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Miracle Molly’s secret origin makes her one of Batman’s most engaging new villains, and it gives her one of Gotham City’s most tragic histories.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Batman Secret Files: Miracle Molly #1, on sale now
Batman and his allies have some of the most impressive villains in comics, with a litany of some of the comic’s most famous antagonists being at the heart of the Batman mythos. But that’s what makes new additions to their ranks all the more exciting, as it presents creators the chance to approach Gotham City with a new edge and angle.
In Batman Secret Files: Miracle Molly #1 by James Tynion IV, Dani, Lee Loughridge, and Tom Napolitano, the origins of the new Gotham rogue are fully exposed and reveal that she might be one of the quietly most tragic figures within Batman’s rogues’ gallery.
Miracle Molly has been one of the more interesting recent Batman antagonists, not strictly fitting into the same category as many of his other foes. As one of the geniuses within the Unsanity Collective, Molly has been working alongside the likes of Mister Wyze. Their mission has been to transform Gotham City for the better, helping the populace effectively erase their traumas and become different kinds of people. Although Batman is taken aback by these revelations, Miracle Molly doesn’t seem to regret the path she’s chosen in the slightest, confident that the woman she was made the decision to erase her memories for a good reason.
These memories are exposed in Batman Secret Files: Miracle Molly, which introduces the woman who’d become Miracle Molly. Before she was Miracle Molly, the villain was just a regular woman named Mary Kowalski. She lived with her domineering and casually cruel husband Matsuda and was a low-level employee at Helios Robotics. There, her work and potential went unnoticed, quietly mocked and belittled by her boss. Her only happiness came during late nights spent listening to Mister Wyze and his arguments towards people like her. As she went day by day, she couldn’t find any happiness outside of the way Wyze seemed to understand her. Things only spiral when Matsuda and his family begin to pressure her to have a child and give up her own dreams of innovating new technology.
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After some encouragement from her husband to pitch her designs to her company one more time (and to potentially give up her dream of changing the world if she fails), Mary shows off her designs to her boss. However, this only gets Mary fired and ends up with her designs stolen. Rather than give up, however, Mary breaks back into Helios to steal back her designs. When she confronts her boss and he openly brags about his plans to pass off her designs as his own, she attacks him and runs off her with her book. She finds the Unsanity Collective and embraces their anarchistic mentality, even leaving a video for herself that ensures she knows she willingly erased her old self to become Molly. In the present day, she doesn’t even recognize her husband when she and her allies rob his family, and she brushes him off with ease.
It’s a truly tragic story, of a woman who was trapped in a life she didn’t want and chose to escape by any means necessary, even if it meant that woman wasn’t the one who’d get to live a brand new life. She wanted to choose her own path regardless of the limitations others and society would put on her. Much like sympathetic Gotham villains Mr. Freeze or Man-Bat, Molly is more of a misunderstood genius than anything else. In many ways, Miracle Molly quietly has some similarities to someone like the modern version of Harley Quinn as someone who was trapped and is now making it their mission to live the kind of life they want. It adds a number of layers to the relatively new villain, and paints her actions in a far more sympathetic light. And now that the Magistrate has tried to use her and the Unsanity Collective for their purposes, it’s an exciting series of revelations that suggest Molly could be a unique and tragically human wildcard in Gotham City.
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