Matthew Rosenberg Reveals How Joker's Nightmare Became a Knight Terrors Workplace Comedy

Knight Terrors will take on a toll on the entire DC Universe and will affect the many heroes and villains in all sorts of unique ways. So what do you get when that wave of terror and change collides with a pure force of chaos? That’s where Knight Terrors: The Joker comes in, a two-issue mini-series by writer Matthew Rosenberg and artist Stefano Raffaele that explores what happens when Joker’s greatest nightmare becomes a reality. With Joker’s ultimate mission finally obtained, what does someone like the Clown Prince of Crime do with their time? Well, they watch Real Housewives and get a day job, and ComicBook.com’s Matthew Aguilar had the chance to speak with Rosenberg all about Joker’s new dark comedy office escapades, trying to move on from Batman, and more. You can find a full preview on the next slide.

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Seeing Joker attempt to navigate office culture and the various hierarchies in play is comedic gold, and it all stems from Joker’s fear of being ignored and lacking excitement in life. Joker then finds himself in an office every day with people that see him as just another co-worker, and when his relationship with Batman changes, he suddenly has no idea what to do with his time.

“And then, it came to me that I was like, I don’t really know what he’s afraid of other than no one paying attention to him and no one caring about him and him being boring. So I came back to Ben, I said, “What if he just had a boring life and was boring to everyone around him?” Ben and I talked about it on the phone, and we talked about it with Joshua Williamson and all of us, I think, were really excited about that idea, but couldn’t quite wrap our heads around what that meant as a book. It took a little work to get there. But I think once we saw how excited everyone was about the idea of bored, day-job Joker, we knew that it was going to be something fun and weird and different,” Rosenberg said.

“I think in some ways, he’s someone who is now being pulled in different directions. He built his life around Batman, and now he’s building a different life and he’s going in a different direction,” Rosenberg said. “And I think Batman is that X that has wandered back into his life after all these years, and he’s going to do his best to be like, ‘I’ve moved on and I’m okay.’ But what we’re going to find out is that he hasn’t exactly moved on and he isn’t exactly okay.”

Batman and Joker are synonymous with each other, and their dynamic will play a big part in these two issues, though probably not in the way you are expecting. “I mean, I think Batman for him is this amazing force that shapes and guides his life and he is doing… What you’re seeing in the issue is him doing his best to pretend that that’s not the case and be a different person and become someone else and try and become whole on his own for better or worse,” Rosenberg said. “There will be more questions and more answers as the book goes on about his relationship with Batman.”

Raffaele’s work is fantastic throughout, capturing the dark humor and absurdity of what’s happening without taking you out of the more mundane day-to-day existence that Joker now finds himself in. “Stefano’s an amazing artist, but a lot of times you see an artist and they’re in a certain wheelhouse, and he is an artist who does great acting and huge action, and he’s amazingly good at it,” Rosenberg said. “And then I gave him the script that was full of odd comedy beats, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if you can draw this, but we’ll find out.’ And he just really crushed it and excels at it so well that I’m hoping we get to see him do more comedy.”

Rosenberg’s work also continues in the main Joker series The Man Who Stopped Laughing, and you can absolutely read this issue and then jump into the full series with the next installment. That said, if you want to jump to the beginning of the series, you will get even more out of it.

“In some ways, we wrote it to be both. We made it to be both. It’s a standalone story, if you just are reading Knight Terrors, you don’t need to know anything going into it other than there’s a Joker and a Batman. And then, if you’re reading the actual book, this takes place between issues 9 and 10. So there are ramifications from this in 10 that I think will be rewarding,” Rosenberg said. “You could go into issue 10, which is the next issue after this, that is the middle of a story arc. I don’t think the book is so confusing that you couldn’t start there, but I would suggest going back, if you like what we do in Knight Terrors issue one, and you can see how it all plays out and how the Joker of the Knight Terrors, Day Job Joker is related to what we’re doing and The Man Who Stopped Laughing,”

Knight Terrors: The Joker #1 hits comic stores on July 11th, while The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing #10 hits later this year.

Are you excited for Knight Terrors? Let us know in the comments and as always you can talk all things comics and DC with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!