Warning: Spoilers for The Joker #8!
When it comes to DC Comics' Clown Prince of Crime, Joker has found seemingly endless ways to torture and maim the good people of Gotham City, but now with Bane’s daughter, Vengeance, hot on his trail, she’s just revealed a super effective way to beat him! After all, removing Joker’s tongue and taking away his best chance at wearing his opponent down before he even has a chance to hurt them physically is probably one of the best ideas anyone’s had to combat him in a long time.
Revealed during the events of The Joker #8, by James Tynion IV and Guillem March, this issue kicks off with a vicious display of Vengeance’s brutality as she quite literally rips the arm off of an acquaintance of James Gordon’s right in the middle of a conversation regarding the hunting down — and potential killing of — Joker. Absconding with Gordon after beating back police forces in spectacular fashion, Vengeance gets real with Gordon in a wildly twisted way as they flee.
Speeding off on a boat to places unknown, Vengeance begins to discuss her origin as a test tube project and how she has been “programmed” to hate Joker with all her being. Telling Gordon that if Joker “were in front of me, the hate that was programmed into my mind would take control,” Vengeance continues to reveal that during her “countless nights in deep artificial sleep,” she has considered many times over exactly how she would take Joker out, starting with hurting him in a way that’s as brutal as it is effective.
Saying, “First, I would rip out his tongue. Disarm him in a way that he could never come back from. Take away his greatest weapon,” Vengeance lays out a plan that would allow her to give Joker a taste of his own medicine that’s far too cruel for many to pull off, especially for Gordon, Batman, and the other members of his extended Bat-Family. Going on to detail the sadistic ways she’d murder him, Vengeance wanting to kick things off by tearing out Joker's tongue is a perfect way to not only symbolically remove his most dangerous weapon — i.e. his ability to run his mouth and get inside someone’s head — but permanently maim him in a way that he can’t readily come back from.
Known to be cutting in his remarks as well as manipulative in the way he toys with his victims’ minds, Joker doesn’t always need to physically hurt his prey to leave a lasting effect on them. Stoking fear, confusion, hate, and a bevy of other emotions and feelings associated with being a deranged psychopath onto the people he comes into contact with, Vengeance finding a way to beat the Joker before he can even start his fiendish game of verbal abuse is a better idea than most, and one that might actually come to pass if Vengeance gets her way.
Going on to declare that she will be the one to put Joker down and do so on behalf of James Gordon and his current mission abroad to boot, Bane's daughter has finally figured out a way to beat an iconic Batman villain that deserves an even worse fate than what she already has in store for him. The Joker may still be running around alive and free, but if Vengeance has her way, it’s not going to stay like that for long.