Warning: contains a preview of Catwoman: Lonely City #2!
A new preview of Catwoman: Lonely City #2 reveals more details about the night Joker finally killed Batman, but while the story takes place in just one potential future, the tactics of the Clown Prince of Crime are scarily similar to his current efforts in DC's mainstream comics. Issue 2 will hit physical and digital retailers December 21.
From writer and artist Cliff Chiang, Catwoman: Lonely City picks up with Selina Kyle's release from prison ten years after the Fool's Night massacre - an event which killed Batman, Nightwing, Jim Gordon, and the Joker himself. With her cat burglar skills present but diminished, the first issue saw Selina on the trail of Orpheus - a mysterious tool hidden in the Batcave which Bruce Wayne asked her to retrieve with his dying breath. But Gotham has changed in Selina's absence - the Wayne fortune has revolutionized the city, while the events of Fool's Night redeemed Harvey Dent in the public eye, leading the former supervillain to become Gotham's new mayor and embrace the authoritarian Batcops - pseudo-fascist law enforcement patterned after Batman.
Reconnecting with an aging Killer Croc and Barbara Gordon, who has retired from vigilantism and is now running for mayor, Catwoman is planning a heist on the well-guarded and incredibly well-fortified Batcave. But alongside this ten-years-later story, fans also gets to see what actually happened on Fool's Night, and what scheme Joker struck on that finally got the better of the Bat. In a preview shared by CBR, it turns out that Joker's big idea was to connect all Gotham's malcontents via a 'Jokstr' app, instigating a semi-organized terror attack on the city that turned lone killers into an army.
Interestingly, DC's mainstream Bat-comics are currently treating Joker in much the same way. Punchline - Joker's new henchwoman and his taunting replacement for Harley Quinn - has become a political agitator, packaging Joker's nihilism as a rallying cry for change and offering the violently disaffected a new identity as "Clowns." In response, Simon Saint's Magistrate recently took over for the GCPD, filling the streets with hi-tech Peacekeepers who shoot first and ask questions later. As the flash-forward Future State showed, the tension between the two groups was enough to defeat Batman and throw Gotham into chaos, suggesting that this tactic really is the magic bullet to defeat the Dark Knight. The preview goes on to show Catwoman and Croc training to retrieve Orpheus, but it's unclear what the Batcave could hold that would save a city so willing to choose security over liberty.
Many comics and movies have explored the idea of Joker sparking a descent into chaos, but more recent stories take that logic further. Ultimately, stories like Catwoman: Lonely City conclude that Joker's final victory wouldn't be convincing Gotham that he's right, but goading the city into embracing a version of Batman's ethos stripped of Bruce Wayne's humanity.
Source: CBR