As Fear State kicks off and Oracle investigates Gotham’s darkest corners, Barbara Gordon is on the defensive against the Court of Owls in Joker.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Joker #7, on sale now from DC Comics.
In her role as Oracle, Barbara Gordon has historically served as the Bat Family’s eyes in the sky, providing them with the vital support on the fly that they need from the relative safety of her headquarters in Gotham City’s Clocktower. And while she may no longer be out in the field of combat as often as her counterparts, Barbara’s life has gotten no less dangerous, especially as not one but two supervillains have recently compromised the Clocktower and nearly killed Oracle in a move to cut down the Bat Family’s primary source of mission intelligence.
After the devastating losses she and her family endured during the crossover event “Joker War,” Barbara decided to retire the Batgirl persona and resume her role as Oracle as she reevaluated her place in the superhero community and the consequences that came along with it. Quickly reestablishing her data network across all of Gotham City, Oracle not only helped Batman as he contended with the rise of the villainous Magistrate but began investigating the connections of a shadowy woman named Cressida who contracted Barbara’s father Jim Gordon to track down and murder the Joker. And as Batman’s war against the Magistrate explodes into a full-on “Fear State” and Oracle learns more about her father’s mysterious benefactor, the Clocktower has fallen under direct attack twice in separate incidents, with the more recent in The Joker #7 by James Tynion IV, Guillem March, Arif Prianto and Tom Napolitano.
While Batman was captive to the Scarecrow, the true mastermind behind the rise of Magistrate, Oracle attempted to use her extensive comms network to broadcast a message across Gotham and reassure the citizens that the Bat Family was taking action against the supervillain. This plan backfired when the Scarecrow revealed he had personally compromised Oracle’s data network and instead used the comms system to issue a threat to the city, indicating that they had all been secretly dosed with fear toxin for weeks. To punctuate this message and ensure that Oracle didn’t move to mitigate the damage, as Gotham descended into chaos, the Scarecrow caused Oracle’s supercomputer to explode, with her narrowly avoiding the blast.
Meanwhile, in her hunt to learn who hired her father to kill the Joker, Oracle discovered that Cressida and her family had deep ties to the Court of Owls, Gotham’s venerable secret society that used its undead assassins the Talons to quietly steer the course of the city’s evolution for generations. To Oracle’s shock, Cressida revealed that she was aware Oracle was monitoring just moments before a Talon infiltrated the Clocktower and apparently attempted to assassinate Barbara. Along with the help of Oracle’s impromptu Birds of Prey, the Talon was repelled yet the showdown demonstrated that the Clocktower’s security system was not as airtight as Barbara had initially believed it to be.
The two recent attacks on the Clocktower underscore that, even not out battling criminal directly as Batgirl, Barbara Gordon’s life remains a dangerous one as Oracle. The compromise of the Clocktower is tantamount to the Batcave being threatened, especially given the level of access to Batman’s secrets that Oracle has. And if Oracle is taken out, either by the Scarecrow or the Court of Owls, the Caped Crusader will have just lost one of his most valuable allies in his never-ending war on crime as his greatest enemies seek to keep in the dark by targeting his greatest source of intelligence.
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