When changing the ending changes the point | Behind the Books

Adaptation can be a weird beast. In some ways, it's a very violent act: taking a novel or graphic novel that could be interpreted many ways and saying: "No! Just this way! Just my way!"

But sometimes, the adapter goes that extra little bit further and they seem to go out of their way to do violence to the original text. Famous examples include Stanley Kubrick when adapting The Shining or Paul Verhoeven when adapting Starship Troopers (to the point that, when I eventually got around to them, it affected how I read Heinlein's original work).

But I'd like to add some new entries to that list, and which specifically get added to the list via one small change they made specifically to their source material's endings: Supergirl (2026) and The Dark Knight (2008).

Famously, Christopher Nolan based The Dark Knight off of a hodge-podge of famous Batman comics material, but for this point we're specifically talking about The Killing Joke by Alan Moore. In the graphic novel, the Joker enacts a fairly simple plot with a fairly simple purpose, but one that came to define the character moving forward ideologically: he sought to drive a good man insane. Specifically to the text: Commissioner Gordon.

He doesn't pick Batman. He knows Batman is already a kind of lost cause. He picks the character than he perceives to be "the best of us." Throughout his plot, we see flashbacks to the Joker's presumed origin: how he was a normal person until he had that one bad day that drove him over the edge. That's what the Joker is attempting to prove with Gordon: that he's not a freak, that he's not insane, that anyone can be driven over the edge if they have just that one bad day that pushes them far enough. And instead of picking just any random shmoe to put to this test, he picks the best man he can think of: Gordon. And in that twisted way, it makes sense: if he did this to a random person, it would just prove that some men break under pressure. But if he picks the best example of mankind and succeeds, he'll prove that all men break under pressure.

There's issues with that plan. There's issues with picking Gordon. There's issues with the storyline that makes Batgirl disabled not involving Batgirl in any way that has agency. And there's issues with the things that have been done with the ideaology since it has become a standard part of how we view The Joker. All of these are issues, some of which the author has even commented on himself, but we're going to breeze right past them to talk about the importance of the choice of Gordon, narratively.

The importance of the author choosing Gordon is that he knows, at the end of the story, DC Editorial will not let him make Gordon into a villain (not that Moore had intended too).

...So what happens when you swap out Gordon for Harvey Dent in adapting it and make it a part of his origin into Two-Face?

What happens is more than just changing the name of Joker's target, it fundamentally changes the theme and point of the story, in a violent way. Issues aside, the point of The Killing Joke was that The Joker was wrong. He didn't break Gordon, even after torturing him. The narrative goes out of it's way to have Gordon say to Batman, as Batman is going to his final confrontation, "bring him in by the book." Even after all that's happened, Gordon hasn't broken. He still believes in rule of law. Not only will he not go bad, he doesn't even slip into a morally-gray version of vengeance or vigilantism. He remains Lawful Good, to put it in DnD terms.

To sum up, having Joker's target be Gordon means the Joker is proven wrong. But switching it to Dent, changing it to make it so that the Joker succeeds in taking "the best of us" to madness and murder, changes the entire theme and message of the story. The Killing Joke says that normal men don't break, that we are not all one bad day away from evil. The Dark Knight says that we are.

A very similar thing happens in Supergirl (2026). For the most part, this book is a reasonly faithful adaptation of Tom King's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow graphic novel. A few changes here and there to fit into the movie continuity and to account for the change in point-of-view, but largley, more faithful than 90% of comic-to-movie adaptations.

The big change to the story, and to the point of the story, for me, comes at it's end. (SPOILERS).

At the end of Woman of Tomorrow, it is revealed that Supergirl convinces Ruthye not to succumb to vengeance, and that while they brought Krem to justice, they did not physically harm him. Through the narrative, Ruthye had been seeking revenge on Krem for the death of her father, and Supergirl had been after him for the cure to the poison given to Krypto. At the end, not only does Supergirl convince her to change, but it's revealed that Krypto was never in any danger: his Kryptonian nature made the poison not work on him, Supergirl had just used that as a pretense to follow Ruthye and put her on the right path.

At the end of Supergirl (2026), not only was Krypto actually in danger all along, but in the end Supergirl also convinces Ruthye of the errors of revenge... before committing to revenge herself, killing Krem.

Now, some people have used this as a cudgel to attack the movie with. To me, this does not ruin the movie. In fact, I kind of like it. But it does change the theme, and much like with The Dark Knight, it all but inverts it. No longer is it a tale that tells us about a beacon of hope that rights all wrongs, its a tale about a flawed person who recognizes that innocence is something to be preserved, even at the cost of another life. Supergirl in the movie spares Ruthye the need for vengeance by enacting it herself, unlike in the novel, when she spares Ruthye the need for vengeance by showing her the error of her thoughts on the efficacy of it.

To me this is such an interesting exercise to look at. How does changing the end change the entire story that proceeded it?

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