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Penguin from batman1/6/2024 ![]() Meredith’s take on the character was certainly beloved by fans as well. Each showed up in 19 episodes, a full 15% of the series’ episodes. This version of the Penguin was, along with Cesar Romero’s Joker, the most consistent returning special guest villain. His henchmen always had either bird or fish names, and his schemes were usually in the same vein. Meredith’s grizzly voice and choice to give Penguin a distinctive, squawk-like laugh proved especially iconic. Actor Burgess Meredith portrayed the Penguin, in traditional top hat and tails, with a monocle and long cigarette holder. In 1966, the Penguin joined other famous (and not so famous) Batman villains as a recurring foe on the Batman TV series. In the Post- Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Comics continuity, Penguin would help Batman on occasion when it suited him, and Batman even admitted that the Penguin was smarter than he. Comics writers often wrote the Penguin as a cultured, intelligent adversary for Batman, whose downfall is his supremely low self-esteem where Batman is concerned. But it’s because of his dogged devotion to his bird brethren that Batman and Robin are usually able to defeat him. The Penguin’s schemes in the Silver Age were almost solely bird-themed stealing Faberge eggs, robbing aviaries, stealing priceless fossils of eggs. A businessman, Cobblepot owns the Iceberg Lounge, a fancy nightclub that is also home to a number of under-the-table illegal activities. He’s one of the few holdovers from the gimmicky gangster-style villains who Batman would fight during his early days. He possesses all of his faculties and has used his wit and guile to set himself up as one of the top criminals in Gotham. Unique among Batman’s rogues, the Penguin is not criminally insane. In some versions, Cobblepot turns to crime after his mother dies and the bank repossesses the bird shop, along with all of her birds. His love of birds would eventually lead him to study ornithology in college-only to find out that he knew more about birds than most of his professors did. He saw the birds as his only friends, and devoted all of his attention to them. His parents owned a bird shop, where Cobblepot spent most of his time. His mother forced him to carry an umbrella everywhere he went after his father died of pneumonia following umbrella-free rain walking. As a child, he was the victim of bullying because of his short stature, weight, nose, and way of walking. As would happen consistently with Batman’s villains, the Penguin got a tragic backstory. It wasn’t until the Silver Age that Penguin became Oswald Cobblepot. His trademark umbrellas would house his various gadgets, explosive devices, a guns, or hiding places for stolen goods. Always ambitious, he quickly rose through the ranks of the criminal underworld and took over one of the city’s most notorious crime families. His schemes were all ways to outthink the caped crusader and prove his acumen to the mobsters in Gotham City. Beakish nose, Emperor penguin-esque physique.Įarly on, Penguin had no identity beyond his alias and appearance. People who wore tuxedoes back in the olden days would be compared to a Penguin, and so artist and co-creator Bill Finger amped that up, making Cobblepot’s anatomy more like that of a bird. Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot (excuse me all to hell) considers himself the “Gentleman of Crime,” far more than a petty thug or boorish gangster. Penguin first showed up in Detective Comics #58 in December 1941 and since then he has cultivated a very strange but important niche in the lore of Gotham City’s most notorious baddies. But of all of those, none has been both as omnipresent and as underserved as Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. Scarecrow, Two-Face, Clayface, Riddler, Hugo Strange, and Mad Hatter all got their start before 1950. Joker and Catwoman both appeared in Batman #1 in 1940. Many of the most popular and influential villains in Batman’s lengthy rogues gallery debuted within the first decade of the comic.
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