At first glance, the Penguin of Matt Reeves’ The Batman and the recently concluded series The Penguin doesn’t seem like the crime lord we’re used to. His scarred, mottled features are a far cry from the sophisticate gentleman crime lord, or even the birdlike sewer-dweller of Tim Burton’s Batman Returns. The way he carries himself like a New Jersey mafia don feels more akin to HBO predecessor The Sopranos than anything Bob Kane or Bill Finger might have imagined. Until now, we’ve been led to believe that the Penguin is a man of wealthy stock, with a place among Gotham’s elite promised—or denied—from his birth. And that couldn’t be further from the truth with his humble East End origins here. On the surface, this “Oswald Cobb” has very little common with the “Oswald Cobblepot” we’re used to, indeed.
Or does he?
Over this past month, the creative teams behind Absolute Batman, Absolute Wonder Woman and Absolute Superman have been challenging us to re-examine exactly who these icons are at their core. By defamiliarizing aspects of their circumstances we have always taken for granted, their new stories help to reveal their true nature. In rebuilding the Penguin from his foundations, producer Matt Reeves, showrunner Lauren LeFranc and lead actor Colin Farrell have achieved what few other Batman stories have in over eighty years: an unflinching eye towards what defines Batman’s most prideful foe.
For a generation of Batman stories, the “Cobblepot” name has been one which stood amongst the founding families of Gotham, alongside the likes of Wayne and Elliot. That may explain why, to better examine Oz’s motivations, he had to be stripped of it here—the shortening to “Cobb” representing a casting down to Gotham’s slums. By widening the distance of how far Oz had to climb to achieve his goals, The Penguin gives us a bigger scope to demonstrate the character we’ve always known: a conniving manipulator without a moral center.
The Penguin is, in motivation, the Joker’s opposite. Dismissed in every room he enters as a joke, his craving is only to be taken seriously. By lowering him to the dilapidated East End, Oswald is given something to prove. Consider it an update that acknowledges what really makes someone an outsider. The wealthy class has never had a problem overlooking physical deformity or moral degeneracy. In fact, the latter is often an asset. The only unforgivable sins are to be without wealth or without a name.
By starting him out in the slums, we get a full arc of what makes the Penguin so frequently fascinating in his other incarnations—a more grounded iteration of Danny DeVito’s literal ascension from the sewers to a politician of the people. What makes the Penguin so compelling is how he challenges Batman on a different angle than any of his other enemies. Sure, he’ll occasionally pull themed heists and leave bird clues like the rest of them. But the best Penguin stories are about a man clever enough to work the system against Batman, leveraging the nuances of Gotham City’s legal, political and criminal worlds alike. The Penguin’s greatest weapon is not his trick umbrellas or his trained birds, but an understanding of how the rot which runs through Gotham City truly works—from its complex drug trade, to its warring factions on either side of the courtroom, to the sewer system itself. In a story without a Batman to distract us from a bird’s eye view of Oswald, his rise through the system from a town car driver to the king of the world prepares us for a Penguin worthy of meeting the Dark Knight on level ground.
Speaking to The Penguin’s showrunner last month at New York Comic Con, Lauren LeFranc cited her chief inspirations from the comics as not just Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s mood-setting Batman: The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, from which we derive much of the Falcone and Maroni crime family, but also one of the most overlooked miniseries in the past twenty years—Penguin: Pain and Prejudice. It’s from this series by Gregg Hurwitz and Szymon Kudranski that we’ve gotten the clearest look at the Penguin to date. It’s here that Oswald’s desperate approval from his mentally declining mother, his willingness to sacrifice his own brothers in order to avariciously hoard love like a limited resource, and the lengths he’ll go to unleash unholy wrath at any who so much as sneer in his direction are all demonstrated here at their most brutal and their most naked.
LeFranc’s Penguin, as much as it draws on the canny manipulation of Burgess Meredith’s gentleman Penguin and Tim Burton’s cold-blooded monster, uses this comics-born expression of the character as the disturbing morality play which underpins his entire motivation: what the Penguin truly seeks is love. But the Penguin has never understood what love actually is. Such is his tragedy, and such is his truth. You can strip away his wealth, his name and defamiliarize him with a mountain of prosthetic work. But it’s that pathetic cry from a broken bird that proves the central instrument of the Penguin’s song.
The Penguin, starring Colin Farrell and Cristin Milioti, is now streaming in full on Max.
Alex Jaffe is the author of our monthly "Ask the Question" column and writes about TV, movies, comics and superhero history for DC.com. Follow him on Bluesky at @AlexJaffe and find him in the DC Official Discord server as HubCityQuestion.
NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in this feature are solely those of Alex Jaffe and do not necessarily reflect those of DC or Warner Bros. Discovery, nor should they be read as confirmation or denial of future DC plans.
