Sarah Essen
44 years ago - Sarah Essen is born in Gotham City
26 years ago - 18-year-old Sarah Essen begins college, studying criminal justice.
22 years ago - 22-year-old Sarah Essen attends the Police Academy, and becomes an officer in the GCPD.
20 years ago - 24-year-old Sarah Essen first meets James Gordon when he transfers to the GCPD. They have a brief affair, but stop when his wife leaves him.
15 years ago - 29-year-old Sarah Essen is one of the officers to withhold judgement of Batman when he first appears.
14 years ago - 30-year-old Sarah Essen begins dating James Gordon when his daughter Barbara Gordon talks him into asking her out.
13 years ago - 31-year-old Sarah Essen joins the GCPD new Major Crimes Division, becoming partners with Harvey Bullock.
9 years ago - 35-year-old Sarah Essen, pregnant with James Jr, is kidnapped by the Joker along with James & Barbara Gordon. The Joker attempts to shoot and kill Sarah to push the commissioner to madness, but Barbara takes the bullet instead, leaving her paraplegic. Gordon refuses to let Batman kill the Joker, proving him wrong.
8 years ago - 36-year-old Sarah Essen, chooses to step down from the GCPD Major Crimes Division as a detective when James Jr is born, and begins working with the mayor's office as a police liaison.
3 years ago - 41-year-old Sarah Essen returns to active duty to help James Gordon & the GCPD during the No Man's Land earthquake.
While it's easy to imagine the mythology of these characters as a monolith, the reality is that they evolved over time. Modern Batman fans might think of something like the imagery of Martha Wayne's pearls as being a core element of Batman's origin, but it was actually introduced in the pages of Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller. As it happens, a LOT of the iconic imagery of the Batman mythos was actually introduced in that series. For another example, let's dive into the story of James Gordon's wife Sarah.
Sarah Essen's Comic HistoryComissioner Gordon is absolutely the most lasting supporting character in Batman's story, literally debuting in the same panel. For all of his history, it was understood that he was married, and while his wife often went unnamed or unmentioned, when she WAS named, she was given the name Barbara. This name was of course given to Gordon's daughter when she debuted as Batgirl in 1966. When Frank Miller reimagined the world of Batman in 1986's Dark Knight Returns, however, Gordon's internal monologue made references to his wife Sarah. The text actually did imply that he had remarried at some point, and he regularly would use her as a mantra when he needed to do something heroic. "I think of Sarah." he would say, "The rest is easy."
DKR was followed up by Miller's Year One story in 1987, as he retold the origins of Batman following the Crisis. We see a younger Gordon first starting out in Gotham, and first meeting the woman that would one day be his wife. |
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Because Year One, and Gordon's portion of the story in particular, is built to feel like a classic detective noir story, Gordon's relationship with Sarah plays like the absolute best Bogey and Bacall style love affair. Gordon is married, and his wife is at home, pregnant. He is wildly attracted to, and tempted by, the extremely competent detective Sarah Essen, and in a moment of weakness they share an absolutely genre-perfect forbidden kiss in the rain. Because it's a noir, Gordon is then blackmailed with pictures of them, confesses to his wife, and Sarah leaves Gotham...
But of course, she DOES come back. Sarah Essen (suddenly a redhead) returns to Gotham in the modern continuity, revealing that both her husband and Gordon's wife have passed. She gets several really great stories, depicting her as incredibly competent, even taking over briefly as the Commissioner. They are eventually married in the middle of a hostage crisis. Unfortunately, Sarah Essen eventually wound up a victim of the wildly unfortunate Women-In-Refridgerators trope when she was killed by the Joker in the pages of the No Man's Land crossover. It was a particularly egregious example because it didn't seem to serve any purpose at all. Even the worst cases of this trope usually feature trauma against a woman to support a male characters story, but in this case it was exceptionally pointless. |
Our Sarah Essen StoryBefore I say anything here, I should direct your attention to a blog entry I found on the site Gotham Calling where they do a fantastic job breaking down both Sarah and the tragedy of her death, because there's not much I can say about it that they haven't already said better.
Which means we can jump ahead to our version. Originally we hadn't included the emotional affair between Gordon & Sarah in our timeline, but rereading it now... oh MAN do we want this. It's just absolutely fantastic stuff. We had to shift a few things around a little bit, notably the fact that Gordon's first wife wouldn't be pregnant here, but they would instead have an 8-year-old daughter (because Miller somehow forgot about the existence of Babs when he wrote this story). Neither Gordon nor Sarah leaves Gotham after the reveal of their affair, but they do absolutely put it immediately to bed once it comes to light and Gordon's marriage suffers as a result. They don't get together again (I love this idea) until Gordon's daughter moves back with him and insists he ask her out. Speaking of Babs; we are also moving Sarah's encounter with the Joker and making it part of the Killing Joke story. The bullet that cripples Babs? It was intended for Sarah. Babs CHOOSES to take it, to save her stepmom and unborn brother. We get to give her agency, and we get to keep Sarah. |
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