It's been a while since I've read Jim Starlin's run on Batman, so I may be doing it a disservice, but I didn't care for his take with the characters very much. Starlin's a gifted writer, but sometimes he just didn't gel with a series, and this was one of the occasions.
As you said, it was the 80's, and Frank Miller's influence was fresh. Under Starlin, the Joker allied himself with Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini. He co-created the KGBeast, who was presented as such a threat that Bats sealed him within a room, leaving him to die, rather than risk his life in a battle he might lose. It... wasn't a good time.
Starlin Batman is a mixed bag for me. There are ideas and touches I really like, others I'd be willing to debate, and a few that just left me asking, "What was he THINKING?" The Joker as Iranian diplomat falls into the third of those categories. That "John Dough" story was more plausible by comparison. (In some reprints, the Joker instead enters the service of the fictional nation of Qurac, but that's only a slight improvement.)
Still, that's not the only popular comic from the 1980s with politics that looked bizarre even ten years later. There was a lot of room at the time for superhero writers to express their views, and not all of them did so adeptly.
It's been a while since I've read Jim Starlin's run on Batman, so I may be doing it a disservice, but I didn't care for his take with the characters very much. Starlin's a gifted writer, but sometimes he just didn't gel with a series, and this was one of the occasions.
As you said, it was the 80's, and Frank Miller's influence was fresh. Under Starlin, the Joker allied himself with Iran and the Ayatollah Khomeini. He co-created the KGBeast, who was presented as such a threat that Bats sealed him within a room, leaving him to die, rather than risk his life in a battle he might lose. It... wasn't a good time.
Starlin Batman is a mixed bag for me. There are ideas and touches I really like, others I'd be willing to debate, and a few that just left me asking, "What was he THINKING?" The Joker as Iranian diplomat falls into the third of those categories. That "John Dough" story was more plausible by comparison. (In some reprints, the Joker instead enters the service of the fictional nation of Qurac, but that's only a slight improvement.)
Still, that's not the only popular comic from the 1980s with politics that looked bizarre even ten years later. There was a lot of room at the time for superhero writers to express their views, and not all of them did so adeptly.