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In Joker #7, Commissioner James Gordon has just formed an alliance with the DC universe’s newest governmental power player.
WARNING: The following article contains spoilers from The Joker #7, on sale now from DC Comics.
The hunt for the Joker has taken Jim Gordon all around the world. He’s fought cannibals, Bane’s daughter Vengeance and unknowingly agreed to work for the Court of Owls. After being framed by the Joker for murdering a group of scientists, Jim was taken to an Interpol holding facility, where he encountered the director of a new government agency within the DCU: Halloweentown. Their meeting in Joker #7 (by James Tynion IV, Guillem March, Arif Prianto, and Tom Napolitano) led to a deal that could give Jim even more support in finding his quarry and also sheds some light on how the rest of the world views the American superhero culture.
The director of this new division is the hyper-intelligent Isabella Hallows, Madame Halloween. She already knew that Jim was innocent, but held him for the sake of legality until they found actual evidence that exonerated him of the crime. She then took him out for a drink to figure out how the two could help each other.
She explained that her division, much like the DEO, monitored superheroes and villains, but only when they left the United States to operate overseas. Jim knew this made their agency a novelty at best, something that only got cases in unique circumstances. But he also pieced together that because the Joker was messy, Isabella had discovered the existence of the Network, the criminal group hiding villains in luxury homes while they laid low and planned their next moves.
Isabella couldn’t be useful all the time, but if she had an actionable lead on the Network, it would justify her agency’s existence. And Jim could give her that lead. In exchange, he would get whatever help she could offer to find the Joker, as well as a blind eye should Jim go through with killing the Clown Prince of Crime.
The interaction between Gordon and Hallows gave a fascinating examination of how the rest of the world views America’s superhero culture. While there are plenty of international heroes in the DCU, Isabella pointed out that no other country on Earth has a high concentration of heroes and villains like America does. So when her agency was assigned the task of keeping watch over their more “colorful” international neighbors, they were given the name Halloweentown.
Isabella also points out that while these people are threats, they don’t just make the normal problems of the world go away. The “old world” as she called it still has the same problems. Gangsters, drug lords, and all the worst bits of society didn’t go away when people like Batman and the Joker showed up. But Isabella is part of an agency that seeks to prevent that kind of influence from spreading to other countries, and in the process stumbled across one of the greatest criminal conspiracies in the world. Now she needs the help of Gordon, who is intimately familiar with the supervillain community to help her crack the case, prompting the formation of their new alliance.
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