Comics

DC Previews New The Penguin Series, and the Batman Villain May Be Kicking the Bucket

The latest preview for the Batman spinoff series ‘Penguin’ teases a dire situation for both Oswald Cobblepot and The Dark Knight.

By Kofi Outlaw

August 18, 2023, 5:21pm

Batman’s old foe the Penguin is getting a new DC comic book series, and the preview for it sets some pretty high stakes!

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As you can see below, the preview for Tom King’s Penguin #1 takes a familiar approach to one of King’s sordid character drama’s: by teasing us with a scene of our principal in dire straits, before jumping back in time to explain how we got there. In this case, the dire straits are Batman and Penguin gravely injured and trapped inside the Batmobile, which is quickly sinking into Gotham River; the time jump backward is significant – one year earlier, when Oswald was hiding out in Metropolis, after faking his death to frame Batman (which sparked the drastic twists and turns of Chip Zdarsky’s Batman arcs, “Failsafe” and “The Bat-Man of Gotham”). Penguin got plastic surgery and was seen running a flower shop in Gotham, before having to relocate to Metropolis, while Catwoman was tasked with tracking down his next of kin.

King and co. have teased that the Penguin comic series will see Oswald going up against his bastard twins, Addison and Aiden Cobblepot, who showed up in the Catwoman backup story for Batman #126, to claim their father’s holdings during his will reading. It’s been made clear that the next generation of Cobblepots will be taking organized crime in Gotham to the next level – enough so that the US intelligence community feels the need to get involved and send in Penguin as their Trojan Horse. But the Cobblepot kids don’t seem like they’re going to be looking for a happy family reunion…

Preview of DC’s ‘Penguin’ #1 by Tom King

Tom King does hard-boiled crime Noir like nobody else, and his take on the Batman Universe earned him legions of fans for that reason. Penguin looks like a nice corner of that universe for King to cook in, hopefully re-inventing our perception (and respect) of Penguin, along the way.

After retiring to Metropolis following his “death,” Oswald Cobblepot finds himself forced back into the unpredictable and violent Gotham City underworld as a pawn for the United States intelligence community! Gotham’s criminal element has been evolving since he was last in the city, with his bastard twin children ruling the Iceberg Lounge. And what of the man he framed for his death—Batman? Is the Penguin walking into a death sentence?

From award-winning and bestselling writer Tom King (Batman, The Human Target) and artist Rafael De Latorre (Daredevil) comes a bloody, hard-boiled tale of redemption and revenge!