Just Another Batman Blog

  This is probably the most obscure villain to be featured yet here. With only a handful of appearances, and only two being more than a cameo, this guy is for the weirdo diehards. First appearing in 1966, The Monarch of Menace was created by Robert Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff. He had only one other full appearance in a Batman story in 1981, 15 years later. Mark Russell brought him back as a cameo in 2020, and he's made 2 other cameos since.  Introduced in Detective Comics #350, Batman describes the Monarch of Menace as the only criminal to elude him and escape into presumed retirement. However, the Monarch's son gets caught committing crimes using his father's alias. Batman and Robin use the son as bait to lure the Monarch back to Gotham and have him arrested. When Batman goes missing after a battle with Ra's al Ghul , the Monarch resurfaces again. He capitalizes on Batman's disappearance and claims he has captured the Batman, using that lie to defraud other crimin...

  I've said it before on this blog, and I'll say it again, good villains in fiction need good criminal motivations. Good Batman villains need to be more than obsessed with beating Batman. The idea of a villain plotting and scheming to take down Batman, like some Western gunslinger kid looking to out shoot the most notorious outlaw, is only really good and compelling maybe one time. We had that one time in Batman comics, it was called Knightfall . After Bane's storyarc, we didn't need to revisit a personal crusade to tear down and ruin Batman for no other reason than bragging rights. However, comicbook writers continued to do just that. We got Bane, followed by Hush . The Joker  has done it multiple times. This is getting out of hand.  Simon Hurt was created by Grant Morrison in 2008, based on an unnamed scientist character created by Sheldon Maldoff and Charles Paris for a one issue story in Batman #156 in 1963. His backstory is a bit of a crazy retcon, but stay with...

  Earlier I wrote about the Terrible Trio . This gang of three white collar criminal dudes hide behind animal motifs, The Great White Shark, the Vulture, and the Fox. Gotham also has another threesome criminal gang, all women, all arthropod aliases, all criminal.  Created in 1966 by Robert Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff, these three vamps debuted together for a Poison Ivy driven story. The Silken Spider, Tiger Moth, and Dragonfly made such a name for themselves criminally, that they became known as the World's Public Enemies, and went by the aliases Public Enemy Number 1, Number 2, and Number 3. They appear to be high stakes thieves in their original incarnation. Poison Ivy apparently is jealous for some reason and wants their fame.  Later, they are rebooted as members of the League of Assassins . I'm a fan of this idea, I don't think you can have enough agents for the League. Kevin Smith gives Tiger Moth a cameo in his unfinished Batman run.  This Tiger Moth incarnat...

Pulp fiction seems to have a villain motivation problem. Back when I wrote the first post for this blog, about the Joker , I included a quote from Ben Bova. He states, "in the real world there are no villains. No one actually sets out to do evil [. . .] There are no villains cackling and rubbing their hands in glee as they contemplate their evil deeds". Villainy, in pulp fiction, is just bad guys doing bad things for no other reason, presumably, than to be bad. Snidley Whiplash hasn't any reasons for tying women to traintracks, normal people don't do that. But, normal people do hatch plans like Iago to psychologically control others through gaslighting, manipulation, rumors, and drama. Real people do cheat and steal to amass wealth. There is no believability or realism to Snidley Whiplash's villainy, but sociopaths and white collar criminals do exist.   These characters, the Terrible Trio, are far more like Snidley Whiplash. Created in 1958 by Dave Wood a...

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...

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...

The Gotham mafia may be one of my favorite Batman villains. No one else seems to fawn over them the way fans do for any of the other Batman villains. Looking up Falcone or Maroni fan art on the internet is useless. I can find a billion awful Harley Quinn pieces, but Carmine Falcone turns up just a few scans from comic pages. Batman's origin always included becoming Batman to fight crime in Gotham, a city with a high crime rate. Miller, I think, wanted to ground his Batman in reality, and historically big cities had organized crime problems. Gotham, being the culmination of every corrupted, dark, and dangerous part of every city everywhere, should have organized crime. Bob Kane, Sheldon Maldoff and Bill Finger created Lew Moxon as the crime boss responsible for Batman's parents' murder, Sal Maroni as the mobster responsible for disfiguring Two Face, and Tony Zucco as the racketeer who put a hit on Dick Grayson's parents. But organized crime didn't take a fron...

I began playing Arkham Asylum again after reading a bit about the new Batman Arkham Origins game set to be released in October. Although the Joker is clearly the main antagonist (as he ought to be in a Batman game), I had forgotten how many other villains had substantial importance to the plot. Some of the supporting villains in this game were reimagined, saved from the borderline ridiculous reputations created in earlier incarnations. Poison Ivy is one of these characters. Almost doomed from the start, Poison Ivy was created in 1966 by Robert Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff and debuted in Batman #181. She is a reaction to the growing feminism and environmentalism of the time and fit right into the "campy villains with a theme" trend of the 50's and 60's. Connected with plants and ecology, Poison Ivy becomes a vengeful Mother Nature type of character, extracting revenge on people for abuses to the environment. JT Krul was instrumental in developing the character...

Many Batman villains are highly intelligent with severely warped psychosis.  Mr. Freeze is a good example of a highly intelligent scientist bent to extreme measures, making him turn to crime to fund his obsession. Created in 1959 by David Wood and Sheldon Moldoff, Mr. Zero is a prime example of the thematic camp villains committing crimes based on their theme. Mr. Zero's name was changed on the Batman television show to Mr. Freeze, which was then changed in the comics to match. Mr. Freeze has a few origin stories, all of them resulting in his body chemistry changing, requiring his need to wear a supersuit that keeps his temperature below zero. Originally, Mr. Zero was researching cryo-technology, weaponizing it. His freeze weapon backfired and turned him into a sub-zero freak. Paul Dini re-imagined the character as a brilliant scientist whose wife Nora became terminally ill. Dr. Viktor Fries cryogenically freezes his wife until he can find a cure.  An accident during...