Garbage Town

Zero Year! Riddler without his mask | Part 1

Zero Year! Riddler without his mask | Part 2

The Many Faces of Edward Nygma

The Penguin. Was gonna put off this ask for a bit but I got surprised today with an incredible rendition of him, so now the dastardly bumbershoot waddled and squawked his way into my thoughts again and I gotta talk about him.

Penguin's not just my favorite Batman villain, he's my favorite DC character and comic book supervillain, the main reason I even want to write a Batman story someday.

I love the imagery that surrounds him, the trick umbrellas and the birds he so lovely dotes after and the WAKs and the Iceberg Lounge, which has become maligned in recent years as a sign of his downfall, but I very much appreciate as a concept in general still. I love a lot of the performances and actors who've taken him over the years. Burgess Meredith and Danny DeVito are some of my favorite performers of all time, Paul Williams has a wonderful voice and starred in my favorite film of all time. Tom Kenny, David Ogden Stiers, Robin Lord Taylor, Penguin's just had such great, terrific performances and adaptations. Batman Returns is my favorite Batman film by far and it was what got me to start paying more attention to Oswald.

I love the roles he can play in any given Batman story and how he's managed to endure all of his falls from grace by becoming an indispensable part of Batman's worldbuilding. I love his varied dynamics with Batman and Riddler and Catwoman and Gordon and his henchmen and those who get close to him. I love his style and the way he conducts himself when he's allowed to be more than just a generic mob boss. Penguin's design has, by simply staying unchanged over the decades, gone from "common rich person wear draped over a funny cartoon gangster" to "he is so out of touch and desperate for respectability that he dresses like an 1930s capitalist caricature, like a little kid's idea of what a rich and respectable man looks like, and Penguin's still stuck in that mindset". I love how absurd and plausible he is.

I like that Penguin can very easily fit just about any kind of Batman story, from the campy supervillain plots to the gritty urban crime ones. You can tell stories about Penguin falling in love, pretending to be legit because he doesn't want his aunt to learn he's a criminal, and opening up a comedy act with a talking penguin, or stories about Penguin terrorizing the city with giant robots and guided missiles and driving people to suicide. I like that he's a character who both relishes in his lifestyles of supervillain and crimelord alike, and yet is perpetually restless because the minute he acquires what he wants, he immediately starts wanting something else. He could have Batman and the Batfamily and all other supervillains wiped out and have Gotham in his pocket and maybe even become President of the United States, and he'd still want more. Because Oswald is nothing but wants, the wants of a traumatized manchild in a funny costume throwing money and toys and brute force and tantrums at the world until it makes sense, which only makes him far too fitting as a Batman villain.

Everyone forgets that Penguin was canonically the first villain to ever successfully escape Batman at the end of a story, completely bypassing the usual "villain swears revenge behind bars" ending to instead escape scot-free, and went on to establish himself as one of his biggest, most inventive and most cunning villains, second only, if not equal, to Joker. I love that he's ruthless and inventive and classy and cunning and brutal and how his main trick is using the fact that everyone underestimates the short fat man to his advantage. He's taken traits that got many of us in real life relentlessly tormented for them, and he uses them to pull the wool over those who think they are better than him.

It'ss a trick that works because even in real life people can't stop looking at this weird and silly little man and think "that guy's too silly for a Batman villain, he's not a murder clown or musclebound monster, what's he gonna do" and, yeah, that's the point, that's been the point from day one, he doesn't look scary or intimidating or even that evil, and he's the guy who pulls the rug under supergenius fighting machine Batman and becomes the top crimelord of Gotham City, a city ruled by terrors and manias and monsters infinitely bigger and scarier and stronger than he is, and he STILL made it to the top and he STILL maintains it, time and time again even when newer and flashier and scarier villains come and go. Batman is, at it's core, a fundamentally absurd character, and Penguin acts as a reminder of that. Because the minute we accept a man can terraform himself with training and money into a living legend on the level of gods, there's no reason why a tiny fat man with similar drive and resources can't likewise throw his weight with monsters and warriors far above his station.

Despite how ridiculously often he's disrespected by writers and fans alike, how far he's fallen off his former position in Batman's Rogues Gallery, and how often he's used as just a punching bag for assorted Bat-people, Penguin never goes away. He's the biggest survivor of all of Batman's villains, more so than the genuinely immortal ones, because he's the cockroach that won't go away no matter how many times you flush it.

Because once you get past the piles of money and the lounge fortresses and the armies of goons and the piles of cartoony gadget toys not too dissimilar from Batman's own, what the Penguin has is brains, and spite and hatred on a scale no other Batman villain has. He hates Batman, because Batman is nothing but yet another bully who thinks he can push Oswald around just because he's bigger and stronger. He hates the lower class for it's unsophisticated brutes and boors that made his childhood hell. He hates the upper class that's rejected and also tormented him since infancy, that he desperately spent so long trying to be a part of. He hates the monsters and supervillains he works with and has to associate with to stay alive. He hates the city that he fights to rule over tooth and nail.

And although he may never admit it, he hates himself, because he'a short paunchy man with a beakish nose who's brutal and immoral not just because those are the cards life dealt him, but because he likes what it affords him too much to give it away. Because he's never going to have the love and acceptance he desperately craves, he will never be able to accept it or keep it. Because he can never fully be a gentleman, or a monster, but instead a sad mix who belongs in neither of their worlds. Because at the end, he doesn't look like anyone else. He looks like one of him.

And still, I like Penguin because he's a Gentleman Villain. The one Gentleman Villain of Batman's rogues gallery, even if that's faded from a lot of his recent appearences that pushed the crimelord aspects to the forefront. He dresses like a gentleman thief, he's canonically a huge A.J Raffles fan, he's one of the most cunning brains of Gotham, he's got the money, resources, and adventurous spirit. Problem is, he's The Penguin. And suddenly, all that he has becomes overblown, outlandish, theatrical, and out of touch purely because it's him trying to do all those things. He's a gentleman adventurer gone rogue, the Count Fosco of the DCU, and that only makes it amusing, even endearing, when Penguin does engage in the swashbuckling antics he's so fond of.

When all his plans go to hell and so he starts fencing Batman, or when he commands henchmen with superflous fancy language, or even when Oswald gives the whole "hero" thing a shot and we see he's actually not bad at it, maybe he actually could have been one if it wasn't for the bile drowning his heart and the hellscape that warped innocent young Cobblepot into Gotham's Penguin, a name that immediately denotes something silly and ridiculous, and he carries it with pride, because he will make you respect that name.

And that's just a couple of reasons. I really, really love this character to the point of obsession and the main reason why I ever wanted to write stories for DC was to get to write Penguin and at least try to do the character a little more justice. But if nothing else, Penguin endures, regardless of what happens to him, in and out of universe. If nothing else, that's a very admirable quality in a supervillain. Oswald is the best.