The Penguin has long been one of Batman’s most prominent members of his rogue gallery.
First debuting in December of 1941 in Detective Comics issue 58, he was created by legends
Bill Finger and Bob Kane, and has remained as one of Batman’s largest foes for years.
But its not just his longevity that’s impressive; there’s a lot of interesting tidbits about
the character that some fans may not know, especially pertaining to the character’s
cultural influence.
So today, we’re counting down our favourite top 10 Penguin Shocking Facts.
10 Mr BonifaceThe Penguin wasn’t always the mob boss criminal mastermind we know him
as today.
In the early days, he was an art thiefwhose name was Mr Boniface.
His first criminal act in comics was attending an art gallery and stealing a piece by rolling
it up and hiding it in his umbrella.
He would then bring the piece to a local mob to prove to them that he had the criminal
chops to join their group.
Eventually he was kicked out of the gang for offended the mob boss after the boss called
him a ‘be-monocled bird’.
Bird jokes never sat well with Penguin; he shot him with his umbrella gun and proceeded
to claim leadership over themob.
From then on out, he told everyone to refer to him not as Penguin, but as his true name,
Mr Boniface.
Years later, his real name was changed to Oswald Cobblepot, which is something that
might further help explain our next number- Despite debuting in 1941, the Penguin’s
existence on Earth 2, theEarth in which all of the Golden Age heroes were dispatched to
after the DC Multiverse was created, the Earth 2 version of the villain was never actually
established on any of the Earth 2 stories.
None of the villains in Batman’s rogue gallery on Earth 2 ever mention him.
Other villains are mentioned as either having retired, been imprisoned, dead or having been
reformed.
Comic historians have regarded this as perhaps the Golden Age Penguin was completely wiped
from existence, or if he did exist, he was considered more of a minor villain back then,
therefore by the time Earth 2 was established in the 60s, there was no point in having him
exist in the Golden Age.
And, many comics historians have established that the Earth One Penguin character, post
multiverse creation and 7 years after his last Golden Age story, came to be in May of
1963 with his appearance in Batman issue 155, which is titled “The Return of the Penguin”.
Although the title of that comic complicates things.
All in all, a bit of a messy history in terms of continuity for our pal Oswald.
Jumping back to Oswald’s name here, the first time Oswald Cobblepot was mentioned
in the comics was in a Batman newspaper strip from 1946.
Similar to the Joker, who had become more comical in his methods towards the end of
the Golden Age, Penguin was caught trying to steal a letter.
Oooo big criminal, right?
The letter was addressed to Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, and it was from his aunt, who thought
he was in charge of an umbrella corporation as some sort of big business man.
From there, the Penguin somehow manages to convince Batman and Robin to help him trick
his aunt in order to keep up the charade.
Oswald hiding his true nature from his relatives is a sentiment that hasn’t
completely died out either as far as the character is concerned.
In the first season of Gotham, the Penguin hides from his mother than he’s up to no
good in the criminal world, although she eventually finds out before she’s knocked off because
of it.
Of a different sort!
The Penguin and the Joker often got paired up together when trying to take down Batman
during the Silver Age.
This is primarily thanks to the Adam West 60s Batman television show, where the duo,
played by Burgess Meredith and Cesar Romero, often worked together to thwart Batman with
some silly scheme.
This is something that continued over into Batman’s crossovers with none other than
Scooby Doo.
Yes, and animated Penguin and Joker would get up to all sorts of iconic Scooby Doo mischief
in order to screw with Bats and Scoobs and the gang.
The friendship tends to only exist in the more light hearted of Batman media; often,
these two are anything but pals, trying to one up each other as to who is Batman’s
more devious foe.
Although, sorry Oswald, we all know that title goes to the Joker.
He’s a hard act to top.
6 Getting PoliticalOut of all the comic book villains out there, the Penguin is often used
to mock American politicians the most.
Kinda neat, huh?
Former vice president Dick Cheney was compared to the Penguin due to his laugh that was similar
to Burgess Meredith’s take on the character in the 60s Batman television show.
Jon Stewart of the Daily Show famously noted that one.
And then in 2006, a Republican led PR firm called DCI Group posted a video on youtube
that satirized former democratic vice president Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth
in which Gore was depicted as the Penguin, using a hypnotic umbrella to hypnotize a group
of penguins into believing that global warming and climate change were real.
Speaking ofweird political connections UmbrellaThe Penguin has had a plethora of
trick umbrellas over the years.
It’s a trademark of his.
But did you know that his umbrella gun isn’t just a work of fantasy?
In real life, it’s called a Bulgarian Umbrella, which was an umbrella gun used by the KGB
in order to carry out several assassinations in the late 1970s.
While it isn’t exactly crafted off of the KGB model (considering the Penguin was created
long before those assassinations and its first noted use on September 7thof 1978), the resemblance
is uncanny.
Old ManI mean... you can’t say that it isn’t expected, right?
We can all thank Danny Devito for that.
Anywho, there’s a horrifyingly hilarious sequence in the 2010 Birds of Prey series
in which Oswald is nearly killed by White Canary, and brought back to the Birds of Prey’s
base in order to recover from his unconscious state.
During this issue, he has a nasty little fantasy about getting it on with the members of the
Birds; a dream sequence in which all of the girls fawn
over him and his every desire.
He also makes out with Huntress and I’m sorry to burn your retinas with this image.
On the same page that features him training, we see him whoop some dude in the face, knocking
his teeth out, and then dumping caviar in his mouth.
So yeah,more muscle, butstill the same oddball Oswald, that’s for sure.
He’s a Cannibal Only on TV though.
The Penguin is often referred to as one of Batman’s only villains who is technically
sane, with the others in this category being Catwoman, Ras Al Ghul and Bane.
But he has occasionally turned a dark fin, and ventured into the realm of cannibalismon
the bat-sh*t crazy television show, Gotham.
Played by actor Robin Lord Taylor, the character decides to get weird in a season 2 episode
titled Wrath of the Villains: Into the Woods, where he serves his step-mother dinner.
Turns out that dinner is his step-siblings, who he killed and cooked up as an act of revenge
for her killing his father and treating him like garbage.
It’s also worth noting that many other Batman villains have also dabbled in cannibalism
over the years, but hey, that’s a whole other list.
Yup.
When you think of the Penguin, him moving around and knocking out his opponents with
something other than his umbrella gun or hired goons ain’t the first thing that comes to
mind.
But turns out back in the day, he used to be well trained in the hand to hand combat
area.
He had taken up physical fitness and marital arts with the same dedication he devoted to
his birds and books, according to the man himself.
His InspirationFor years there was a debate as to where the Penguin’s inspiration came
from.
Bill Finger had claimed that the character had long been inspired by Emperor Penguins;
there’s an undisputed resemblance there.
That, and the character as meant to be a caricature of aristocrats.
On the flip side of that, the Penguin’s co-creator Bob Kane argued otherwise; the
character is based off a mascot of a cigarette company.
Kool Cigarettes, a menthol cigarette company that started in 1933, had a mascot the name
of Willie the Kool Penguin.
Willie the Kool Penguin has his own history in comic strips, ever since his creation in
1934.
He even had his own comic book published by Standard Comics in 1951 as part of the ‘funny
animal’ sub genre, although it had a handful of subliminal messages throughout that advertised
smoking.
Back to Oswald, though!
As towho is telling the truth, its hard to say.
Kane has a history to distort the truth, and considering that Finger was long kept from
his rightful title as co-creator of Batman, it wouldn’t be surprising that Kane is off
in his argument.
That being said, publically admitting that a cigarette mascot was the inspiration for
a villain who was prominently featured in beloved comic
books, especially during a post-Comics Code Authority era, probably wouldn’t be the
most marketable idea.