Warning: Full spoilers follow for Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. In 1988, three years after the release of George Miller’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome , writer Alan Moore and artist Brian Bolland created one the defining superhero stories of our time. The Killing Joke attempted to explain the unexplainable, offering a possible glimpse into the mind of the Joker as a man who believes in the transformative power of one bad day.

Between The Killing Joke and the death of Jason Todd’s Robin , 1988 would cement Joker and Batman as mirror versions of superhero trauma for decades to come. Similarly, the tension between madness and violence has never been far from the stories of the Mad Max franchise. But it is Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga , the first of the films to not explore the legend of Max Rockatansky , that gives Miller’s famous antihero his own mirror image.

While the stories of Moore and Miller may be equally obsessed with the impact of a life torn apart, for Miller, madness is not the end. Dementus and Max offer parallel perspectives on why loss is just the beginning of each character’s journey – not its end. Painting Chris Hemsworth as the Joker of the Mad Max universe is more than just franchise bingo.

Both characters are positioned as second-tier tyrants whose madness has evolved almost into a form of hypersanity. Dementus possesses both a keen sense of history and tactics that allows him to come inches away from control over all three of the Wasteland’s fortresses. What.