The Man Who Laughs
A child left on a Portland beach in a snowstorm, his face cut by traffickers into a permanent laugh, digs a blind baby out of the snow beside her dead mother and carries her to the caravan of a philosopher who travels with a tame wolf. Fifteen years later the pair are drawing fairground crowds across England as the grinning man and the girl who cannot see him, until a document sealed in a flask and the boredom of a duchess reach them. Written on Guernsey as the first panel of an unfinished trilogy on aristocracy; Conrad Veidt's face in the 1928 film gave the comics their model for the Joker.
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