Just finished reading it and have a question. Gordons wife is called Barbara, I always thought his daughter was called Barbara. I can only assume that he remarried later or stayed with his wife and they later had a daughter because in that story he had a son.

Barbara was a victim of a stupid post Crisis retcon.

From Wiki:

The conclusion of Crisis on Infinite Earths changed DC Universe continuity in many ways. Following the reboot, Barbara Gordon is born to Roger and Thelma Gordon, and she is Jim Gordon's niece/adopted daughter in current canon.

Post-Crisis, Supergirl does not arrive on Earth until Gordon has established herself as Oracle; many adventures she shared with Batgirl are now retroactively described as having been experienced by Power Girl.

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Though now its being established all of these stories were with Black Canary, to link the past with Birds of Prey

Like stingermck said, they made Barbara into Commissioner Gordon's niece. I think this was done so they could de-age Gordon to the point where he wouldn't be old enough to have an adult daughter (I don't think the retcon of his age has lasted).

So - when the Joker shoots her, she is actually Gordon's niece, even though she was his daughter in the story?

How friggin' confusing.

She's his biological niece, but he's raised her as his daughter since she was a young teenager.

Basically, the relationship is a victim of the fact that you can't think too much about a comic book timeline. There's no way Batman can show up when Gordon's a rookie cop, that Gordon can be Commissioner of the Gotham City PD, that Gordon can be old enough to have a daughter who is herself old enough to be Batgirl, and that Batman can be in the prime of his life (late-20s to mid-30s, depending on the writer). All of those pieces just won't fit together, so there are really only two options: ignore it, or come up with convoluted stories about how Barbara is techncally his niece but he raised her as his daughter and she thinks of him as her father.

How very, very true. I remember back when comics cost $.40 that it was okay to refer to the age of some characters. But eventually, it stops making sense and one has to wonder how Robin be a leader of the Teen Titans at age 19 in the nineties when he fought side by side with Batman in the late seventies.

As one comic writer put it, the best thing to do with a character's age is to ignore it. Superman stays eternally at 29 even though his youngest readers from the sixties are on their way to being senior citizens.

DC's post-Crisis continuity was (and is) a complete fucking mess.

Ostensibly, they did the while Crisis thing in order to streamline the DC Universe, but all of the character switching and timeline alterations just turned the whole thing into one big disaster. You had some old stories being pulled out on continuity entirely. Some only partially pulled out. Some being left intact. And on top of that, you had writers who really had no clue as to how to deal with everything, and editorial which didn't seem to have any kind of cohesive plan in effect on how everything was supposed to fit together.

One thing it did was really, really screw up the Legion (what with Superboy not existing and everything). Of course, nearly every other "crisis-like" event since then has also screwed up or rebooted the Legion (Zero Hour, Infinite Crisis, etc.).

And now we're back where we started from anyway, with Hypertime (or whatever it's called now), Superman coming from a non-sterile Krypton, the appearance of other survivors of Krypton (including Krypto, who to this day I have no idea where he came from) after the big fuss to make Superman the ONLY Kryptonian, a terrible, terrible rendition of Supergirl, etc. About the only book that's been better for it all is JSA, and even then they had to crap on Infinity Inc. to do it.

Thanks for the answers there guys, kinda get it!