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The Batgirls latest encounter with a new villain just proved that one Batman rogue is influencing the next generation of villains.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Batgirls #3, on sale now from DC Comics.
In many of DC’s futures, the Joker’s legacy lives on in Gotham. The character’s charisma inspires many followers, past, present and future, with some of them even gaining their own massive following, both fictionally and in reality, like Harley Quinn. Despite the mark the Dark Knight’s nemesis has made on the DC Universe though, he isn’t the most influential of Batman’s rogues. For the past few years, one of those villains has secretly been spreading their influence, to the point that they’ll leave an even greater and more lasting legacy than even the Clown Prince of Crime.
The latest comic to suggest this is Batgirls #3 (by Becky Cloonan, Michael W. Conrad, Jorge Corona, Sarah Stern, Ivan Plascencia and Becca Carey). After a run-in with the new villain Tutor, Steph and Cass note that his hypnotic gas seems to be made partly from the Scarecrow’s Fear Toxin to the point that both are haunted by visions of their own villainous fathers. Although Tutor is a new villain in his own right, the fact that his signature weapon comes from Dr. Jonathan Crane is one example of why he’s the most influential Batman rogue.
Fear Toxin being mixed into Tutor’s own concoction to make something of his own isn’t anything new. Something similar happened recently with wildly different effects, in Batman: Urban Legends. In the Red Hood story “Cheer” (by Chip Zdarsky, Eddy Barrows, Eber Ferreira, Diogenes Neves, Marcus To, Adriano Lucas and Becca Carey), the new villain Cheer turned the fear-inducing gas on its head and created a new similarly hallucinogenic drug. However, instead of inducing fear, it induced cheer. Although this unnerving abundance of happiness is the complete opposite of Scarecrow’s work, he is the one ultimately responsible for it coming about. If it wasn’t for him, neither Cheer nor Tutor could terrorize Gotham the way they have recently.
After coming off of the Scarecrow-centric “Fear State” event, the villain’s influence in the Batman books right now is immense. That event spread across multiple titles, with the central Magistrate storyline also being the focus of the Future State titles that came before it. Add in the Magistrate remnants that also feature in the Batgirls series, known as the Saints, and Scarecrow’s influence dominates this new book, despite the fact he isn’t even in it.
This is a far greater influence than Joker has over Gotham right now. Although the various Batman titles have shown that Joker still has some pervading influence over the criminal underworld after Joker War, it’s been nowhere near as fierce and far-reaching as Scarecrow’s. The Party Crashers are just a bunch of hired muscle in Detective Comics and not much else. Punchline has her own worryingly large fan club but that’s only featured in the Joker comic’s backup. Yes, the Clown Prince of Crime has left a large impact on the Bat-Family in the form of storylines like Death in the Family but it doesn’t extend far beyond himself.
Crane’s work, on the other hand, can twist and turn to become anything. There’s much more room for growth with both the Fear Toxin and Scarecrow’s image, which has taken on many terrifying forms over the years. Perhaps one of the most influential was his appearance in the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum. Mark Hamill’s Joker may have stolen the show but Scarecrow arguably decided the direction of the whole series. The Scarecrow Nightmare sequences were so incredible that they’re often regarded as the best parts of Asylum, to the point that they’re emulated in the sequel, Arkham City, through other villains like the Mad Hatter. All of this culminated in Scarecrow being the main villain of the explosive finale, Arkham Knight, with him influencing the direction of that whole game. It’s not just video games either, there’s also the fact he was one of the main villains in Batman Begins and featured in every movie of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
So both in-universe and in real life, Scarecrow has been exerting quite a large influence over Batman. An influence that rivals even the Joker’s. Although he won’t be quite as iconic as the classic clown, he may have a bigger say in the future of Gotham and Batman in general. The fact that his Fear Toxin can grow beyond him, as well as how his obsession with fear plays directly in Batman’s own arsenal, is why he’s a more influential villain than the Joker.
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