James Tynion is on a roll.

Between his regular Batman series and creator-owned titles like Department of Truth and Something is Killing the Children, Tynion has to be one of the most exciting and prolific talents working in comics right now.

The first issue of his new series Joker boasts all the promise and excitement of his aforementioned series, and showcases a writer prepared to interrogate why exactly the character of Joker – a murderous, psychopathic madman that, as this first issue proclaims, is evil incarnate – garners so much attention and fandom. For a problematic but fan-favourite figure, Joker #1 introduces what I suspect will be a key theme of this series – a kind of meta commentary upon why we as a society and culture are so fascinated with the ‘bad guys’. Joker seems to be speaking specifically to a world in which serial killers and murderers on death row can attract ‘groupies’ and ‘fans’, one in which it has become a culturally acceptable trend for true crime series and Netflix docs to capture their lives and crimes for the enjoyment(?) of the everyday viewer.

This mode of interrogation is established by the fact that Joker #1 is told mostly from the perspective of Detective James Gordon, a broken man following the loss of his son and haunted at all times by the acts committed by the Joker against himself and his family. Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke is the most evident urtext here, with Guillem March’s intense artwork explicitly drawing upon that iconic Batman/Joker story at multiple points throughout this first issue.

Tynion’s pedigree as a horror writer and enthusiast (epitomised by Something is Killing the Children as well as his anthology horror magazine Razorblades) is also in full force, with storytelling and artwork drawing upon the psychological horror of films like Silence of the Lambs. However, what appears to be the central premise of this series – Gordon tasked with hunting down the titular villain, hired by a shadowy and anonymous collective – also leans into the tropes of film noir and detective fiction.

Joker #1, as such, offers a clear sense of what this series will be about from the get-go, and effortlessly underlines its potential to reinvigorate this character and perhaps address the elephant in the room around his continued popularity – why is this character so engaging and what does that say about ourselves?