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THE LEGEND
James Gordon is an honest cop in a city where the police have often been as crooked as the people they arrest. He climbed through the ranks of the Gotham City Police Department the hard way and became its commissioner, and along the way he made the most dangerous decision of his career: he chose to trust a vigilante in a cape.
That partnership appears in no official record. Gordon is the man who put the signal on the roof of police headquarters, who meets Batman in the dark and stops pretending to be surprised when he vanishes mid-sentence. He doubts the methods and depends on the results. His daughter Barbara has led a double life of her own, first as Batgirl and later as Oracle, and he has carried more than one city-wide disaster on his shoulders. Of everyone in Batman's war on crime, Gordon is the one with no mask, no armour and no fortune. He has a moustache, a trench coat, a badge and a stubborn belief that Gotham can be saved.
OFF THE PAGE
Bill Finger and Bob Kane introduced Gordon in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939, in 'The Case of the Chemical Syndicate', the same story that introduced Batman. That makes him one of the oldest characters in the mythos. For decades he stood at the edge of the panel, the reliable ally who switched on the signal. Frank Miller's Batman: Year One in 1987 moved him to the centre, retelling his arrival in Gotham as a story as important as Bruce Wayne's.
Screen versions followed that lead. Neil Hamilton played him in the 1960s Batman series, Pat Hingle across the Burton and Schumacher films, J.K. Simmons in Justice League and Jeffrey Wright in The Batman (2022), while Ben McKenzie made him the lead of the television series Gotham. The Gordon most sixth scale collectors know is Gary Oldman's, from Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy: a tired, decent man who starts The Dark Knight as a lieutenant and ends it as commissioner.
IN SIXTH SCALE
Hot Toys has made Gordon in 1/6 scale through Gary Oldman's portrayal in the Nolan films. The first, Lt. Jim Gordon (S.W.A.T. Version), put him in the tactical gear he wears in The Dark Knight, with a helmet, goggles, a walkie-talkie, a shotgun and a pistol. Released in 2012 as a Toy Fairs exclusive, it also included a second pair of glasses for a plainclothes look, which tells you how much of Gordon lives in those frames.
The second arrived in 2015 as part of a three-piece set from The Dark Knight Rises: John Blake in police uniform, Gordon in civilian clothes, and a Bat-Signal about 25 centimetres tall with an LED light, a remote control and a rotating base. The signal tends to steal the set, since it can light up an entire Batman display.
Gordon is rarely the star of a shelf, and collectors seem to like it that way. He usually stands where he belongs, on the rooftop beside the signal, a step back from the action. The rest of the trilogy's cast, from Bane to Scarecrow, waits on the wider DC shelf.
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