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Batman: White Knight Presents: Generation Joker Team Previews DC’s Family Road Trip with a Joker Twist
The Batman White Knight Universe is set to continue in two new mini-series, and the first series will pick up where Batman: Beyond the White Knight left off, though with a different focus. The new series is titled Batman: White Knight Presents: Generation Joker, and will shift focus from Batman to Jack Napier and his two kids Jackie and Bryce. What follows is a family road trip that doesn’t go at all as planned, and Jack is up against the clock to repair his relationship with Jackie and Bryce while his past finally catches up to him. ComicBook.com had the chance to speak to Generation Joker writers Katana Collins and Clay McCormack all about the new series, what’s at stake, Batman and Harley Quinn’s role in everything, and more.
As opposed to the previous books in the series and even the name of the series, Generation Joker is a series that puts Jackie and Bryce in the spotlight, and they will learn quite a bit about their dad and his past as well as context for their mother’s decisions over the years.
“For me, personally, I could not have been more excited than to just be back with the Bat Family, to be able to see these two kids that were my babies in Harley’s book now as teenagers and young teens, and getting to be a part of their … formulating them now into little adults,” Collins said. “Much as in Harley, the thing I wanted to explore the most was Harley’s journey into motherhood and how that changes and shifts your perspective on life.”
“This is basically a continuation of that. It’s the heart of what family is, it’s the heart of discovering who you are amidst this, quote-unquote, villainous family. So these kids who’ve grown up with the Joker as their father just hanging over them and how two kids born into the same family can react so differently to that,” Collins said. “We have Bryce, who is a straight-A student and just tries to do everything right as a response to that. And we have Jackie, who leans into the chaos of it. So yeah, I was just really so excited to be back and with this family again.”
“I was excited to take these characters and put them through the wringer as intensely as possible because my biggest question was, how poorly can this road trip go and how difficult can we make it for them to get to achieve what they wanted to do? Because my thought was, these kids, they want to find out who their father was. Their father was the Joker. They better be ready to find out what that means,” McCormack said. “I think by the end of it, they are in a real position to decide how they want to reconcile that. It’s stuff that Harley and Jack both have been trying to shield them from their whole lives and now they get to really see the truth and all the good and all the bad, for what that means.”
Jack still had deeper issues to explore in Beyond the White Knight, but more often than not he was the lighthearted balance to Bruce. This time around Jack is on his own and really needs to show up for his children, both in terms of showing them how not to follow his path and being a protector as they run into elements and people he’s affected over the years.
“On the note you were saying, I think Jack’s never had to be a father before this moment and I think he assumed it would be a lot easier than it actually is,” Collins said. “And I think he goes into this with that exactly what you were saying, where it’s like, ‘This is going to be fun. This is going to be great. I’m going to show you that I am more than just the Joker. I am Jack,’ and he quickly devolves and realizes that … he very quickly gets the fear of what being a parent is, where it’s not just fun and games and you don’t just get to be a cool dad taking the kids on a road trip. You have to keep these two living, breathing beings alive and that’s a lot harder than you’d think, especially if you’re the Joker.”
Jack is on a journey of his own too, and while he strives to distance himself from the Joker and what the Joker’s done over the years, he will eventually need to make peace with the fact that they are two different sides of the same person.
“Yeah. I think, going off what you were saying, there is such a clear split in the White Knight series between Jack and the Joker that I think it’s easy to forget that they are the same person, especially, or I should say including for Jack, himself, because he’s trying to push the Joker away,” McCormack said. “He doesn’t want that to be part of who he is, but I think part of this story, a big part of it, is him realizing that they are one and the same.”
“I would say, at the end of this, I’d like people to see Jack as someone who has maybe finally grappled with the duality of his personality in a way that I feel like he’s been fighting a bit up to this point,” McCormack said. “And I think it’s one of those things where, if you are trying to impart yourself onto your kids, you might have to first be honest with yourself about who you are. So I think him getting to that point at the end is going to only be beneficial to his relationship with his kids, if he makes it that long. I don’t know, he might die halfway through the series, just saying.”
“It is White Knight. Everyone dies, right? White Night Universe,” Collins said.
While Joker is in the title, this series at its core is about Jackie and Bryce, and Jack is going to have to really be an open book and more vulnerable than he’s ever been if he wants them to trust him. They aren’t just letting him slide by showing up this one time, and it was important for Collins and McCormack to give them ample room to be themselves and guide the choices made along the way throughout the series.
“They’re not going to make it easy for him because they, I think, as much as they want to spend time with their father, they also have a lot of questions and he does have a lot of accounting he needs to do. I also thought it was important to get across that feeling where you really want to show something that was important to you to your children, and then when you get there, it’s changed and your kids think it’s really dumb,” McCormack said. “Because the whole story is about evolution and the changing of these characters, and Jack is trying to hold onto his past, and every time he gets to a different point, he realizes that past has changed or it’s gone. And what does that mean for him? Is he the only thing left that remembers what he used to be?”
“And Bryce and Jackie have a lot of agency in this story. They are not just along for the ride. They are driving. At first, it’s not literal, but eventually, it’s literal and figuratively driving this car. One of the things that I like the most about the story is, as Clay mentioned, Jack is on this road to self-discovery that he doesn’t even realize he’s on yet, but so are the children, and the autonomy that I think both Clay, Sean, and I have all given them will help flesh out two characters that were not always looked into with depth, nor should they have been in previous books because they were children,” Collins said.
“Yeah, and I think we all wanted to make sure that this was a story about the kids more than a story about Jack, and in doing that, we needed to make sure that they had as much agency as possible because, with someone like Jack there, it’s very easy for him to overshadow these child characters,” McCormack said. “Even if the book is meant to be about them, you’ve got the Joker in there. He’s obviously more prone to running the show. I wanted to break the hologram in the first issue just to get him off the board so we could focus on the kids, but they wanted me to back off of that one (laughs).”
“(Laughs) That was vetoed,” Collins said.
“I think making sure that they (Bryce and Jackie) remain the center of the driving action is very important,” McCormack said.
Batman: White Knight Presents: Generation Joker #1 hits comic stores and digital platforms on May 9th.
Are you excited for the next chapter in the White Knight universe? Let us know in the comments and as always you can talk all things comics with me on Twitter @MattAguilarCB!
