Just Another Batman Blog

There are an awful lot of lame comicbook villains out there, especially from the Comics Code era . Once the Code was deemed unnecessary and ridiculous, plots in comics became, like any fictional medium, relatable again. This meant villains could be villains again worthy of super heroics to stop them, and not a bunch of schoolyard pranksters and petty thieves best left to rookie cops and mall security. If the criminals in your neighborhood are tougher than the villains in your fiction, there is something wrong. But still, stupid villain concepts popped up now and then. For a long while different writers for comics, movies, and games have been trying, mostly successfully, to reboot Batman villains in ways that make them less of a joke and more like realistic horror shows. I was never sold on The Ventriloquist. A puppet with a machine gun never scared me. Created in 1988 by Wagner, Grant, and Breyfogle for Detective Comics #583, the original Ventriloquist was a study in dissociativ...

Calendar Man was created in 1958 by Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff. The character made seven appearances from 1958 to 1996. In 1996 Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale rewrote him for the Long Halloween where he played a major role in the murder mystery. His real name is Julian Day. For most of his existence in the Batman mythos Calendar Man was essentially a gimmick character, committing larceny according to days of the week, holidays, and seasons. He morphed into a supervillain with super weapons used to pull heists, and then built elaborate traps to kidnap victims for ransom. Loeb rewrote him as a Hannibal Lector type of character. This idea of him being a high functioning sociopath, a dangerous mastermind with an obsession with dates helped resurrect the character and save him from being forever a joke character, like Kite Man , the Polkadot Man, and Crazy Quilt. This version of Calendar Man was also used in the Batman Arkham games, which painted him as a very dangerous adversary, cont...