the artist was retrospectively interpreted as "clashed and competed with the story's symbolic systems between the script and the art" when both actually envisioned the same story against each other. McKean wanted abstract rendering in his art which Morrison described as "doesn't have the most terrifying expressions of the real", wishing the panels were all in the same style as most comic book artists regularly illustrate. The author personally preferred Brian Bolland to have been the artist instead since Bolland's art in The Killing Joke was always the idea in mind when scripting the story. The 15th anniversary edition reprinted the story which Morrison saw the opportunity of supplying the original script and adding annotations to reinforce every metaphors in the story. The annotated script revealed another conflicting factor between the two and that's McKean himself had personal inputs in the script's narrative structure. Some of the acts Morrison originally intended to include in the graphic novel were eventually excluded in the final product. One of the suggestions McKean made was removing Robin from the story as he thought mainly focusing the asylum's creepy interiors would be sufficient enough rather than adding unnecessary scenes that aren't taking place inside the mansion itself. Morrison opined that everything in the graphic novel would have been more concrete if McKean hadn't interfere with the original idea and diminish it into a thin sense of plot. The author also recalled how the script was passed around to a number of professionals in the comics industry for review. Most of them thought the heavy symbolism and psychological horror elements were not only pretentious, but comical, and laughed at the idea. Morrison apocryphally cited a "Who's laughing now, @$$hole?" line in return when the original idea in the script actually does make much more sense than the current final product. McKean's response McKean, on the other hand, stated that it was appropriate for him to ignore some of the horror tone in Morrison's script when he called those acts were "absurd thing to do". The artist has said that he was "trying to make the book despite the subject, rather than because of it. At the end of the day, if you really love to do Batman comics, then that's probably the best thing to do. Not liking them, and then trying to make something out of them is just a waste of time". McKean even