10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Commissioner Gordon
4. The Killing Joke
It is impossible to have any examination of the integrity of James Gordon without looking at Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke.
It was a quiet night at Gordon’s apartment when Joker knocked on the door. Barbara Gordon answered it and the clown shot her through the spine, paralyzing her. As his henchpeople kidnapped Jim, the Clown Prince undressed Barbara as she lay bleeding on the floor.
Joker’s small army of fat ladies, dwarves, rubber men, and other circus sorts took James to an abandoned amusement park, stripped him naked, attached a chain and collar, and locked him in a tiny cage. When the Jester of Genocide arrived, he forced the Commissioner to ride through a “Fun House” filled with nude and suggestively posed pictures of Barbara’s brutalised body. The Joker’s idea was that even the most stable man needed only one bad day to drive him over the edge.
When Batman arrived, he quickly dispatched the Harlequin of Hate’s group of freaks and geeks and freed James Gordon, but the Joker fled into a Hall of Mirrors. Gordon made the enraged Dark Knight promise that he would bring the Clown in “by the book.” Jim told Bruce that, no matter what, they had to prove that “their way worked".