Later, Batman runs several traces for on previously collected samples of Joker Venom to see if any was found on the scene at police headquarters. Batman has arrived, and the two of them rush to the evidence room to check on the detached face that had been on ice there for a year. Jim sits surrounded by the dead bodies of every police officer that had been in the room. Suddenly, though, the lights come on, and the Joker is nowhere to be found. As the Joker's voice seems to be getting closer, Jim can stand it no more, and discharges his weapon. He is disappointed, though, in Jim's tendency to hide things - particularly cigarettes - like the cigarettes he's been hiding under his bed, where the Joker admits to having spent many a night lying underneath it, listening to Jim breathe. The Joker remarks that he missed Jim, and Batman, and Barbara too. Each time he starts the opening line of a joke, one of the police officers to whom he tells it begins crying out in horror, prompting him to kill them and start over.įilled with outrage, Jim demands that the Joker turn his attention to him alone. The cheerfully grim voice of the Joker moves unpredictably around the room, as he tries to tell a joke. As quickly as they returned, the lights go out again. Calmly, Jim explains that the generator will kick in at any moment - and it does - but in that brief moment of light, his eyes fall on a figure standing in the doorway of the bullpen, and he is instantly filled with fear. This quest to quit smoking has been a distraction to Jim, while a series of bad omens in Gotham City have convinced Harvey Bullock that whatever the next big crime is, the people of Gotham will claim that the commissioner should have known it was coming.Īs Jim and Harvey return from the roof, where yet another of his hiding places has been emptied, the lights in the station suddenly go dead. His daughter Barbara has been involved as well, though he is sure she will never find the hiding place he keeps in his own home.

Commissioner Jim Gordon has been trying to quit smoking for a while, to the point that he offered a prize - a day off - to the officers who could find all of the places he had been hiding cigarettes on the premises of Gotham City Police Headquarters.

Batman the new 52 volume 7