Review #30: "Mad Love"

[lovedatjoker]

Writer: Paul Dini
Artist: Bruce Timm

Mad Love, Mad Love, Mad Love. How do I begin to review Mad Love?

Since “Mad Love and Other Stories” was released this month and the “Mad Love Collector's Set” action figures have been announced for release next year (repaints of old sculpts and not the 'new sculpts' the advertising is claiming incidentally)

Comments

[itllcometome]

This review deserves its own review. You have a way real talent for turning over every stone and leaving little room for addition. I appreciate your personal notes acting as an emotional conduit for the story.

But to pull out the some of the really shiny imagery without rehashing stuff I've rambled on about before--

Having this story told through the perspective of the woman who loves the Joker is also a really beautiful way to make it a Joker & Batman story. And really, you could only tell this sort of story through Harley's eyes - because so much of Joker's existence revolves around Batman. Telling it through Selina's or Talia's just wouldn't be the same, wouldn't throw into as fantastic relief this tense,

Those women all personify the same hope the men could break tradition and ultimate heartbreak at the futility. The reader gets to see those conflicting desires depicted in flesh and blood people's happiness and distress. Harley does illustrate them and speaks & shows the subtext that would otherwise be heavy handed or clumsily obvious in exposition or narrative script. The second person POV experience does give the truths of the Joker & Batman an inventive finesse.

And really, you could only tell this sort of story through Harley's eyes - because so much of Joker's existence revolves around Batman.

I love how this evokes the image of Bats as the sun, Joker as the earth, and Harley as the moon. Especially Harl as the moon since to the earth it's obscured by the sun's light for most of the day, and only lit in portions waxing back and forth by the sunlight the rest of the time. It occasionally eclipses the sun, it occasionally appears whole, but it's never entirely visible. But it does have its concrete effects on the earth, pulling at the tides, then the old wives tale about it causing "lunacy".

He created a monster, and it thinks and feels and acts independently of him and yet he just can't bring himself to get rid of it., because dam nit, he created it and he's pleased with it too.

All the little ways that truth sneaks up on him too. He snapped her mind and she broke him out, but how much of the former had anything to do with his plan. The surprise might have been a huge kick at the time, but once she's doing this on his time its a problem. He doesn't have control, whats more now he's letting her collaborate and she's influencing him. Would he have really let the chattering teeth into the plan? Is she manipulating him, (getting the better of) or is she making him soft altogether. (compromising his mind) Both are terribly disastrous for him.

I'm sure everyone is already aware aspects of this story were based on a person Paul Dini and Bruce Timm knew. Please note that relationship was not traditionally abusive - the lady in question was expending a great deal of energy on someone who was using her and not reciprocating the commitment. Nonetheless, inspiration was drawn from it for Mad Love.

The He hit me and it felt like a kiss, also has a strange parallel because it too was written by a third party about an odd explanation for why a woman stayed in an physically abusive relationship. Everytime I see this line cited as a declaration of BWS, I remember that is how the song came to be in the first place.