Is this what happened to the Joker’s face after he fell to his apparent death following the events of Batman‘s Death of the Family story?That’s what DC’s Bob Harras would have you believe, releasing a new image of The Joker’s Daughter with the tagline, “Something evil lurks under Gotham City and it wears the Joker’s face.”But who is The Joker’s Daughter? Like Black Zero, a villainous DC force that we looked at earlier today, it depends on who you ask, and when.In many ways, the original Joker’s Daughter was the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths iteration of Harley Quinn, even going by the name Harlequin at one point. Duela Dent first appeared as Joker’s Daughter in the Batman Family series of comic books. At different times, she later claimed to be the daughter of Catwoman, Scarecrow, Riddler, and Penguin. Eventually it turned out that she was Duela Dent, Two-Face’s daughter.Duela claimed she wanted to join the Teen Titans to atone for her father’s crimes; however, not all members of the Titans were in favor of this idea. Eventually she changed her identity to Harlequin. As Harlequin, Duela utilized gimmicks such as smoke-inducing powder puffs and bullet-firing lipstick.After the Teen Titans comic books were canceled, she popped up in the Batman titles, calling herself Card Queen. Duela’s last pre-Crisis appearance was at Donna Troy’s wedding where she appears to be a middle-aged matron. Dick Grayson confronted her with the fact that she was too old to be Two-Face’s daughter, which she agreed with, but there was never any real resolution on the point.After the Crisis, she appears in Team Titans as an aging mental patient. That version of the character turned out to be a time traveler, whose existence was explained away as an anomaly created by the Zero Hour crisis.Her most recent appearance was in Countdown to Final Crisis, in which a version of the character from an alternate earth. That version was the daughter of The Jokester, the Joker of Earth-3, and was killed by a Monitor for intruding upon New Earth.While it’s unclear which features of which versions might be retained, it’s worth noting that time travel and the Multiverse are both expected to come into play in a big way in the not-too-distant future at DC, and that DC Co-Publisher Dan DiDio was reported at the time to be more closely involved with the development and execution of Countdown than with many other DC crossover events.
