“Hello. I came to talk. I’ve been thinking lately. About you…about me. About what’s going to happen to us, in the end. We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we? Perhaps you’ll kill me…Perhaps I’ll kill you. Perhaps sooner…Perhaps later.” – Batman, in Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke

Since 1940, The Joker has brought crime and chaos to Gotham City while Batman has stopped him and sent him to prison or an insane asylum. The Joker, however, always manages to escape and brings even more crime, and even death, to the city. With his passage from the 1988 comic book, The Killing Joke, Alan Moore captured the past, showed the present, and speculated on the future of the ongoing war between Batman and The Joker. His use of a couple of lines of dialogue for multiple purposes makes the passage especially effective. Moore’s passage is important to the story but also elevates the story to a place where it becomes relevant to the world at large, not just in 1988 but in the present day. And, just as with other British writers such James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Moore transports the reader from external story events to internal thoughts seamlessly.

Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke passage is effective not just for its weight within the story, but also for its relevance in the real world. Batman, like the criminal justice system in our world, struggles with the decision of how to handle serial violent criminals; do we imprison, execute, or rehabilitate? Imprisoning The Joker has proven ineffective as he has been able to escape time after time. Killing The Joker would rid Batman and Gotham City of an insane, vicious, violent criminal who most certainly will kill again and again. But, the act of killing will make Batman a criminal, as well. An especially important part of this important passage is “We’re going to kill each other, aren’t we?” Batman knows that, if he does kill The Joker, a part of his own soul will die along with him. Rehabilitation seems unlikely as The Joker has proven over and over that he is beyond redemption. Batman’s decades-old struggle to bring The Joker to justice permanently echoes the same struggle that our real-world court system faces.

The real power of the passage lies in Alan Moore’s decision to repeat it at a critical point in the story. At the beginning of The Killing Joke, Batman enters Arkham Asylum to have a talk with The Joker. When he enters The Joker’s cell, Batman confronts The Joker (we think) and utters the above passage but also adds an extra bit of dialogue, “I just wanted to know that I’d made a genuine attempt to talk things over and avert that outcome. Just once.” At this point in the story, Batman, while not entirely optimistic, holds at least a glimmer of hope that he can help The Joker, to reach through the insanity and resolve things without violence. Later in the story, when Batman confronts the escaped Joker, Moore has Batman repeat the same dialogue, this time without the additional part about making an attempt to talk. Confronting The Joker once again, Batman is much less hopeful, even resigning himself that his thinking is correct: that one day one of them will die at the other’s hand. Moore’s decision to repeat Batman’s dialogue at this point in the story shows the stark difference between Batman’s (at least partial) hope at the beginning of the story and his despair at the end of the story.

Moore’s repetition of the passage serves another purpose as well. At the beginning of the story, Batman is speaking the dialogue out loud to another character. This external dialogue is shown visually as word balloons, as is typical in comic books. When the same dialogue is repeated later, the words are shown visually as boxes, showing the reader that Batman is repeating these words as an internal monologue. In the same tradition as other British authors, Moore pulls the reader in and out of a character’s mind. This transition between external speaking and internal thoughts heightens the drama as we experience with Batman his disappointment in failing to stop The Joker without violence.

Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke is one of the most popular and widely regarded stories in the Batman mythology. Moore’s writing gave us many memorable lines (for example, “How can two people hate so much without knowing each other?”) that are as culturally and socially relevant today as they were when the story was published in 1988. One of the most important passages from the story is Batman’s speech that states that either he will eventually have to kill The Joker or that The Joker will kill him. Moore is able to use this passage to convey hope and nonviolence and then later, in the same story, to convey disillusionment. He is able to use the same set of words to pull us into and out of the mind of a fictional character. At the same time, he is able to use the passage to comment of the dilemma of the criminal justice system while not only repeating the struggle between one of the world’s most popular superheroes and his greatest villain, but also creating a compelling and unique entry into the mythology of Batman.