As we enter the final week of Villains' Month, you get the feeling DC are really scraping the bottom of the barrel when they put out a comic about an obscure '70s character who never made an impact in the DC Universe: Joker's Daughter. WHO!? Wha...? Zzz.... Because we're talking about a character I'm certain nobody knows, I'm going to include a brief history of her before I get into the review. Joker's Daughter was created by Bob Rozakis and Irv Novick, first appearing in the Batman Family series in 1976. Besides claiming she was Joker's Daughter, she also pretended to be Riddler's Daughter, Penguin's Daughter, and Scarecrone(!), the Scarecrow's daughter, before it was revealed that she was actually Two Face's daughter, Duela Dent. Most recently she appeared in Catwoman #23 and at the end of this issue we're informed that, for those of you who want to follow the character, Joker's Daughter's story continues in Catwoman #24. In this comic, we do find out her name is Duela but not her surname and the dad we see in this issue remains nameless though he sure doesn't look like Harvey. But what about this issue? Well, while I haven't read all of the Villains' Month one shots, the ones that I have have been forgettable and trite at best and Joker's Daughter continues this trend. This issue also reminds me why I stay away from books with Ann Nocenti's name on the cover - she is an utterly diabolical writer! The issue opens with one of the clumsiest exposition scenes I've read in a while with Duela literally telling us how and why she came to be where she is - to no one except her mangy cat! She's below Gotham about to take an underwater trip through Gotham Reservoir to a cave system where escaped Arkham Asylum patients have established a tribal subculture and are living on roast rat. Despite the expositional deluge of the first few pages, I did like that Nocenti had included Gotham Reservoir into a story featuring Joker's Daughter, the setting being famous for Batman and Joker's first encounter (see Batman: The Man Who Laughs to read that excellent first encounter). At the end of Scott Snyder's Death of the Family story arc earlier this year, Joker plunges into the darkness of the caves and has yet to emerge. However in the fall, his cut-off face, which he'd been wearing like a mask during that entire story, came off and in this issue we find out what happened to it - it's somehow managed to remain intact despite being, at this point 2 years since it was cut off of Joker's head, and Duela, plucking it out of the sewage water, now has it.
She sees the way this rudimentary society operates - women as slaves to men - and decides to flip the script, Aristophanes-style! During one of her lengthy speeches, she relates the story of Lysistrata, a play by Aristophanes, where warring men are cowed by women who refuse to enable their constant fighting, thus ending a seemingly endless cycle of violence. But the Ancient Greek references don't stop there! The leader of this tribe is Charon who, like his namesake the ferryman of Hades who accepts coins as payment for his service, appears in a rowboat wearing a coat of coins! It's just too derivative. Duela does continue her near-constant speechifying to tell us about her boring but pleasant upbringing, where we learn her name and that her real parents weren't crazed supervillains though it explains nothing about how she became the crazy person she is, except to say that mental illness can happen to anyone and seems to have done so to poor Duela. In other words, this is an uninspired and dull origin story, though she does deform one side of her face so maybe the Two Face angle will get worked into her story later down the line - based on this comic, Nocenti doesn't have any original ideas of her own so it's plausible she'll go back and work the 1976 storyline into her Catwoman series (maybe we'll even see Duela dress up as Catgirl again!). So that's Joker's Daughter #1: the feeble story of a gimmicky character and the ridiculous underground society she comes to dominate thanks to Joker's face which should've disintegrated long ago. Absolutely dreadful writing from Nocenti, uninteresting art from Georges Jeanty, Joker's Daughter #1 joins most of Villain's Month on the crapheap of bad comics.
Published by DC Comics, Joker's Daughter #1 by Ann Nocenti and Georges Jeanty is out now