The Penguin #11: Downfall

“Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” By the end of The Penguin #10, no one in Gotham was more prideful than the Penguin. And as such, no one had so far to fall. That fall turns out to be swift and violent in The Penguin #11.

Batman is taking out his frustration on his old partner when The Penguin #11 opens. Penguin’s daughter Addie revealed how he was manipulating Batman to eliminate threats to his own ambitions, and Batman isn’t taking it well. But Batman ultimately leaves Penguin alone, telling him to keep his nose clean because he’ll be treated no differently than any other citizen of Gotham. Unsurprisingly, this revelation costs Penguin much of his power and puts a target on his back. But as his enemies close in, he remembers he has one card left to play–the government agent that wanted him to take over Gotham in the first place.

The Penguin #11 is a series of reverses. The issue’s opening pages suggest that the Penguin is done for. The end of his deal with Batman as well as the revelation that he helped Batman puts him at risk from Gotham City’s entire underworld element. What comes next is predictable–a collapsing criminal empire is a story that’s been told before. What’s interesting is that King had practically laid out the roadmap step by step on the way here. The people and circumstances Penguin manipulated to regain power in Gotham turn out to be just as useful in his fall from grace as they were in his return. Looking back from The Penguin #11, it’s clear that as King built Oswald into a criminal force of nature, he likewise sowed the seeds for his eventual downfall. King didn’t have to introduce any new elements to the situation–he merely had to rearrange the ones that were already present.

King’s handling of Penguin’s fall also successfully walks the tightrope between a reader being invested in the protagonist while still finding a measure of satisfaction in his defeat. This is a balance that every series featuring a villain has to find. And Penguin is most assuredly a villain. To the extent that he cooperates with Batman, it is purely to enrich himself. There is no gray area with him, and in almost all other circumstances outside this series he is an antagonist. But rather than lean heavily into how horrible Penguin is to make him a kind of spectacle and guilty pleasure, King accentuated his intelligence and emphasized when possible his humanity. Indeed, such a scene takes place in this issue. Penguin is not sympathetic at any point. But he is compelling enough that while most readers will likely enjoy his downfall now that it’s begun, they probably weren’t rooting for it to happen.

Also worth noting is how blindsided Batman is when he discovers how thoroughly Penguin manipulated him. In a Batman book, the antagonist would be the shortsighted idiot who ushered in their own defeat. King plays out the same dynamic here. The only difference is that Batman is the shortsighted idiot antagonist.

It’s not surprising that Penguin’s downfall turns violent considering how much of the underworld he betrayed. Couple that with the government agent that put Penguin up to this in the first place, and it’s not surprising that The Penguin #11 eventually turns into an action free for all. The early sequence plays out in a combination of wider, pulled back views of multiple people shooting at each other and close up views of one or two people shooting toward enemies off panel. The closeups on characters that have been a long running presence in the series help make it a particularly vicious and visceral fight. De Latorre brings his usual level of high detail to these characters, capturing their emotion in different moments, both when events are going their way and when they aren’t.

Easy to track action eventually descends into pure chaos as De Latorre handles the final panels in wider views with two sides of the fight slugging it out with gunfire. There is enough detail on the characters’ clothing to differentiate who is shooting at whom. But whereas the first encounter felt controlled–two sides shooting in straight lines between right and left–this one is two masses of people in and around each other. The more abstract brutality works well here because De Latorre captured emotion on the faces of characters the reader is familiar with earlier in the fight.

The gunfight sequence is largely devoid of background details after some initial establishing images early on. It largely takes place against simple colored backgrounds. It’s first set against a soft yellow of daylight coming in through windows before quickly turning into a conflagration of red and orange as more people (who become more dead bodies) enter the fray. This gunfight might as well be taking place in hell for the level of colorful burning intensity Maiolo surrounds the characters with.

Late in the gunfight sequence King cuts from a panel of gunfire to a panel of Penguin comfortably reading a book in a room somewhere beyond the fighting. Maiolo’s extreme color choices make the jump between the two settings jarring. Rather than that effect being distracting, though, it emphasizes the horror of the fight just outside.

One of the series’ ongoing devices, and a very successful one at that, has been Cowles’ separation of every characters’ thoughts via different colored caption box backgrounds and fonts, often coded in some way to match a character’s original setting or their outfit. For the first time, in The Penguin #11, he confuses two characters by giving them the same colored captions and text. And because of the two characters involved, it is momentarily confusing. While this is arguably a nitpick with regard to this particular issue, it serves to better highlight the importance and overall success Cowles had with this device in a series featuring so many important secondary characters. And the fact that such an error didn’t happen until now also emphasizes his attention to detail.

Cowles’ work is quite effective during the gunfight. Two different sound effects are used, one for the handguns and one for the automatic weapons. Cowels gives each one a style that matches the gunfire it represents. For instance the BLAMs of the handguns are large and distinct, each use of it clearly separated from another.