WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Batman: The Smile Killer one-shot, by Jeff Lemire, Andrea Sorrentino, Jordie Bellaire and Steve Wands, on sale now.

DC's Black Label threw Batman fans for a loop with Joker: Killer Smile, which focused on the clown gaslighting and breaking the psyche of Ben Arnell in Arkham. That story ended with both escaping the facility to go kill Arnell's wife, Anna, and son, Simon, since they left Arnell who got too obsessed with being a psychiatrist to the killer clown.

Interestingly enough, while we did see Batman appear in those three issues, the psychedelic nature of the story made it unclear if the Caped Crusader was indeed real. Now, in Batman: Smile Killer, Ben confirms that he doesn't exist, and it does set the stage for a Dark Knight to rise up in one of Batman's most horrific origin stories ever.

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After opening like a typical Batman adventure, this mind-bending story finds an adult Bruce Wayne in a cell, next to Ben. Bruce is being treated, and we see how the Joker influenced him as a child. The show, Mr. Smile's Playhouse, was apparently hypnotizing kids into committing violent acts with Bruce once trying to dig his eye out. His mom, Martha, stopped him and slapped him, but there's something telling about the show's long-lasting effects.

We see Joker as the puppeteer -- only given away by his white hand and not by his face -- which suggests that this may be the prime Joker. It's believed that the show actually created young Jokers using a psychotic formula, which is what Joker did to Ben in Killer Smile. But since Bruce and Ben are around the same age, the Joker would be much older by now, so it appears the current Joker is a new person. Ben also donned makeup to kill his family, after his sessions turned him instead of a TV show.

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Bruce seems to resist the impulses because he's fighting as Batman or Mr. Pouts in his mind. He's creating scenarios of brawls and cases where he keeps missing the Joker, realizing there are childhood drawings he made watching the show in what he thinks are lost memories. At this point, Jim Gordon, child psychiatrist, enters the fray since he's been treating Bruce for decades. Bruce is adamant that he's Batman, and Joker tricked everyone into keeping him here. As Bruce waxes on about his parents' death in Crime Alley, the older Gordon brings Martha in. Bruce is stunned, and it gets worse when she reveals the show got him to paint his face up and shoot his dad, Thomas.

In other words, Bruce isn't Batman; he's a Joker, and it looks like he's just one of many. He didn't get to run amok on his own, though, as Martha got him to Arkham after killing his dad. Apparently, Bruce is using Batman/Mr. Pouts to cope, which leaves fans wondering if this was the show alone, or maybe Ben subconsciously helped him build this story. We have no clue if Ben's a double agent or the extent of his conditioning, but we can see him being brainwashed and used as a cog, as he had no grasp on time in the first book or even his own memory. It's like The Manchurian Candidate with a Joker twist.

What's also interesting to note is that in Killer Smile, Batman felt like a figment of that Joker's imagination who was an enemy in the minds of his followers, which also gave them an excuse to go wreak havoc. However, Bruce did the opposite and used him as a defense mechanism. Chaos wasn't his outlet, it was using the Batman -- not as an enemy -- but as the hero he wants to be. The story ends with Bruce breaking out and then looking up at the sky to see a glowing Bat-symbol in the night.

Since the Bat-signal disappears in the final panel of the book, a hallucinating Bruce may very well try to become Batman in the real world to atone for his past or feed his delusions, which means that, in a roundabout way, Joker does create him by using the young boy as a gun. We'd love to see a follow-up so all these obscure notes can be finally cleared up because if Bruce becomes an unhinged Batman, who could be just as bad for Gotham as the Joker.

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