Spoilers for Future State: Dark Detective #1 ahead!
In the world of DC’s Future State, Gotham City has become overtaken by a fascist, anti-vigilante regime, which has forced the Bat-family to rethink their crime fighting strategies. This has led some members to adopt new code-names, and there is more to these names than meets the eye. This revelation happens in the second story in Future State: Dark Detective by writer Matthew Rosenberg with art by Carmine Di Giandomenico and colors by Antonio Fabela.
Even before Future State, the Bat-family was having a rough go of it. The Joker War ravaged Gotham and one of Batman’s old foes from the past, The Ghostmaker, has returned. A new mayor has been elected and he is slowly mounting a campaign against masked crime fighters, stoking the flames of anti-vigilante sentiment. Furthermore, Bruce Wayne has lost a considerable amount of his fortune, severely limiting his access to the resources he needs to be Batman. And now, in Future State, it seems as if all these events have come to a head, leading to an even darker and more twisted version of Gotham.
Cole Cash, AKA Grifter, is in Gotham City, laying low and trying to scrape by. When his identity slips out, a bar fight quickly escalates into a showdown with the Magistrate, the fascist government ruling Gotham. On route to a Magistrate prison facility, Grifter stumbles across Luke Fox. Fox is seeking a way out of Gotham and offers Grifter $50,000 to smuggle him out of of the city. Grifter takes Fox deep into the darkest parts of the city, looking for the “Queen of Clubs,” who he describes as the “last and best” criminal Gotham ever produced. When Grifter, takes out a picture of the Queen, readers are shocked to learn it’s the Huntress!
With the anti-vigilante Magistrate running the city and driving the heroes underground, it makes sense the heroes might take new and different names to throw off the authorities. In the lore and mythology surrounding playing cards, the Queen of Clubs was not necessarily a good omen and represented a dark-haired woman with contrasting objectives. The Huntress, a dark-haired woman, is usually depicted as brutal vigilante, dispending justice with her crossbow. As for the contrasting objectives, she has always been on the side of angels, but now is technically a criminal, one with a reputation. Of course, what it means to be a “criminal” under the Magistrate is vaguely defined, so it is possible that she is continuing her heroic ways but has been branded a criminal by the Magistrate.
Readers still have much to learn about the Huntress of Future State but much like the rest of the Bat-family, she has been driven underground and forced to adopt new methods of keeping Batman’s crusade alive; here she has adopted a new codename and modus operandi. While it remains to be seen if the rest of the Bat-family will adopt playing-card themed names to go underground, it points to how dire the world of Future State is.
