When Will Hollywood Adapt That Manga Where The Joker Cares For Baby Batman?

Since we're apparently going to be watching new Batman movies for the rest of our lives, DC might as well mix it up and give the public exactly what they're asking for: an adaption of the 100% official manga where Batman gets turned into a baby and the Joker has to raise him as a single dad! I know this sounds like a fever dream or a really bad pitch, or a fever dream about a really bad pitch, but it's very real and kind of charming. Cancel your plans tonight, you're staying in and reading the Baby Batman/Daddy Joker manga, and you're going to like it.

Translated as "One Operation Joker" and "Joker: The One-Man Operation," the manga is an official collab between DC Comics and the Japanese publishing company Kodansha, which has serialized the story in their "Morning" magazine. This isn't the first time they've teamed up with them to pump out some spin-off manga. DC and Kodansha also partnered to create "Batman Justice Buster" and "Superman VS Meshi," the latter of which features Superman as a kind of restaurant critic, but "One Operation Joker" has to be their strangest offering to date. 

Written by Satoshi Miyagawa and illustrated by Keisuke Goto, the story kicks off with Batman accidentally falling into the same vat of chemicals that turned the Joker into, well, the Joker. When the Joker pulls Batman out of the vat, he's greeted by a tiny 'lil baby instead of the Dark Knight. With no one else to take care of the baby, and with the Joker not wanting to lose his favorite nemesis, he takes it on himself to raise Batman. Or Batbaby. Or whatever you want to call him. What follows is at least 14 chapters of the Joker learning how to change a diaper, navigating tantrums, and dealing with all of the other heartwarming and yet tedious tasks that come along with raising a baby.

And it raises so many questions. Will the Joker raise Batman to be evil and follow in his villainous footsteps? Will he raise him to be morally just so that he can have his old nemesis back? Won't the Joker be way too old at that point to put up a fight? Will Batman even want to fight the Joker, no matter how good he is, if he sees him as a father figure? Will Batman even want to be Batman if he's not an orphan and instead has a solid, if unconventional, relationship with his single dad?

This is a real study of comic book nature versus comic book nurture. What aspects of Batman's life an personality are fundamentally baked in, and what was thrust upon him by his own history and society? Also, it just occurred to me that maybe Batman is conscious that he's a baby? Maybe he remembers being a full grown man and turning into a baby and now he's just got an adult brain in a baby body? Okay, if that's true, this manga has gone straight from cute and heartwarming to fully horrifying and deeply dark. Either way, we're all strapped in and along for the ride now. Baby Batman is our past, present, and future.