Last weekend we hit the amazing Geppi's Entertainment Museum in Baltimore, Maryland to chat with a few special guests of the massive new pop-culture landmark.  Among them -- in town for Bouchercon, the annual World Mystery Convention --was 100 Bullets comic scribe Brian Azzarello. The writer told us that Vertigo will soon be unveiling a new line of crime comics, and he shared a little of what he's got up his sleeve for the upcoming conclusion of his long-running crime saga. We'll have that portion of our chat up soon, but, in the mean time, check out what Azzarello had to say about Joker, his upcoming graphic novel (due out in bookstores November 4th) examining everyone's favorite Clown Prince of Crime...

In titling this book simply Joker, it seems there's a desire at play here to tell the definitive Joker story... 

I don't have the ambition to tell the definitive Joker story. I just wanted to tell a Joker story. The character and me go together. I did a Lex Luthor book a few years ago, and that was a modest success. It got called "The definititive Lex Luthor story." So they came to me and said, "Would you want to do something else?" [Artist] Lee [Bermejo] and I talked about what we were gonna follow up with, and we said, "Let's do Joker. We did Lex, now let's do Joker." That's what it grew out of.

It's ugly. It's the most violent thing I've ever written. It's an extremely dark story. We started it two years ago. We've been working on it for quite some time. If people like the Joker in the last film, they're gonna love this book.

Were you pleased to find The Dark Knight's take on the Joker was in sync with your own, or did that present a kind of competition for you?

At first it was like, "Oh no!" It was very in sync. But it's a good thing. There must have been something in the air... But if you look at the Joker in some sort of a realistic way, try to make him fit into your "realistic world," they took kind of the same tact that we took, because we were doing the same thing -- "How does this work realistically?"

How would you describe your vision of the character?

He's completely insane. You don't know what he's going to do. In the Lex book, we told that stpry from Lex's perspective. With Joker, we're using one of his henchmen, a guy who joins his gang and gets real close with him. Because I think getting in Joker's head is just a mistake. He's insane, and to try and tell a story from an insane person's perspective takes away some of the power of that insanity.

Why would someone work with the Joker, and think they could get out of the experience alive?

That's what's in the book! [Laughs.] It answers, "Why are you so stupid? Why wouldn't you just stay out of his way?" The way readers are drawn to that character, there's something really seductive about it. And it has the same sort of pull on people in his own little universe -- "Let's try that, operate completely outside the law, outside the boundaries, and with no moral code."