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As Jim Gordon continues his worldwide hunt for the fugitive Joker, his search puts him on a collision course with DC’s most horrifying family.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Joker #9, on sale now from DC Comics.
While retired police commissioner Jim Gordon might be on an international mission to track down and kill the Joker, the veteran lawman is far from the only person gunning for the Clown Prince of Crime these days. After years of villainy terrorizing Gotham City and the wider DC Universe, the Joker has made a long list of enemies and, when Arkham Asylum was doused with Joker toxin resulting in the death of hundreds at the start of the Infinite Frontier era, this proved to be the last straw for several nefarious figures. And among these rising enemies is the DCU’s twist on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with a cannibalistic family from Texas targeting Gordon when he gets in their way.
One of the victims killed in the Arkham attack was an imprisoned patient named Billy “the Brute” Sampson, a serial killer active in Texas approximately fifty years ago. While hunting their latest set of victims, the Sampsons discovered their property was nested on top of a large oil deposit, effectively making them billionaires while Billy took the fall for his family’s grisly crimes and was locked away in Arkham for decades. Despite their overnight wealth and affluence, the Sampson family continued to indulge their murderous and cannibalistic tendencies in private as a sort of longstanding family secret kept from the general public. And following Billy’s death in Arkham, the Sampsons blamed the Joker and launched their vendetta, catching up to the Clown Prince of Crime in The Joker #9 by James Tynion IV, Stefano Raffaele, Romulo Fajardo, Jr. and Tom Napolitano.
Gordon and Vengeance, the genetically modified daughter of Bane, track down the Joker to his remote hideout in the Spanish town of Majorca. Vengeance is neutralized by a trigger phrase that immediately renders her unconscious, with Gordon discovering that the people the Joker is meeting with are the sinister figures that cloned Vengeance from Bane’s genetic material in the first place. And before Gordon can react, this tense standoff is interrupted by the Sampsons, who kill the Joker’s wealthy benefactors, drug the supervillain so he can be personally barbecued by the Sampson family patriarch Uncle Sawyer back in Texas and gravely wound Gordon before departing.
With Gordon in Spain while the Bat-Family is preoccupied with a whole myriad of threats menacing Gotham, including a resurgent Court of Owls, there aren’t any familiar heroes in place to save Gordon from bleeding out this time. And with Vengeance more interested in pursuing the Sampson family and Joker back to Texas to achieve her revenge for her genetic father’s death, Gordon’s ersatz partner has similarly left the scene, leaving Gordon alone in the Spanish villa to succumb to his grievous injuries.
Gordon is poised to become the Sampson family’s latest victim, saved from being personally finished off only by the fact that the Texan cannibals are more focused on dealing their ravenous brand of backwoods justice to the Clown Prince of Crime instead. But Gordon is far from making it out of this harrowing encounter alive, with the knife deep in his chest and steadily causing him to bleed out as he lays alone half the world away from his usual support network. Gordon has endured some ghastly injuries before in the line of duty but, outside of Gotham, the retired commissioner’s number may finally be up.
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