Batman: One Bad Day - Penguin #1

[cyberghostface]

"For me, what I wanted to do, I want it to be honorific of the past. For people who have no idea who Oswald is, give them a taste of his origin story. Do something that's immediate. But yeah, the best thing you can hope for is people go, 'So when are we going to see Lili again? When are we going to see Freida and her gun gals?'

To me, the most wonderful thing is if the corporate power called up and [went], 'Listen, how quickly can you do a limited series or any kind of a series with this characters?' I would love that. Everybody knows how seminal Killing Joke was and how much that was part of the canon for so many years. If any of us, if any of these characters, if any of these moments can be part of the wider storytelling, it's drop the mic, it's walk away. How wonderful would that be?" -- John Ridley

Comments

[agent8]

I like to think of Penguin as Batman's Lex Luthor. He's smart, cunning, and ruthless. Smart and cunning enough to make his plans and have enough cut-outs to cover his tracks and bury/destroy the evidence of his law-breaking meaning there's often very little, if anything, to tie hm to any actual crime. Just rumor and innuendo. Ruthless enough to get his hands dirty if he has to (and still smart enough to cover it up).

He's also rich, maybe not Luthor or Wayne rich, but rich enough to buy off officials, cops, judges, prosecutors, etc. Rich enough to buy silence. Rich enough to spread it around a little for PR purposes so that the public has a pretty good opinion of him.

So Batman and the unbought cops may be 98.88% certain that Oswald is behind any given crime, but they just don't have any evidence that can stand up in court.

[lego_joker]

A slight problem with that: Batman made his bones chasing exactly that breed of criminal out of Gotham. I like Mobster!Penguin in small doses, but if he becomes too prominent one gets the impression that Bruce has literally made negative progress since Year One.

[lonewolf23k]

The way I look at it, it's still progress for Bruce, in that he's chased off the mundane crime bosses.

It's just that the one crime boss that's managed to stuck around is one that's evolved a resistance to his brand of crime fighting, and has assumed dominance over that specific ecosystem.

Call it Unnatural Selection.