Next month, discover the secrets of Joker’s Daughter.
You’ve already seen a sneak peek at artist Meghan Hetrick’s interior art for the upcoming BATMAN: JOKER’S DAUGHTER #1. And today, take a new and closer look at this eagerly anticipated one-shot by taking a look at some more of Hetrick’s artwork in the gallery above!
“I think Joker’s Daughter is weak, and I think she is cruel,” writer Marguerite Bennett said to COMIC BOOK RESOURCES about this elusive new villain. “I think she is needy, and acts out in her weakness and her cruelty -- a way to feel powerful, to feel righteous, to achieve that sense of meaning and completeness that I believe everyone seeks. She's found a satisfaction in pain, a superiority in her own newfound abilities, a way to feel important. She reminds me of Poe's imp of the perverse -- that sudden shock of impulse that urges you to shove the person next to you down the stairs, or drive a knife through your own hand. These are natural thoughts that occur to everyone from one time or another, but we possess the restraint to recognize the thought as destructive and dismiss it. A person who is ill, perhaps, would be plagued by those thoughts, or unable to control them, or even compelled to act on them. Joker’s Daughter, however, seeks them out. She provokes them, cackles, calls it sickness, acts upon them and dances over the spilling blood … Batman does indeed appear, in a place I am honored to revisit. And you will see a few of his newer rogues before the night is through.”
“This is a story of worship, as the Joker’s Daughter hunts for the great and horrible entity that could give her life meaning, make her chosen. This is devotion to a savage and absent god — how people define themselves through what they adore and revere and fear and desire,” Bennett teased to NEWSARAMA.
“I think, beyond Joker’s Daughter herself, there is a terrible suggestion of what would happen to readers if, one day, some piece of the Joker came into their lives?” the writer continued to COMICOSITY. “He is a villain of such horror and grandeur—I think it is chilling but also rather intoxicating to imagine what you would do—you, now, reading this—if some part of the Joker himself came into your keeping. He hasn’t come to kill you, hasn’t come in person, but his face (which is his crown) is now in your hands, to treasure or to spurn or to secret away or to keep or to destroy or to don. You now possess a relic of death, the living proof of the existence of the Devil. Would you feel chosen or doomed? Would it give you meaning or deprive you of freedom? What do you do with it? How would possession of such a thing change you? What would it compel you to do? She is but one possible answer.”
For more about Joker’s Daughter from Marguerite Bennett, check out some recent full interviews that ran with the writer in COMIC VINE, COMIC BOOK RESOURCES, NEWSARAMA, COMICOSITY, and WEEKLY COMIC BOOK REVIEW.
BATMAN: JOKER’S DAUGHTER #1 arrives in stores on February 5th.