Just Another Batman Blog

Batman has been featured in comic books since his creation in 1939. As a consequence, an 80 year old hero has a large number of similarly aged villains. Most of the villains I've already posted about here were created between 1939 and 1971. A theme to these blog posts have been the evolution of these old characters into less campy, scarier, more realistically terrifying villains. However, more recently created characters come already fully realized as completely evolved nightmares. In 2007 Grant Morrison introduced Professor Pyg . Before that, Dan Slott and Ryan Sook created Jane Doe. In 2003, Slott and Sook wrote the miniseries Arkham Asylum: Living Hell . They introduce several new characters, some more interesting than others, but Jane Doe is one of only a few that would continue to appear in other DC mediums. Jane Doe is also one of a few female villains who aren't sidekicks. Jane Doe's true name is unknown. In fact, other than being distinctly female, she has n...

It seems like the biggest challenge for contemporary comic writers is creating new characters that are as interesting and potentially as longlasting as the more classic characters. How do you create a villain for Batman, for example, that is as terrifying and dangerous an adversary as say... the Joker ? Grant Morrison had a run on Batman and Robin that not only had to create an interesting storyline without using Bruce Wayne as Batman, but also had to develop a new Robin (Damian Wayne) who initially wasn't very popular (the test tube son of Batman and Talia? Really?). Morrison did pretty well, and created some new interesting villains in the process. Professor Pyg is one of these new characters, and perhaps the most interesting, most twisted, original Batman character in the last 30 years. His first appearance is in Batman #666 (2007), created by Grant Morrison and Andy Kubert. Professor Pyg doesn't really become developed though until 2009 when he appears in Batman and ...

Sometimes comicbook villains are rebooted or reused periodically. Clayface is one of these. The original Clayface was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane and appeared in Detective Comics #40 in 1940. Originally Clayface was the alter ego of Basil Karlo, an infamous b-list horror film actor. He dressed up in one of his costumed roles, the horror villain Clayface, in order to intimidate, terrorize, and murder people associated with a remake of one of his movies. The second, and best known Clayface was created by Bill Finger and Shedlon Moldoff in Detective Comics #298 in 1961. Matt Hagen is a career criminal who gets mutated by radioactive material, allowing him to reform and change himself into any shape imaginable. This version of Clayface is the most well known, appearing across most mediums. Later on, the original Basil Karlo Clayface turns himself into a similar transformational monster using Hagen's DNA. There have been 8 other Clayface-related villains throughout Batman...