Headscratchers / Death of the Family

• Wait, so The Joker spent a year faceless? How did he pull that off? The point of skin is to protect the body from disease and other things. So how did Joker spend a year missing his face without getting infected?
  • There are other ways to protect the face. Perhaps he kept it covered with bandages or a face covering and used eyedrops to keep his eyes from drying out.
  • Joker's natural toxicity killed off any foreign diseases. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
    • If we're supposed to accept that a chemical bath of undetermined contents bleached his skin, dyed his hair and stretched his face into a grotesque grin, pretty much this.
  • We also have Hush as a precedent, though he didn't spend a whole year faceless.
• Wouldn't the skin from Joker's face have wasted to dust and he have grown a whole new layer of skin over his face within a year?
  • There's nothing saying he doesn't have a new layer of skin. It's not addressed either way, and it wouldn't affect anything if he did have some new skin. Given that his own blood is poisonous, who knows how much of his physiology has changed during his exposure to all those chemicals.
  • The skin from Joker's face (that he cut off) was kept in a freezer.
    • That just raises more questions, the most obvious of which is why anyone would keep such obvious Schmuck Bait left behind by the Joker.
• When Catwoman encounters the Joker, she acts all "Never heard of you." Either she was insulting him or she was being serious. As one review pointed out, it would be unbelievable that she's being serious, because she had worked with Joker and other villains from time to time. So how is it possible for her to never hear of someone when she worked with that someone at one point?
  • This was most likely a dig at the "new" appearance of the Joker. With the face mask & all.
• Harley Quinn bites off Joker's tongue and spits it out. His ability to speak is not affected at all! How is this possible?
  • The same way he cut his tongue in two during Batman R.I.P. and could still speak.
    • Although the implication in RIP was - although Morrison had to clarify this - was that Doctor Hurt (an entirely unnatural being by that point himself) was the only one who could understand Joker at that point.
• Tim states that Jason is the closest thing he's ever had to a brother. What the hell about Dick?! Did the New 52 completely erase all the adventures and moments the two shared before the reboot?
  • That may very well be the case, since Dick and Damian already have a close bond that is touched on. Playing relationships off each other isn't surprising in any ensemble.
  • Yes, actual relationships that have been developed, not ones purely informed. Battle for the Cowl still happened, so Jason still brutally kicked Tim's ass. You don't get past that with a few favours.
• The Joker shows Harley a huge pile of dead Harleys, and tells her she's not the first one. Except that, since we know Harley's been around for this whole year, all of those bodies would be rotted down to bones if that were truly the case. It's far more likely that he killed a bunch of random women and dressed them like Harley just to mess with her. After all, the whole point of his plan was to Mind Screw the Bat-Family - there's no reason to think he'd exempt Harley from that.