Artist Brian Bolland conceived the idea for the story after watching the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs, which features a character named Gwynplaine (played by Conrad Veidt) whose rictus grin inspired the visual design of the Joker.[2] Bolland's rendition of the Joker was partially influenced by that film.[3] DC editor Dick Giordano's invitation led directly to Bolland working with writer Alan Moore to create a plausible background story for the Joker. He recounted: "I thought about it in terms of who's my favorite writer at the moment, what hero I would really love to do, and which villain? I basically came up with Alan, Batman and the Joker".[4]
Although the story takes pains to stress that it is merely one possible "origin story" for the Joker, it has been widely accepted and adopted into DC continuity, and editor Len Wein had to ask the publisher for approval of a central mutilation of long-running character Barbara Gordon.[3] Bolland said that he saw "Judge Death [as] almost a dry run for drawing the Joker". He also recounted that "by the time Alan had finished Watchmen he had fallen out with DC to a certain extent... in the end, he only continued to do Killing Joke as a favor to me".[4]
The 48-page prestige format one-shot comic took a considerable amount of time to produce. Both Moore and Bolland are well known for their meticulous and time-consuming work; both creators' then-recently finished 12-issue maxiseries titles – Moore's Watchmen and Bolland's Camelot 3000 – had seen delays.[1] Bolland was aided by the laid-back attitude taken by DC, who he says "seemed prepared to let me do it at my own pace". The original editor, Len Wein, left the company, and was replaced by Dennis O'Neil, a "very hands-off sort of guy", with whom Bolland only recalls having one conversation about the book.[4]
Bolland envisaged the flashback sequences in black and white, and instructed Watchmen colorist John Higgins to use "muted November colors". He was upset when he saw the finished comic had "garish... hideous glowing purples and pinks... and my precious Eraserhead-esque flashback sequences swamped in orange".[3] The 2008-published 20th anniversary edition of the book featured new colouring by Bolland, restoring his artistic intentions to the palette. The first problem was that all the original artwork had long disappeared in the hands of collectors but thankfully, someone in DC figured out a way to reverse engineer the already colored prints to isolate the black & white from the colors. In addition to recoloring, Bolland also did a touchup on several of the character's faces using Photoshop.[5]
