What is with modern writers and going full edgelord with Penguin? Are they just overcompensating for his goofy...

What is with modern writers and going full edgelord with Penguin? Are they just overcompensating for his goofy, silver-age persona?

DC decided that they needed their own Kingpin knock-off.

>Are they just overcompensating for his goofy, silver-age persona?
Yes
Literally everything edgy about anything related to Batman and comics in general is because writers want to distance themselves from Silver Age goofiness

I'm fine with a kingpin-esque penguin, I'm just annoyed by when writers pull shit like in the OP pic where they write him like some character from a bad creepypasta

He needed something to set him apart from all the other Batman villains that are just "mob boss, but with a thematic gimmick". So they made him exceptionally petty and prone to being hilariously, autistically excessive with his retribution.

Long before that he was made into a total sadist. That was supposed to be his gimmick. Hasn't anyone here read The Killing Peck and the Penguin Affair?

Him being a mob boss is a recent thing, like post-2000's.

I feel like there's a right way to do this an a wrong way. Paul Dini's approach of making him a petty and self-aggrandizing "legitimate businessman" who pretends he's better than the common criminals is far superior to the
>He's like, SUPER CRAZY. When he gets mad his vision literally goes blood red and fantasizes about gory murder

Penguin has a lot of good potential to be edgelord, since he's the closest of the themed rogues to still being gangster types.

I mean, the alternative is Mad Hatter running child trafficking again.

>the alternative is Mad Hatter running child trafficking again.
Has he ever had a single good comic? The only one I can think of is Robin Year One and he had a very minor role in that

The Secret Six mini when he helped out the team by kicking ass.

>Mad Hatter kicking ass
>single handedly wiped the floor with the Doom Patrol with his mind control hat
>over powered Dr. Psycho also with his mind control hat
>used Mind Control hat to sexually pleasure himself
>only ate foods that had tiny hats on them
>didn't bother to even look at a nude knockout strutting around the mansion because she wasn't wearing a hat

you know, I don't always like Gail's writing, but that was a fun Mad Hatter to read

That story would work better if it turned out the chef became the Joker and started going after Penguin

He was the best.

>Are they just overcompensating for his goofy, silver-age persona?

...yes.

But that wasn't mad hatter tho.

I'm sick of seeing that panel posted all the time whenever a Penguin thread pops up.
Honestly, it's just Joker's Asylum being way too tryhard (not just in Penguin's segment) and stories trying to ape it like Pain and Prejudice that have him go full edgelord. Most modern writers don't even use Penguin in the first place, and when they do, they turn him into a discount Rupert Thorne. Can you name other instances other than these two comics where modern Penguin does this ? I don't think you can't. Modern Penguin barely does anything at all.

>Are they just overcompensating for his goofy, silver-age persona?
That's pretty much the entire thought process behind how most Batman characters from the Silver Age are handled nowadays.

But there is a precedent in Penguin's over-the-top revenge schemes that has been a thing ever since the character started being written more seriously and they gave him a backstory, like The Killing Peck, for example. And Penguin is a manipulative character who's best stories involve him pulling off crimes in ways that can't be traced back to him. You put two and two together and shit like pic related happens.
Penguin has always been a brutal fucker whenever he was allowed to be.

But he does have a lot of things that set him apart. Some of these very characteristics are the reason he's not used more
The problem is that writers nowadays either write him as a lesser Kingpin stuck in the Iceberg Lounge who gets beaten up for information, and his two most recent major roles, Joker's Asylum and Pain and Prejudice, had laughably extreme revenge plots (athough the latter was just doing it to imitate the former)
Comics like Penguin Triumphant, The Penguin Affair, The Penguin Returns two-parter, and even other media like Batman Returns and TAS, all developed his characterization and added their own spin on it. But that would require writers to actually give a shit about his character instead of falling back on moronic shock value.

Eh, early-to-mid-90s actually. Him and Black Mask were warring for control of Gotham City for years after Knightfall.

I'd really like to see a story where Penguin turns a new leaf. There was this story during the new 52 where one of the Penguin's childhood friends who protected him from bullies ends up in a high ranking political position. The Penguin asks him to pardon some crimes he got caught doing and the guy refused. The Penguin secretly fed him with Bane's venom drug and the dude went wild and ate some woman's head. The dude late goes on tv and says "sometimes the bullies get it right" and shoots himself. I would have liked it if from there the Penguin realizes he is as bad or worse than the people who tortured him as a child. I want to see a Penguin who genuinely wants to see change in the world. Multiple times it's been shown the Penguin is capable of love and affection so why not let him have a chance at being good?

>That was supposed to be his gimmick.
No, that was just an aspect of his gimmick that writers ran with to make him more threatening
>Hasn't anyone here read The Killing Peck and the Penguin Affair?
Yes, and in neither of these two stories does his sadism overtake his character as heavily as it did in Joker's Asylum.

>Him being a mob boss is a recent thing, like post-2000's.
Not exactly.
Chuck Dixon was writing him as a mobster back in the early 90s. He was the one who actually introduced The Iceberg Lounge into the character

Plenty of Penguin stories actually do involve him trying to turn over a new leaf and going legit, in fact a lot of them feature the premise "Penguin turns a new leaf except he doesn't" is the most cliche Penguin plot next to "Penguin runs for mayor" and "Penguin frames Batman for something".
Sometimes he's doing it as a blatant cover-up, like pic related or in Penguin Triumphant. Sometimes he's actually serious about it, like in Love Bird and the Batman TAS episode "Birds of a Feather", but it ends up in disaster. And sometimes it's even kind of both, like in Batman Returns or Pain and Prejudice. Regardless, it always ends up in disaster and tragedy for everyone involved.

>I would have liked it if from there the Penguin realizes he is as bad or worse than the people who tortured him as a child
It's a decent concept but it's against character. Penguin acknowledges this and he doesn't care. In The Killing Peck he even thanks Sharkey (although he might have been sarcastic) for tormenting him and forcing him to become a strong man.

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I agree with all of your points, especially about how obnoxious it is to see that page posted constantly. I remember when the story was brand new, and it still had some shock value, but years of seeing it posted again and again, all over the internet, out of context has made it lose all meaning except to edgelords.

For those who don't know, Joker's Asylum was a series of one-shots where he'd tell stories about his fellow inmates/supervillains, in the style of a classic horror host comic. I don't think Jason Aaron realized that would become the only part of the story fanboys remember, and thus the part copies by future hacks.

But I didn't mind that page really, or the main plot with that lady, or the ending. But it goes out of its way to retcon The Killing Peck in having young Oswald kill all his birds, for no reason seemingly other than to show SEE HE'S ALWAYS BEEN ANGRY AND CRAZY!

And man, I could talk about everything I hated about Pain & Prejudice all night, I'm just glad you feel the same way. It's the Hush of Penguin stories - pretty art, a story that's hacky and cliched if you're familiar with the character's history at all, and a retarded ending. I'm still mad that this cover is blatantly false advertising.

>But it goes out of its way to retcon The Killing Peck in having young Oswald kill all his birds, for no reason seemingly other than to show SEE HE'S ALWAYS BEEN ANGRY AND CRAZY!
On that note, Pain & Prejudice retconning Oswald's dad's death into being "because he had to beat Oswald outside specifically for some reason and Oswald tricked him into whipping him outside in the rain and THAT'S why he died of pneumonia" to be the most pointless try-hard bullshit. It actually does go back to the Hush comparison, cuz like Hush, the writer thought the best way to establish the villains' cred would be to have him try to kill his parent(s) as a little tyke. WHOAH IT'S LIKE BRUCE WAYNE BUT IN REVERSE.

Fucking hacks.

>Are they just overcompensating for his goofy, silver-age persona?
Yes, very much so.

Even though literally the first page Penguin ever appeared on had Bill Finger acknowledge he was a "strange, almost ludicrous figure", every writer since has been painfully insecure about writing a super-criminal mastermind that looks SILLY, so they overcompensate, as seen in this page where Penguin acts like he's been reading reader mail, and in demonstrating how "dangerous and unstable" he is, ultimately ends up looking even more pathetic and desperate for validation.

Where is this from?

When Is A Door Not A Door? by Neil Gaiman.

>But it goes out of its way to retcon The Killing Peck in having young Oswald kill all his birds
That was what completely killed it for me. It was so unbeliavably stupid, way worse than the chef part (which actually did end up screwing things over for Penguin).
Penguin's bond with his birds is one of the character's most humanizing traits, directly tied to his gimmick. He employed them in his crimes as soldiers, but cared more for them that he ever did for anyone else. And it was mutual, too, the birds never pecked him. There's even a story where another villain kills his flock and he's in prison, tearfully begging for Batman to take justice for his birds.
It was bad enough that they were retconning The Killing Peck as well as other elements of his backstory away, but to make it so that he was the one who killed his birds, over the fact that they pecked him, was what shat the bed for me.

Pain and Prejudice is a story that I initially liked, but as I read more and more Penguin comics and became more familiar with the character outside of TAS and Batman Returns, I came to enjoy less and less until it turned into dislike. I think it's a decent way to introduce a more serious Penguin to readers only familiar with the campy bandit, and certainly much preferable to Joker's Asylum, but I agree with what you said about it being the Hush of Penguin stories.
I see it often called "The Killing Joke for the Penguin", which I think is a title that, if it's supposed to represent quality, should go to the woefully underrated Penguin Triumphant.

Never write comics

This always bothered me. People were getting killed all along. Was there ever a point when they weren't? Even in the silver age people still got killed.

He was supposed to be Batman's arch nemesis, but Joker ended up being way more popular.

>underrated Penguin Triumphant.
Funny. I've always considered that story to be greatly overrated, with obnoxious characterization and terrible art

Yeah, why would an ugly and petty mob boss with tendency to be thin skinned and vengeful abuse his power in true Roman decadent manner in basking in the delight of seeing people who he perceives as having wronged him suffer?

Oswald kinda *IS* Batman's arch. He's the kingpin of Gotham that gets away with everything and lives a life of luxury after it all.
Joker is just the Jack-The-Ripper character, scary and always trouble, but he's not getting away with anything because his life is an ugly joke.
Popularity with fans has nothing to do with in-universe success.

>Even in the silver age people still got killed
There was always the threat of it, but it was part of the game. Especially for the Riddler. No one every actually died during that era

Well I'm with you that the art is certainly not it's strong point, but I thought it's characterization of Oswald was pretty spot on

The Penguin "going straight" to open a high-end restaurant/nightclub is actually one of his oldest stories.

Allow me to share a special surprise Golden Age storytime.

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I hate how Sup Forums has to condemn even anything semi-serious as "Edgy" now.

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I don't know why, but the whole "girl turns into a whore because of Oswald" subplot always really bugged me for some reason.

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>anything semi-serious as "Edgy" now.
You can't honestly look at the pic in the OP and say it's just "semi-serious"

I'm amazed comics survived the censorship heyday with as little long-term damage as they did.

>"I'm crazy! I'm dangerous! See?"
It's almost like Finger foresaw the try-hard antics of future writers.

I mean at the time they were aimed at little kids. Saturday morning cartoons seem to do fine without killing anyone off.

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It's misogynist for one thing.
Women having no personal agency of self-determination and inevitably being defined by whatever male influence holds the most influence on them is one thing ...
... but not depicting a character as having a mind of their own is just lazy writing.

To be fair, comics only became known as "only for kids" because of the CCA, and I'm not even talking about superheroes - the CCA killed horror comics at the apex of that genre, there's stuff in old EC that's decades ahead of its time, and much like Hollywood's Hayes code they castrated their own storytelling standards for the better part of a century to avoid outside censorship. But that's neither here nor there.

Have Batman messing with Penguin by being his guardian angel.

Not entirely.
They turned the medium into a kids-only thing using that censorship.
Before that comics had plenty of potential for more.

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Did he just stab that guy?!
Did that gut laugh off being stabbed?!

That's actually a great page.

For every well written sequence like that I have encountered dozens of writers who WANT to be that edgy but can't figure out how to do it so just have a character mention off-hand "he's so cruel and manipulative he made someone kill themselves!" to build up a villain since they don't have the skill to write how they'd actually go about doing that. But there you go, a realistic way you'd ruin someones life.

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Why can't they grant Morrison the silver age

they update the villain to be more ruthless/vicious.

hero more or less stays the same.

at what point would the updated villain will have to force the hero to update as well?

I really like how back in the Golden Age, The Joker and The Penguin were treated as Batman's two deadliest archenemies, the "Knights of Knavery", and the camaraderie & friendly rivalry between them.

I'll storytime their first team-up story if anyone wants.

I agree, but OP pic is edgy as all fuck, from writing to artwork

Rock on

Then we'll begin, as soon as I post this unrelated but incredibly cool cover.

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You think THAT'S edgy?

Hey spook were you mad when Damien killed you

>"But I'll be out much sooner than you'd think!"
Penguin buying his way out of jail was always a thing, even when he wasn't a "legitimate businessman".

The child-Bat cannot win. In striking me down, he has made me more powerful than he could possibly imagine. But that is a story for another time...

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Mostly because modern writers love to go edgelord on everything, even when it doesn't make any sense.

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This is fucking retarded.
Between paying off ICE, the cops, some kind of bee expert, buying an entire public park AND building a liquor store, if the penguin pulled this dogshit every time anyone laughed in his vicinity he'd be paying tens of millions a month.
This is the fantasy of an autistic comicbook """author""" and has all the merits of a downsie's pissed pair of pants.

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That fucking first panel.

I love this scene. Penguin and Joker bickering over how to kill Batman and Robin, their reaction when Batman tells him they're not REALLY his archenemies, the way he uses their egos to get them to do some clever William Tell meets Houdini escape bullshit... great.

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And that's that.

Have a good night hope to see you story timing flinstones soon jk

Almost as if his pettiness and excessive retribution is the whole point. And he doesn't necessarily have to spend a lot of money of he can just put his goons to pressure a corrupt asshole to do his bidding. Plus it makes a great intimidation story.

>It's misogynist for one thing.

You're right, but prepare to have Sup Forums jump down your throat