In an era where documentaries like I'll Be Gone In the Dark and Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel catch on like pop culture wildfire, it's no surprise that even the Arrowverse is elevating its own True Crime icon in Batwoman: the Joker. In season 2, episode 5 of the CW series, everyone's trying to hunt down a painting by the late Jack Napier, one of the Joker's many aliases. The infamous art piece is known to have been "painted" in an unconventional and gruesome way: by the Joker breaking into someone's home and slaughtering them so their blood soaked another painting on display in the foyer.
Kate Kane, the original Batwoman, is still missing and her phone makes it look like she has a connection to the artwork. And everyone is still trying to find her for different reasons. The new Batwoman, Ryan Wilder (Javicia Leslie), uses a temporary alliance with the Crows to try and track down the painting. She finds it at a swanky art party hosted by her friend Evan Blake. The episode is densely packed with action and plot development, and it leaves viewers with the notion that Alice and Safiyah's just-introduced step-brother, Ocean, are the ones who have the real Napier painting in their possession as they continue to evade Safiyah.
Though this season 2 Batwoman episode itself isn't more troubling than normal in its subject matter, the way it orbits around a work of art crafted by a homicidal madman via brutal murder is. The painting is supposed to be a piece that was literally bled on by one of the Joker's victims, yet it's treated with eerie reverence and interest. Not only are different characters involved in trying to capture it, but it's also the hit piece at Evan's upscale art gathering. While there, they even remark to Ryan about how popular the piece has been among the guests. Yes, Batwoman is fiction; the painting doesn't actually exist in reality. But the concept of fetishizing darkness and violence, of trying to make a personal connection to it after the fact, isn't new or even fictitious. For years, the art of cold-blooded killers has been garnering so much attention and piquing the interest of so many buyers that its relevance has become commonplace in the true crime genre.
Houston victims rights advocate Andy Kahan coined the term "murderabilia" in 1999, referring to the lucrative facet of the art industry that makes obscene amounts of money off of such artwork. Notorious killers such as John Wayne Gacy, Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, Richard Speck, and many more have become increasingly infamous not only for the trail of innocent victims they've left behind, but also for their personal interest in creating art. As of 2018, Gacy's paintings were selling for anywhere from $6,000 all the way to $175,000, the current price of an oil painting he made of his home where he hid the bodies of young men in a crawl space and buried others in the yard. Just like the Napier painting, artwork that encapsulates cruelty and carnage somehow entices people who would never want to encounter such depraved "artists" in their own lives, but nevertheless crave a safe connection to the darker parts of the human psyche.
Interest regarding the deepest darkness of the human mind is understandable. Shows like Mindhunter and The Fall and True Crime documentaries such as Crazy, Not Insane are undoubtedly engrossing. They prompt viewers to wonder, "What went wrong? What wires were crossed that made someone capable of these things?" But the idolization and overall fetishization of the art, paralleled in the episode of Batwoman with its reverence for Joker and his art born of murder, is what's disturbing. Acknowledging heinous crimes that have taken place is far different than implicitly elevating the status of those who perpetrate them. "Gore on Canvas" may be a mere episode of a fictional show in the fictional Arrowverse, but the buzz around the Napier painting in Batwoman isn't an entirely fabricated concept.