WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Joker #9, on sale now from DC Comics.
Jim Gordon has dedicated his life towards the defense of Gotham City, rising through the ranks to eventually hold a celebrated tenure as the city's police commissioner. This job hasn't come without its bitter consequences for Gordon's personal life, including the dissolution of his first marriage and the immense toll of facing off against some of the greatest supervillains in the DC Universe. And while Gordon may be retired from his law enforcement career for sometime now, he finds himself inextricably drawn in the orbit of his most hated nemesis, the Joker, making an observation that rings startlingly true on just how close and connected the two characters truly are.
At the start of the Infinite Frontier era, following Arkham Asylum being doused with Joker toxin resulting in the death of hundreds of patients and personnel, the Joker was blamed for the incident and went on the run internationally. Gordon was hired by mysterious benefactors, revealed to secretly be the Court of Owls, to track down and kill the Clown of Prince, with Gordon tacitly accepting the offer as he privately blamed the Joker for all the misery that had befallen his family over the years. And in The Joker #9 -- by James Tynion IV, Stefano Raffaele, Romulo Fajardo, Jr. and Tom Napolitano -- Gordon further elaborates on his grudge against the Joker and how heartbreakingly deep he remains connected to Gotham's most notorious supervillain.
As Gordon and Vengeance, the genetically modified daughter of Bane, move to intercept the Joker at his latest hideout in the Spanish town of Majorca, he recalls his personal history with the cackling villain. Most infamous was the Joker shooting Gordon's daughter Barbara, severing her spine, before the evil madman tormented Gordon in an effort to snap his sanity. Years later, the Joker shot and killed Gordon's second wife Sarah Essen-Gordon during the crossover event "No Man's Land" while the recent crossover event "Joker War" saw Gordon's son James, Jr. fall to his death as the Joker-fueled chaos and mayhem swept across Gotham, which Gordon personally blames the Clown Prince of Crime for.
Previously, The Joker comic book series revealed a vital mistake that Gordon made during his first meeting with the supervillain after the Clown Prince of Crime was first taken down by Batman. While Gordon personally oversaw the Joker being processed at Arkham, he offhandedly revealed that he had children. Reacting to this seemingly innocuous admission, the Joker quickly noticed that Gordon was protective of his family, discreetly informing how he would go on to terrorize the police commissioner in the years that followed, making Gordon and the Joker's dynamic even more tragic than the villain's relationship to Batman.
Even in retirement, Gordon can't escape the Joker's insidious grasp, traveling to the end of the Earth to put down his nemesis for good. And with everything that the Joker has personally cost him over the years, from menacing his children to executing his wife, Gordon certainly has a better reason that virtually anyone else in the DCU to want to put the Clown Prince of Crime in the ground. And while Batman has often contemplated his own morally and thematically inverted connection to the Joker, Gordon may be the one person in Gotham whose link to the supervillain runs deeper and thicker than blood.