The Joker Clocks Gordon's Secret in a Gut-Punch Batman #15

Matt Fraction and Jorge Jiménez's Batman #15 shipped November 4 in the shadow of the Bad Seeds arc, and Jim Gordon's situation hasn't gotten any easier. Vandal Savage spent his stint as Gotham's police commissioner demoting Gordon to beat cop and locking Barbara Gordon in Supermax for working with Batman — and even with Savage now dead, nobody's bothered to fix what he broke. Gordon is still walking a beat, Barbara is still inside, and vigilantism is still very much illegal.

None of that has stopped Batman from quietly pulling Gordon back into the fold. This issue finds six assassins converging on Gotham with Bruce Wayne in their sights at a masked gala, and in the aftermath, Batman leans on Gordon to keep two captured killers in medically induced comas and off the city's books entirely — a favor that puts the cop even further outside the law he's sworn to uphold.

Meanwhile at Arkham Towers, Dr. Zeller pays a visit to the Joker and asks, almost casually, what he makes of Gordon these days. Given the Joker's history with the family — up to and including crippling Barbara in The Killing Joke — it's not a comfortable question, and by the end of the conversation the Joker appears to have sniffed out exactly what Gordon's been hiding. For a man already living a double life, that's about the worst possible person to have figured it out.

Original reporting: Bleeding Cool.