Can You give your thoughs on Scarface and the Ventriloquist? To me, of all batman villiains, they are the most Unique to batman, with their gimmick being inseparable from their psycology. The platonic form of the criminal insanity.
"Platonically perfect Bat-villain" is about how I'd describe him, yeah. The Ventriloquist gets pitched a lot as the only Batman villain of the last 40 years who could have debuted in the Golden Age right alongside Two-Face and Penguin and not feel remotely out of place, which went a long way towards making him an instantly iconic character from gimmick alone if nothing else. I think he's on a comparable wavelength to Bizarro and Mxyztplk, in the sense that he they are so blisteringly pitch-perfect a match for the exact specific heroes they fight, to the point their presence is a useful vibe barometer. They're rooted in many of the most outwardly silly serial elements of what the hero goes up against to the point dealing with them feels sorta like punching the clock, but that gives them the capacity to surprise the reader when they inevitably take swings towards darker or more tragic territory, and unlike other villains, these are swings they can do without fundamentally undermining their solid gimmicks or inherently comedic routine or the ways in which they signify that this is a funny comic book world where guys like these can exist and menace the day. In fact it's partially the ways in which these characters are absurd, baffling freaks that can only exist the way they do in comic books, that is what makes them so great.
But while this makes The Ventriloquist & Scarface perfect serial villains, it's also part of what makes it so that they don't exactly see much usage outside of it - they don't really have any business not being a Gotham City problem, and they're not very conductive to grander arcs and storylines. It's rare for them to even take center stage as main villains as is, instead they tend to be sandwhiched as amusing detours between the real villains. As far as amusing detours go, they're among the best - but it's still a waste of what they can do.
This is partially because, yes, they really aren't much of a threat to Batman, and this in a larger issue that has exacerbated across the entire rogues gallery, but Wesker has never truly needed to be a major threat to Batman's skills - he consistently works by being a much greater threat to himself and everyone around him, because the man who holds the gun-wielding puppet is always also a hostage in need of saving, and because the puppet is completely and utterly out for blood and sets sights on people Batman has to stretch thin to reach and save. Some have argued that this deal is somewhat redundant given Two-Face exists (especially considering he too does the self-hostage thing, and he is one Bruce is primed to care about a LOT more), but if anything, I think The Ventriloquist is straightforwardly better at being the villain defined by his split-personality. He can mine that idea for consistently more enjoyable results in whimsy and horror and tragedy, because he has no other major ideas to contend with getting in the way of Scarface.
Two-Face having a split personality is a distant second in storytelling value to his core deal that is the coin and his duality - there are stories for Two-Face that have mined good results from said split, but largely because they make this divide a resulting effect and not the driving force of his character, and unless you're willing to take the time to properly develop the Other/"Scarvey" as an equal equivalent character, it tends to fall into overdone schlocky "haunted by my evil alter-ego" territory that frankly diminishes Harvey Dent, who calls for richer nuance and more complicated material. This is not a problem for Wesker and Scarface, who are perfectly fine as shlocky absurd creatures, and whose existence siphons away each other's range of complexity and human emotion and flattens them into a corny and miserable cartoon comedy routine with very real guns and drugs and murders attached, and unlike Two-Face, this works for them instead of against them. Harvey lives in the half measures, the pull between worlds, the contradictions, the inability to fully commit and to fully fall into the abyss, the fact that his surrender of choice is still a fight to make different choices - but all is already lost for Arnold Wesker, the weak little scion of a murdered mob family who endures 24/7 abuse from the uncomplicated rotten son of a bitch gangster who has no doubts or hesitations about anything, who forces him to rip up his other felt friends and the last pictures of his mother, until Wesker shoots his own hand or feeds the puppet graphically into woodchippers, and then rebuilds him so he can never stop haunting and cursing him and everyone else.
Scarface is a dummy--literally, a blockhead. And yet he is probably the smartest and meanest adversary Batman has ever gone up against.
The setup consistently wrongfoots Batman, who has to rely on and save the sad little man who is causing all the trouble; the gang members, who naturally canโt choose between the two when they turn on each other; and the audience, which is both delighted by the cheekiness of the conceit and unnerved by the sense that this villain, of all the whackjobs in BTAS, is perhaps its most plausible. - ToonZone review of "Read My Lips"
I think of The Ventriloquist as having the opposite problem as Mr.Freeze - Freeze is rather well-known for being a difficult character to integrate on serialized fashion because he has a singular concrete tragedy and goal that he works to correct, because a vast part of his appeal is in his nobility and refusal to engage as a villain unless his hand is forced, and because he has an arc he needs to follow which only opens up for about a limited number of stories, and thus most attempts to adapt Freeze have taken lengths to strip him of these qualities to make him work better as a serialized forever comic book villain, to varying degrees of failure and a couple of successes here and there. But while he has many issues as a reocurring forever baddie, Mr.Freeze is an extremely cinematic villain - his personality, his weapons, the way he talks, the vibe and climate he brings, the operatic tragedy of it all, him being one of the very few Batman villains whose success or death can elicit serious reaction from an audience, and so on. He is a very self-evident character to pick from if you want to go big and if you want to make a tragic epic within a Batman story, he's almost a shoe-in for that.
The Ventriloquist I think has the opposite situation - he is a spectacular character to have running in place dealing with endless variations of his central gimmick and routine, and subjecting Batman to it. He comes with a pre-packaged dynamic with himself that's so efficient, that most of his best moments and stories need Batman to be merely the spectator of Arnold Wesker's inevitable self-destruction. He always has a reason to go up against Da Gatman and everyone else who gets in his way, he always has a reason to want to be involved in whatever gangster plots are being cooked, and if you just need a Weird Gangster to shoot at Batman for a couple of seconds while he's busy dealing with a larger problem, he's as good of a instant visual for that as it gets. But he's not exactly a character you can pin a whole movie on, he's not really going to be plotting the destruction of Gotham on a regular basis, and compared to other gangland players like Two-Face and Penguin he doesn't exactly have much of an "in" for being involved in those Gotham destruction / Batman personal saga plots. His best stories don't exactly open much room for a win - he has spectacularly depressing stories, but again, they are that way because Batman is unable to do much of anything for him and his victims until it's too late. His efficiency is wired to a mold that Batman doesn't really follow anymore.
These aren't necessarily problems to be fixed, and I do think there are ways in which The Ventriloquist and Scarface could be made to play bigger roles or stand their ground more as threats without forcing them to become different characters. It's been common to assign the Scarface puppet for other characters to play around with, and while none of the other Ventriloquists really supplant the original dynamic, Dark Patterns has recently done a terrific job of escalating Scarface's threat across a story arc without undermining the core elements of what makes him interpersonally comedic and scary and tragic and effective as a Batman villain. His finest moments remain in the DCAU, and particularly Read My Lips has a wonderful lean efficiency to it that I'd like to see emphasized elsewhere with him. The ways in which he functions and what makes him effective enough to do what he does to the point he gets to do it again and again no matter how much it wrecks his life.
The most effective gangster in Gotham City, only divided by half - there are plenty of bigger and greater and more powerful crimelords in town, but they're aspiring for greater things and different things, the kind of things Wesker may have achieved for himself if he were a different man. The Ventriloquist and Scarface are not at cross purposes with each other or deciding different outcomes, they're both on the same page because Scarface is da boss, and as much as both have clear psychological weaknesses to exploit, they have also compartmentalized themselves in ways that give them clear advantages over everyone else as well. If Scarface is anything, it's an unsurmountable force of sheer gangland meanness, and if Arnold Wesker is anything, it's the sorry yet resilient wretch who will be there and put up with anything for the sake of the boss. You may think he is dumb - but you don't talk to him like he's dumb.
Also RIP Croaky, he was too good for this world.
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