Aztek: The Ultimate Man #7

Let’s get this out of the way now: there’s no Millar in this issue. It’s all Morrison, and it’s hands down the best issue of the series.

Morrison is all about duality & doubling; I mention this because, as I said last time, this is part two of a two-part Joker/Batman story that act as a sort of mirror of one another. To further hammer home the point, he opens the issue with Heatsnap, a fusion of two villains, Heatstroke and Coldsnap, who have been fused together into a chimera following a medical mishap. The pair are actually members of a team called the Masters of Disaster, an enemy of Batman & The Outsiders, who were in love but couldn’t touch each other due to the natures of their powers. In attempting to become closer together, they found themselves permanently fused and worse off then before. Later in the issue, Batman (while away from Aztek) makes sure to provide them with medical treatment - he feels bad for them, looks out for them. Much has been made over the years of Batman & the Joker having a sort of quasi-sexual relationship; Frank Miller in particular played with this idea quite a bit in The Dark Knight Returns. For it to appear here, literally in the middle of a story in which the Joker & Batman are similarly infused into one another’s guest-starring issues, is very interesting on Morrison’s part.

Morrison himself did play with this idea in Arkham Asylum - Joker grabbing Batman’s ass, calling him darling - but hasn’t really gone into it much since then. His recent story, Batman RIP, did play a bit at the end with the idea of Batman & The Joker being two sides of the same coin, or opposing natural forces, but not in a sexual way (although, Morrison did point out that his Joker in RIP is based on David Bowie - who is known for androgyny and bisexuality, so certainly he didn‘t abandon that element). I said in my column on issue 6 of this series that this story serves as an interesting precursor to Morrison later work on Batman, and this issue plays further into that. In fact, it may even serve as a bridge of sorts between Morrison’s earlier portrayal of their relationship and his more recent one, given the fact that Morrison doesn’t even have the two interact on panel, but does throw in an interesting sidebar like Heatsnap. He’s moving away from the older, more stereotypical portrayal of their relationship and into more original territory.

Some more notes on Morrison’s look at the Batman/Joker relationship: look at the panel below, set while some of the Arkham guards are beating the joker: he uses (Morrison’s) Batman’s trademark sound effect, ”HH”. The two are far more similar than Bats would care to admit. Batman, of course, is instrumental in actually solving & thwarting the Joker’s plans, since he’s far more familiar with the Joker’s methods.

Aztek actually manages to make himself relatively useful in a fight here, by the way, for the first time in the series (he does manage to rescue a rat, continuing his run of small victories). Aztek & Batman are confronting the Fixer over his supplying the Joker with his crickets and they find a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses”, along with a bag of word clippings (recall Morrison’s use of the Burroughs “cut-up” technique in Doom Patrol, years prior to this. He frequently re-uses ideas, as he is doing here. Not criticizing, just pointing it out). Aztek further gets a moment to shine here, as he actually manages to solve the final clue to the Joker’s plot, hidden in a throwaway line he uttered while being arrested. By the end, Aztek’s won Batman’s respect, a fairly major coup for him that will have further consequences later on, when he joins the JLA.

A final note on this story: the title, “Hey Diddle Diddle, The Japed and The Japer”, repeated during the book by the Chief of Police while mesmerized by the Joker’s dancing crickets, is apparently taken from a nursery rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed to see such fun,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

As near as I can tell, Morrison is using it here because it's known for being a fairly nonsensical poem, popular because of the varied interpretations possible & available for it. Its' imagery, while interesting and vivid, leaves much to the imagination as to what it’s really about while at the same time sparking the imagination - much like most of the Joker’s plots.