I just read the whole thing, and it gave me chills. I've been a Batman fan my entire life and now with this little tale, it's strengthened my love of all things Bat, and FPW. Thank you so much for sharing that with us all.

I just read the whole thing, and it gave me chills. I've been a Batman fan my entire life and now with this little tale, it's strengthened my love of all things Bat, and FPW. Thank you so much for sharing that with us all.

Yo, thelionwaits...dis guy Wilson...his fiction ain't too shabby, right?

Yo, thelionwaits...dis guy Wilson...his fiction ain't too shabby, right?

Mr. Lindner, I have to tell ya - I've read the entire Adversary Cycle more than once, All the Rage, and Conspiracies. My entire library was lost in a house fire a couple of years ago and things have been really tight.

Yeah, FPW Is in my top 5 favorite writers of all time, if not THE fave of the list.

And to top it all off, it's his writing that inspired me to take my manuscript and put it into novelization form rather than persue the original graphic novel format. It took a long time to get what I had done, and to have to re-do it all because of the fire would have made things even harder.

Yeah, I love his work, and when I can afford to, I'm getting all of his novels.

Cheers. :cheers:

It was chilling. Too bad someone copied it and pasted it elsewhere.

If anyone's interested, Robert McCammon's story from that anthology is now available on his website.

On a Beautiful Summer's Day, He Was

Hunter

Robert McCammon looks like Darryl Hammond from SNL. Or the other way around, I guess.

I'm not afraid of their Joker.

But I would not want to be a target of your Joker.

Cool thread...FPW's Joker story was,believe it or not,the FIRST FPW story I ever read. I was a Batman fan long before I ever discovered our favorite Repairman,and after reading The Tomb and went back and reread The Further Adventures of The Joker and made the connection. As for Ledger or the screenwriters being inspired by the story,I say its absolutely possible. I read where they based their version of The Joker on a lot of different comics,and I'm sure someone somewhere had a copy of that Joker book and scoured it for inspiration. I seem to recall that same book had a Joker story by Joe Lansdale and another really good,really sick story called On the Wire. The authors name escapes me at the moment,but it was all about The Joker calling some anonymous 900 party line and trying to talk the girl on the other end of the phone into commiting suicide. I wish DC would reprint those stories...I know a lot of fans would like to reread them(mine are buried in storage somewhere at the moment...I hate being stuck in an apt.)

This is similar to my own experience. I loved Definitive Therapy when it was first published and I was already a life-long Batman fan. I recognized it as a return to Joker's 1939 roots much in the way that Alan Moore's Killing Joke was. I would like to know if FPW was inspired by Killing Joke or any of the other dark versions of the character when he wrote this. (Killing Joke pre-dates Definitive Therapy and was the modern template for the character until Nolan's films.)

Don't forget the Englehart/ Rogers retooling of the 70s and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns in the 80s.

I still count his story as one of the defining Joker stories and the one that led me to read the Keep and RPJ.

My Joker's evil predates The Killing Joke. You saw it in The Keep. Real evil seduces and corrupts and leaves you finding yourself doing something you never imagined possible before your run-in with evil.

Again, both were excellent and inspired visions of the character but was it strictly a work-for-hire or did you have an interest in the characters before?