerbated by the sublime HBO Watchmen series releasing at the same time, the comic was, on the whole, largely unambitious. It was another big DC event designed to restructure the continuity yet again, and in many ways it typified a lot of what makes the superhero genre such a faff to approach In The Year Of Our Lord 2021.
Three Jokers - Johns' follow-up work that delivered on the multiple Jokers tease when Batman sat in the Mobius chair in his Justice League run from years earlier - ended up being just as weird as Doomsday Clock, in that it yet again sees Johns position himself within Moore's legacy (specifically The Killing Joke), and fail to grasp it in a worthwhile manner.
It's filled with shocking moments of course, like Jason Todd shooting one of the Jokers and the hint of a romance between him and Batgirl, but ultimately all it does is answer a question other writers already addressed in a much more interesting manner; Grant Morrison's theory of "hyper sanity" to name just one.