Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Batwoman season 1, episode 14, "Grinning From Ear To Ear."
The latest episode of Batwoman introduced the character of Duela Dent into the Arrowverse, but who is the mysterious lady known as The Joker's Daughter? That's a question that even Duela herself seemed unable to answer through most of her life in the comics.
There have been two different women known as the Joker's Daughter, and they were as different as night and day. One of them was an aspiring hero, who claimed to be redeeming the name of her criminal parents, even as she changed her story about just who those parents were. The other was psychotic for seemingly no reason at all and became obsessed with winning the approval of the Clown Prince of Crime.
While the producers of Batwoman went in another direction with the concept, the tribute was clear enough. The Arrowverse version of Duela Dent draws upon both characters from the comics, who are relatively unknown to mainstream audiences. Here is everything you need to know about the women who call themselves the Joker's Daughter.
Joker's Daughter In The Classic Comics
Duela Dent first appeared in Batman Family #6 in August 1976. She was originally set up to be an enemy to the first Robin, Dick Grayson. Duela tormented Robin with the knowledge that she had figured out his secret identity and challenged him to do the same, even as she changed costumes and gimmicks, claiming to be the daughter of various Batman villains including The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin, The Scarecrow and Catwoman. Eventually Robin deduced the truth: that her real name was Duela Dent and that she was the estranged daughter of Harvey "Two-Face" Dent.
It turned out that Duela didn't mean any harm and that she had gone after the Boy Wonder as an audition of sorts. Duela wanted to join the Teen Titans to make up for her criminal father's crimes and thought impressing Robin would be the best way to go about doing that. Duela's gambit worked and she went on to work with the Teen Titans throughout the late 1970s, adopting the name Harlequin. This was over a decade before Harley Quinn's first appearance on Batman: The Animated Series.
Duela disappeared into limbo after the Teen Titans title was cancelled, but did appear occasionally in the New Teen Titans series that followed. She also briefly appeared in Detective Comics, adopting the alias Card Queen in order to infiltrate a criminal organization called MAZE. Her last appearance before Crisis on Infinite Earths was at Donna Troy's wedding, where she inexplicably appeared to be a middle-aged matron and ran off before Dick Grayson could ask how she could possibly be Two-Face's daughter while being so old.
This plot thread was picked up in the Post-Crisis Team Titans series, where an elderly Duela was depicted as a patient in a mental hospital. The plan was for Duela to be established as a time-traveler who was driven insane by her experiences and wound up traveling back in time at one point to join the original Teen Titans. Unfortunately, Team Titans was canceled before the story could be resolved, and this version of Duela was written off as a side-effect caused by the breakdown of reality around the time of the Zero Hour event.
A de-aged Duela Dent appeared sporadically throughout various titles following Zero Hour, still using the name Harlequin. Though she most often appeared helping the Teen Titans, she was also seen crashing a number of supervillain gatherings, claiming to be the daughter of various villains, including Doomsday. Duela briefly joined the villainous Titans East team, but rejoined the Titans after being asked politely if she'd rejoin her old friends, whom she was afraid didn't want her around anymore.
Duela's origins were finally explained in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, where she was established as a refugee from Earth-3, the parallel world where all the heroes of New Earth were villains and vice-versa. Duela's parents were revealed to be the heroic enemies of the criminal Owlman; Three-Face (a woman named Evelyn Dent, whom had three distinctive personalities) and The Jokster, a heroic version of The Joker. Unfortunately, Duela was killed by the Monitors for the crime of threatening the continuity of New Earth by traveling between worlds.
The Joker's Daughter in the Current Comics
A character called The Joker's Daughter was introduced into The New 52 DC Universe, but she bore little resemblance or relation to the original Duela Dent, apart from sharing a first name. This Duela (who was never given a last name) first appeared in Catwoman #23 in October 2013. Born to a normal family in the suburbs of Gotham City, Duela disturbed her parents by finding beauty in things most people found repulsive and carved at her face with a box-cutter to make herself pretty. After further scarring her face when her parents forced her to have plastic surgery to correct the damage she'd inflicted on herself, Duela ran away from home and lived in the sewers of Gotham City. It was here that she found the severed face of The Joker, who had removed his own face as part of a scheme.
Wearing the rotting flesh as a mask, Duela became obsessed with the idea of proving herself a worthy heir to the legacy of The Joker, who was presumed dead at the time. She met The Dollmaker, the villainous surgeon who had removed The Joker's face at his request, and he gladly sewed the Joker's face into Duela's flesh and injected her with a blood sample he had taken from The Joker. Duela launched her own crime-spree and joined with several other villains over the course of the Batman Eternal mini-series, attempting a magical ritual to resurrect The Joker at one point and doing battle with Batgirl.
She was recruited into the Suicide Squad after being captured, much to Harley Quinn's dismay. Unsurprisingly, Duela was determined to be too much of a loose cannon to be trusted as a field agent and she was sent back to Arkham Asylum. She has not been seen since.
Joker's Daughter's Powers In The Comics
No version of The Joker's Daughter has ever been depicted as having superpowers, though they've all proven to be quite dangerous without them. Duela Dent was a brilliant engineer and detective, capable of building all manner of clown-themed crime-fighting gadgetry and smart enough to figure out Robin was Dick Grayson unaided. She was also a talented acrobat and physical combatant, holding her own with Robin in a one-on-one fight. The New 52 version of the Joker's Daughter showed no special skills apart from being unusually good with bladed weapons.
Joker's Daughter In The Arrowverse
The Arrowverse's version of Duela Dent doesn't use the Joker's Daughter name, but she is clearly inspired by the New 52 version of the character. Part of a wealthy family in Gotham City, Duela was pushed by her mother, Evelyn, to emulate her fashion-obsessed classmates. One day Duela snapped while putting on make-up and punched her mirror, using the broken shards to cut a smile onto her face in a mockery of how plastic surgeons cut other women's faces open to make them pretty. This was probably also meant to be a nod to the scars of Heath Ledger's Joker in The Dark Knight.
Forced to undergo plastic surgery before being committed to Arkham Asylum for a time, Duela became determined to "free" her classmates from the unrealistic expectations of beauty society forced on them. This led Duela to attack the social media influencers her mother admired, cutting apart their faces with a knife while leaving their bodies unharmed. She also attacked her mother and slit her throat to stop Batwoman from chasing after her.
Batwoman eventually caught Duela and left her tied up for the GCPD to find. However, before the police got to her, Duela was found by Alice, who had discovered that Duela had tried suing her plastic surgeon for working on her against her will. Since Alice had a grudge against the same surgeon (he was the man who held her captive for over half her life) Alice proposed a way that she and Duela could help one another. This led Alice to cut off Duela's face, leaving her looking beautiful to her twisted mind and giving Alice the perfect disguise for getting close to her tormentor. It remains to be seen, however, if Duela will adopt the Joker's Daughter name in the future, once she finds a new face.