Joker’s New Henchman Straightman Has a Shockingly Tragic Origin
Joker #Joker
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Batman: The Adventures Continue: Season Three #5The Joker has had no shortage of sidekicks and subordinates throughout the years, but his newest henchman has a surprisingly tragic and heroic origin. The recently-released Batman: The Adventures Continue: Season Three #5 reveals the backstory and fate of Straightman, revealing him to be a veteran cruelly manipulated by Hugo Strange. In many ways, Straightman is DC’s answer to Captain America – at least, one co-opted by the Joker.
Coming from the creative team of Paul Dini, Alan Burnett, Ty Templeton, Monica Kubina and Josh Reed, the new Batman: The Adventures Continue issue finds the Suicide Squad in Gotham City, on the trail of Joker and Straightman. It turns out that Joker’s new henchman is one Captain Carl Finley, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan who volunteered for a top-secret super soldier program. Previous issues showed how Joker stumbled upon the military experiment and was able to brainwash Finley into doing his bidding, but ‘Project Samson’ was never actually altruistic – instead, it was the brainchild of amoral scientist Dr. Hugo Strange.
Related: Batman: The Adventures Continue Season 3 Brings Back a BTAS Legend
Joker Found His Own Captain America 
Straightman first appeared in “Season One” of the Batman: The Adventures Continue series, which picks up where the old animated series left off and continues the story from there. This new Batman series sees several characters appearing in the DC Animated Universe continuity for the first time, such as the Court of Owls, Deathstroke and the Red Hood. Straightman is a character created for the new comic series, and is a powerful character with enhanced durability and strength – enough to lift a car over his head. Straightman is the Joker’s humorless thrall, following his diabolical plans thanks to being brainwashed by Hugo Strange to follow orders without question.
Joker’s New Henchman Is Incredibly Tragic 
What makes Finley so tragic is that he was a heroic soldier attempting to serve his country. However, the final stages of Project Samson involved a secret procedure to bring him totally under control – a process the Joker sabotaged. While Hugo’s guilt-ridden assistant has since been working to help Straightman, and Batman does eventually free him from Joker’s control and bring him in for help, the arc ends with Finley receiving treatment but now filled with vengeance. His time with Joker has made the former ‘Straightman’ have a violent reaction to laughter, and it seems that he is now obsessed with getting payback for what was done to him. It seems that Captain Carl Finley is now a true Gotham villain, hating humor and sworn to take revenge no matter what it costs him.
BTAS Is Still Surprisingly Dark 
Tragic backstories are nothing new in the BTAS continuity; both Paul Dini and Alan Burnett re-worked old Batman villains to give them a tragic element. Perhaps the most famous example is Mr. Freeze, who was little more than an evil mad scientist before Dini gave Freeze a new origin in the classic episode ‘Heart of Ice,’ where it was revealed the accident that gave him his condition was the result of Freeze attempting to save his sick wife. Even characters created for the animated series were given their own empathetic origins and motivations for doing evil, as the Noir-ish series embraced the idea that Gotham often turns good people into their worst selves. Finley is the latest victim of the animated series’ surprisingly dark world.
Readers of Batman: The Adventures Continue: Season Three will surely see Straightman again soon, as he turns his superhuman abilities and hatred of laughter against the people who hurt him – with the Joker surely among them.
Batman: The Adventures Continue: Season Three #5 is available now from DC Comics.