Over the past few issues of Batman, the world of Gotham’s hero has been turned upside down. First, it was the sudden arrival of the world’s most brutal assasins, including Deathstroke and Cheshire but they were only pieces of a larger, darker threat to come. That threat is the Designer, a mysterious foe utterly unknown to Batman until know. In Batman #90, though, we finally find out what the Designer is up to in Gotham — as well as his origin.
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Spoilers for Batman #90 beyond this point.
After realizing what’s at play, Catwoman opens up to Batman and tells him everything, revealing that the Designer had first come to Gotham years before in Batman’s early days and struck up an alliance of sorts with Catwoman, Riddler, the Joker and Penguin with the Designer offering to help the villains realize their biggest, wildest plans and, by way of truly helping them understand what he is capable of, the Designer revealed his own origin.
It turns out that years before, when he was younger, the Designer had his own foe in the form of a detective who would manage to defeat and outsmart him at every turn. This resulted in a 20 year game of cat and mouse with this detective and the Designer attempting to outwit and outsmart one another with the detective coming out on top each and every time. The endless defeats prompted the Designer to continue coming up with more and more complex plans, ultimately driving him to spend a year away from the world focused only on his plans. His single-focused drive to be able to think beyond the detective until he perfect his skill and successful defeated the detective. How he does that exactly — or who that detective was — remains a mystery.
But now, the Designer has the ability to literally out-plan his opponent, something that he can in turn teach others to do as well, which is what he ends up doing with Catwoman and the others. Now, all these years after that fateful evening with Gotham’s villains, it’s Catwoman’s plan that it seems the Designer is putting into action. Despite believing him to have been killed by the Joker during that fateful meeting, the Designer appears to have somehow survived and is poised to carry out the most ambitious heist ever: the ruination of Bruce Wayne.
Batman #90 is on sale now from DC Comics.
