I love redemption arcs in comic-books. I love anything that actually moves a familiar villain forward into a more complicated situation, especially if it’s the result of a meaningful shift in the character’s status quo. (e.g., not mind control, a dream sequence, etc.)
I briefly mentioned Dr. Doom’s recent turn to “good”, which has now been undone in a way I really dislike. I wish they’d stuck with it. There’s an imaginative cowardice in a long-running serial when a changed character gets reverted by fiat to a baseline without any real reason other than nervousness about the familiar becoming strange over time.
Today I’m going to talk about one of the most interesting and ultimately extremely unsettling redemption arcs. For many years, DC Comics published a licensed comic that was based on the really wonderful animated Batman series developed by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini in the 1990s. It largely followed the lead of the animated series by being safe-for-kids while also being quite sophisticated in the story-telling.
Most of the issues, drawn in the style of the Timm-Dini series, were one-and-done stories rather than ongoing arcs. It went through some retitles and relaunches to try and reflect changes to the animated series. In 2003, it relaunched again as The Batman Adventures, written by Dan Slott and drawn by Ty Templeton, both big favorites of mine.
This time, it had a multi-issue arc. The Penguin runs for mayor of Gotham City and wins. Batman is absolutely certain that there is something dirty involved and sets out to investigate, using every resource at his command and calling in all of his allies.
It’s a reasonable enough suspicion. Batman pokes and prods over twelve issues, a year’s worth of stories, and he finds a few odd things. Someone’s out to kill the Riddler, who is also going straight, because allegedly he has information on the Penguin’s election. (It turns out to be on an encoded smartphone prototype but the Riddler is in a coma and can’t unlock it for Batman and his allies.) The Clock King, aka Temple Fugit, seems to have been involved with the election somehow—his entire modus operandi in the one episode of the animated series where he appeared centered on hatred for the previous mayor of Gotham City, Harold Hill, and Hill is one of the candidates who lost to the Penguin. But the Batman Family can’t prove anything specifically about what Fugit was up to.
In the meantime, Batman and his allies are closely monitoring the Penguin himself, figuring that at any moment he’s going to be involved in obvious criminal activity. They don’t catch him at anything despite all the investigative skills they can muster. The Penguin announces that costumed supervillains and superheroes alike are no longer welcome in Gotham, and sets Commissioner Gordon the task of arresting any of them that show themselves. But he genuinely seems to mean the “and supervillains” part too, promising the beleaguered citizens of Gotham that they’re finally going to feel safe.
The Penguin mistrusts Gordon and the Gotham police, as well as other bureaucrats, who he feels are trying to undercut him or skirt his authority, and starts surrounding himself with his own hired men (who to Batman’s frustration also don’t seem to be criminals). A minority of Gotham voters end up liking the mayor, as he governs somewhat well and forcefully, though certainly with an eye for publicity stunts and a tremendous dose of narcissism. On the other hand, the popular opposition to Mayor Oswald Cobblepot (aka the Penguin) gets more intense over time, particularly because many Gothamites just assume, like Batman, that the election wasn’t legitimate and they just cannot respect the guy—he’s a classless little man who pretends to be richer than he is and they just cannot shake their memories of him being a sleazy nightclub owner and criminal boss.
Starting to sound familiar? Hang on.
The story concludes in issue #13. It concludes in a jarring way. It’s about one step away from “And then Batman used a gun”. I had really liked Slott and Templeton’s work on this title up to this point—they had some fresh takes on Batman, his friends, and his enemies, with a lot of changes to long-standing animated series characterizations.
The issue opens with Mayor Cobblepot complaining to Gordon that he still hasn’t brought Batman to justice despite a clear order to do so, and then the mayor notices that there’s a crowd of protestors outside. He grabs a bullhorn to yell at them:
He tells his private security force to clear them out, and is pretty indifferent to whether any of the protestors get injured in the process.
The Penguin is not wrong, by the way, that Batman is doing everything he can to subvert the mayor’s authority—when the protest takes place, Batman has been disguised for a week as a police guard inside the mayoral mansion, spying on everything the Penguin is doing. But just as in the previous twelve issues, there just isn’t anything happening, and he can’t understand it.
The Penguin, in the meantime, is furious about the continued drop in the polls and the hostility of the press (except for the one paper he controls directly).
At this moment, Batman breaks in to Cobblepot’s office. He and the Penguin fight. In between dodging the Penguin’s umbrella sword, Batman patiently explains that he’s finally broken the encryption on the Riddler’s smartphone and gotten the evidence that led to the Riddler being stabbed into a coma. It turns out that Temple Fugit, the Clock King, interfered with the election via hacking the new voting machines.
According to Batman, the Penguin actually came in sixth.
Cobblepot is actually emotionally devastated by the news. He loved the idea that a majority voted for him. He wants to be mayor, he likes being at the center of attention. So he asks Batman, “What buys your silence? Do you want the signal back up in the sky? Or should I tear up the warrant for your arrest?” Batman replies: “I don’t do deals”.
The Penguin decides to try and kill Batman to silence him. Batman replies, as he dodges ray blasts from the umbrella, “That’s your solution? You revert to form? You try to murder me to keep a lid on what I know?” The Penguin quite reasonably and accurately replies, “It’s not called murder when it’s justifiable self-defense, you fool! You keep invading my home! I have witnesses!” (Batman was a wanted vigilante who broke into the mayor’s office, beat up his police guard, and attacked the mayor himself just to report information about the previous election that isn’t even a crime committed by the mayor himself.)
At this point, Batman indulges in what is often one of my least favorite tropes: the revelation that he’s been surreptitiously recording the villain’s confession and broadcasting it all over the city.
The thing is, though, that this isn’t even a conventional villainous confession. All the Penguin did wrong is fight back when attacked in his own home—in our world, there isn’t a court in the world that would have convicted him for that. Ok, sure, he offered a quid pro quo deal to drop criminal charges against Batman in return for Batman not revealing the truth about the election, that’s a bad look. But the real thing is not that the Penguin was revealed by Batman to be a “murderous thug” but that Batman revealed that the last election had been manipulated, though the Penguin seems to have had nothing to do with that himself.
The Penguin appears the next day in public to announce his resignation.
He goes full-out Nixon: they won’t have Oswald Cobblepot to kick around anymore. That is, “at least not until the fall election. You’ve seen what I can do as mayor, Gotham City. When the time comes, I’m sure to come back in a landslide”.
On his way out the door, the Penguin tells Commissioner Gordon that he wants him to pass a message to Batman. “Tell him he took away everything and I’m never going to forgive him for this. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, someday, I’m going to kill him.”
Ok, so not a redemption arc. Or is it? I mean, the Penguin really went out of his way not to be a criminal while he was mayor. The world’s greatest detective couldn’t catch him doing anything illegal or even slightly shady. All he did on a video was defend himself and be genuinely surprised about an alleged crime he didn’t do or commission. And all he’s doing when he speaks to Gordon is swearing vengeance for something that’s been done to him, for the loss of the prestige and power that he enjoyed having.
But come on, it’s the Penguin. And he came in sixth and the election was rigged.
Well, about that.
So, um. This was in 2004. Yes, three years after a close and very contested election, but I think it’s more the resemblance to rather more recent events that is unsettling.
There are a lot of ways for me to process re-reading this story. Maybe it shows that the discourse we’re trapped in right now about elections, rigging and legitimacy is just a deep resonant narrative structure in any democracy. Rich vulgar men who win despite seeming to be unpopular aren’t just a phenomenon of the last five years.
My main reaction is just as a Batman fan, though. Slott and Templeton spent thirteen issues building up a story where you presumed they would reveal some clever plot underneath the whole arc: the Penguin really was up to something, the Penguin was someone else’s pawn, the Penguin tried to go straight and then gets corrupted by political power, something. But what happens instead? The Penguin does nothing illegal and doesn’t even govern badly for the most part. There’s some kind of mysterious skullduggery going on all around him but he doesn’t seem responsible for it. Temple Fugit seems to be up to something, and stabs the Riddler to prevent him from revealing it. But Batman’s got nothing. There’s nothing to unravel. Nothing to prove.
So he assaults the mayor, the mayor fights back as he’s entitled to, and Batman fakes evidence to cause political damage to someone who is inconveniencing Batman. The chief law enforcement officer of the city becomes aware that Batman has faked evidence to frame a law-abiding citizen and force a political outcome and is perfectly fine with it.
That is really not a very Batman thing. I mean, ok, he breaks people’s bones and goes wherever he pleases and has surveillance systems all over Gotham, but he’s generally constrained by “that was necessary to save lives and get at the truth” and generally is validated by the confirmed truth in his stories. Batman doesn’t operate in a universe where readers are left wondering, mostly, if Batman maybe got it wrong or whether there’s something ambiguous about what he’s investigating. We don’t see a prisoner in jail for ten years because Batman faked evidence in cahoots with Commissioner Gordon. When an anti-Batman politician shows up (a fairly common event in Batman’s comics history) he just deals with it, for the most part. When Batman ambushes a dinner party in Batman: Year One where politicians, judges and the commissioner of police are present along with mob bosses, it’s because he’s sure for good reason that everybody there is dirty as hell at that time and we the readers are equally sure of it.
It did occur to me on re-reading that this is kind of how the most unbalanced Trump supporters see the universe: everybody’s out to get their version of Oswald Cobblepot, and the people who pose as being righteous like Batman, Commissioner Gordon and the press are in on the conspiracy and willing to do anything to anything. It’s especially weird to come across this in this context because the writer, Dan Slott, is famously liberal and anti-Trump. It kind of feels to me like the idea here was to refuse the obvious or expected ending to the arc and to give the Penguin (in the sideline continuity of the comic-books based on the animated series) a new motivation for hating Batman. That didn’t pay off simply because only five issues later, this title was cancelled and replaced by a new comic adapting the animated series The Batman (aka “the Matsudaverse”, after its main creator).
It was a strange story that didn’t feel right back then, and it’s way more unsettling now.