Batman: Joker's Daughter #1 Review

A gruesome find leads a troubled girl down the road to madness.

One-shots can be hard to pull off, but writer Marguerite Bennett and artist Meghan Hetrick take on the challenge with stellar results in Batman: Joker's Daughter. The issue isn't an easy read -- and it shouldn't be considering its subject is a deeply disturbed young woman -- but it is an engrossing one, and if you have a heart, Bennett and Hetrick will pull at its strings all while making you question the true north of your own moral compass.

The book's first panel shows a Gollum-esque figure fishing what appears to be a scrap of flesh from the murky waters of Gotham's sewers. As the girl we come to know as Joker's Daughter waxes poetic over it, there are echoes of Smeagol and the Ring to the unholy union between troubled soul and inanimate object. Joker's face becomes this girl's Precious, and she develops wildly unhealthy -- and deeply unhygienic -- fascination with absorbing its essence and becoming one with the man she creepily refers to as Daddy. It's disturbing on a lot of levels, which is exactly what one would want in a book about this character.

Visually, Batman: Joker's Daughter deals in some dark territory, and Hetrick's art is nicely matched by Michelle Madsen's moody color palette. The attention to detail hides nothing, baring the character's scars -- both external and internal -- to our gaze, while the atmosphere is appropriately dank and wretched.

The girl's quest to track down the man she sees as a divine father figure brings her into the orbit of a few familiar faces, chief among them Batman. His tough love act comes from a good place, but Joker's Daughter is a special brand of mad, even for him. Likewise, her sojourn through Arkham raises more questions than answers about her true identity, if she can even be said to have one at all. It shouldn't be surprising that a girl who dons a face she found in the sewers is essentially an empty husk of a human being, but there's something heartbreaking about her hollowness. When she's offered the faintest glimmer of hope in the issue's final pages, the reader is put in the uncomfortable position of wanting her to achieve her goal, even though Bennett and Hetrick have pulled no punches in displaying the grotesque nature of her methods.

Melissa Grey wears Green Lantern pajamas to bed and writes stories for a living. She can be found on MyIGN atMelissaGrey or lurking on Twitter@meligrey.