When I first read about this story, my kneejerk reaction was that I sure hope that this wasn’t going to be part of a canon storyline. Fortunately for all parties involved, this is more of a one-off storyline that coincides with the release of a DC Comics related video game of some sort, but the point remains about how dumb this concept is, and that this is not the first time that DC Comics has failed to grasp a concept that they created.
Despite the fact that it’s not canon story, I’ll still exercise the consideration to refrain from discussing it without the fair warning that there are some spoilers ahead; after all, like in Inception, once an idea is put in place, it can never be removed, like a festering disease, and if you don’t have to think about it, it’s best to never be exposed to it in the first place.
Long story short, this one-off storyline’s payoff moment is that Superman kills the Joker. Joker apparently goes demonic on Metropolis, kills Jimmy Olsen, fear toxins Superman, making him hallucinate and see pregnant-with-his-child Lois Lane as Doomsday thus making Superman kill her and his unborn child, and then Joker nukes Metropolis into oblivion. I guess Joker was getting jealous that Batman wasn’t playing with him, so he decided to take it all out on dorky Clark Kent instead.
Bottom line is that Superman predictably comes after Joker for justice, but instead just kills him. And this is where, if this were a canon storyline, DC Comics effectively dies.
Superman may be a very big deal in the world of comics, but as far as DC Comics is concerned, the entire company has, will, and always will, revolve around Batman. And anything that pertains to Batman as well as Batman’s universe should and always should hold more weight over anything else in the entire DC universe.
You simply cannot have Batman icons like the Joker being killed off by anyone other than Batman, even if it is the almighty Superman. Just like the failure storyline of Batman’s “death” prior to the reboot of DC Comics, at the hand of the scrub Thanos-wannabe, Darkseid, Batman should not be allowed to die at the hands of anyone other than the Joker, and vice versa.
The Batman and Joker dynamic is the single-most important pair in all of DC Comics, and it’s absolutely absurd that even for a one-off or promotional tie-in that DC would even fathom running a storyline like this. The only logical thing that could ever happen is that Batman and Joker kill each other at the same time, and there is no alternative. Any other outcome, is inferior and is garbage.
