The Penguin: Oz’s Origin Story Is Even Darker in the Comics

[Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Penguin episode 7, “Top Hat.”] “One thing was clear to me from a tender age: It’s a cold, cold world,” says Oswald Cobblepot in 2011’s Penguin: Pain and Prejudice. The five-issue miniseries from writer Gregg Hurwitz and artist Szymon Kudranksi inspired the painful and dark past of Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell) in The Batman universe, where a young Ozzie (Ryder Allen) left his brothers, Benny (Nico Tirozzi) and Jack (Owen Asztalos), to drown when he locked them inside a train tunnel that flooded during a storm. As the last-surviving son of Francis Cobb (Emily Meade, Deidre O’Connell), Oz made his beloved mother a promise: “You deserve the best life, and I’m gonna get it for you. And I ain’t gonna quit till I do.”

“I always knew that we wanted to do a backstory of Oz to better understand who he is as a man now,” The Penguin showrunner Lauren LeFranc says in this week’s episode insider. “I thought Oz should have two brothers who passed away, and that all of the love that his mother Francis had for all three then went into one child.”

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“Part of this drive for who he is stems to a trauma that he’s always explained came from the loss of his brothers,” adds The Batman director and series executive producer Matt Reeves. “But then you come to understand that this was a story of his own creation, and really his desire to have his mother all for himself.”

Oz felt slighted by his brothers during a game of flashlight tag. Believing Benny and Jack climbed down a ladder Oz would have difficulty climbing down due to his clubfoot brace, the scorned Ozzie locked his brothers in the tunnel and ignored their pleas for help as it filled with water.

“In his mind, they go down the ladder into a deeper part of the tunnel because they know it’s hard for him to get down there. That’s not true, but that’s what he thinks because he personalizes things,” LeFranc explains, noting that Oz impulsively shot and killed Alberto Falcone (Michael Zegen) when he felt demeaned by the heir to the Falcone Family back in episode 1. “As the water begins to rise and he knows the rain is coming down, and he has every opportunity to stop it. He lets that impulsive act become permanent. It’s not that he actively kills his brothers — it’s that he actively does nothing to stop it.”

Did Oz Kill His Brothers in the Comics?

Penguin: Pain and Prejudice reveals that Oswald is the last survivor of the Cobblepot men: his father, Tucker, and brothers Robert, William, and Jason all met untimely ends. The runt of the Cobblepot litter, Oswald was nicknamed “Penguin” by his bully brothers because he was born with a beaked nose and had an affinity for birds. While his father rejected him as a baby because of his appearance, calling him “freak,” Oswald’s mother, Esther, doted on her “beautiful boy.”

In the present, Oswald dutifully cares for his mother. Mean and feared, rich and powerful, the Penguin provides his now-catatonic mother with jewels and other treasures obtained through his criminal dealings. When a man makes a rude remark about Oswald’s weight and short stature, he systematically destroys the man’s life: he’s framed for embezzling at work, his elderly neighbor dies in an apartment fire, his parents have their vehicle’s brake lines cut and are sent off a cliff, and his girlfriend is stuck with a drug-infected needle.

The Penguin is powerful — except when in the presence of Batman, who makes him feel like that bullied little boy. Issue #2, titled “Beautiful Boy,” suggests an Oedipus complex, and reveals the fate of Oswald’s brothers: Jason dies as a boy choking on his vomit from food poisoning. William is killed in a hit-and-run. And the eldest, Robert, falls through the ice of a frozen lake and drowns in a freak accident.

A montage reveals that Oswald poisoned Jason’s food with rat poison, ran over William with a truck, and melted a spot on the frozen lake where Robert played ice hockey, then watched as his eldest brother disappeared into the freezing cold water and drowned. He let his father die from pneumonia and had his mother all to himself, until her own death from natural causes years later.

“Strength isn’t about size. Or muscle. Or looks,” Penguin says. “It’s about strategy. Delay of gratification. The long-term plan. It’s about determination. Perseverance. About getting up every single damned time they kick you down. What impresses me about me is that, given everything I went through, everything I overcame… I didn’t just get back up.”

As a young Oswald admires the graves of the Cobblepot men, he realizes: “I didn’t merely find my feet. I found something else… something I was great at.”