Kite Man, Hell Yeah!

I have been reading through Tom King's recent Batman run. Like Snyder before him, King has been overhauling stale, silly aspects to Batman canon and recreating them into twisted horror shows. The recently completed War of Jokes and Riddles (spoilers ahead, I guess) revolved around a pretty innocuous character and his origins, and it was done in a way that you don't immediately see coming. King takes perhaps one of the stupidest Batman villains, The Kite Man, and turns him into a tragic victim of both the Joker and the Riddler.

Before this reboot, however, Kite Man started out in Batman #133 (1960), created by Bill Finger and Dick Sprang. His real name is Charles Brown, an homage to Charlie Brown of the Peanuts, created by Charles Schultz, who had repeat issues with an infamous kite eating tree. Right out of the gate, Kiteman was fated to be a joke. 

He had 7 or 8 appearances since 1960, none of them truly memorable. Two of them ended in his death. His appearances in other media portray him as a bumbling crook, easily dispatched by whatever hero happens to be nearby. 

As I've mentioned above, Tom King took the character and used him to great affect in his War of Jokes and Riddles arc, complete with an origin of aeronautical engineer. This places him within the realm of other smartypants Batman villains with graduate degrees. Charles Brown gets mixed up in the Joker/Riddler conflict, loses his young son, sides with the Joker at first, but ultimately sides with the Batman and redeems himself. Of course this whole ordeal causes him to go mad. 

So, King took a villain often considered a joke character from the 1960s campy era, and rewrote him into a man broken by two of Batman's more deadly villains. Charles Brown, the Kite Man, isn't a silly joke. Now he's heartbreakingly sad. 

Kite Man, Hell Yeah.