The Penguin, Volume 1: The Prodigal Bird Review (Tom King, Roberto de la Torre)

With Penguin dead and loving it, his kids have filled the power vacuum he left behind in Gotham. Except (shock) Pengy isn’t dead - he’s retired incognito to Metropolis, living the quiet life. Except (shock) he isn’t - the Feds want him back in the game for reasons. Pingu’s gotta assemble a crew and take back Gotham. Just when he thought he was out, yadda yadda wak…

Tom King is a great Batman writer but his Penguin spinoff is very lacklustre. Mostly because it’s all setup and no payoff. Imagine if you watched Ocean’s 11 and, instead of showing the exciting heist, the movie ended once Danny Ocean assembled his crew! That’s basically what you get with The Penguin, Volume 1: The Prodigal Bird.

Not that the way Penguin goes about recruiting his crew is especially bad - The Help (from Killing Time - basically Batman if he were an evil butler), obscure patriotic-themed superhero team Force of July and Black Spider chapters were interesting, and King writes the characters well. Penguin’s voice is convincingly dark and Machiavellian and his actions shockingly violent and ruthless. I also liked that King came up with a plausible scenario for why Penguin is continually able to coexist in Gotham publicly despite running so obviously criminal a place as the Iceberg Lounge.

But an entire book of table-setting? Come on. I kept waiting for King to get a move on and kick the story into gear and it never happened. The entire book is Penguin painstakingly recruiting one member after another and it just got too slow and tedious.

Is DC Black Label still a thing? Because, if so, I don’t know why this book wasn’t published under that imprint if only to dispense with the increasingly annoying *&%!$s that covers each swear - and, my word, there a LOT of swears covered up. Speaking of annoying, it’s really begun to irk me, having read so much Tom King Batman, how nothing in Gotham can’t have a creator’s name. It’s never just “the docks” or “the Gotham docks” - it’s “Capullo’s docks”. Sometimes it IS just the docks! How many docks does Gotham have that you need to specify the name?!

I don’t like King’s style of telling this story. He has two narratives running concurrently - one monologue in the narrative boxes over the story proper which has the dialogue in the word balloons. Especially when that monologue in the narrative boxes has broken-up sentences spread across multiple panels, so I often had to go back and read the thing in its entirety to get the gist of it. It’s distracting and unnecessarily hard to follow. Have one and not the other - it’d make for a smoother read.

It’s also hard to tell who’s speaking in the narrative boxes. Instead of just having Penguin always speaking or Penguin and occasionally Batman, King has multiple characters speaking at different points in the story and King just isn’t that good a writer at being able to make each voice distinctive. He tries to waylay this by having different coloured boxes and fonts but the characters are too many and unknown to know which one is which and so it’s pointlessly difficult to follow who’s speaking at any given time.

Also included are some of the backups from Chip Zdarsky’s first Batman book where Catwoman and a robot executor called The Executor search for Penguin’s kids following his “death” - that’s why Zdarsky’s credited as a writer on this book, not because he and King were series co-writers. I guess these crappy backups are reprinted here to provide some context as to who Penguin’s kids are in King’s issues, but then why have them at the back and not included at the front so readers know in advance of being introduced to them? Eh, common sense and DC never seem to mix.

There are some decent issues in this book but ultimately all setup and no story isn’t enough for me. Especially when that lack highlights King’s stylistic shortcomings as a writer which adds irritation to an unsatisfying reading experience. Don’t expect King’s usual higher standard of Batman comics and be prepared to exercise a lot of patience if you’re going to pick up The Penguin, Volume 1: The Prodigal Bird. Hopefully with all of this out of the way now, the second book will be more fast-paced and entertaining.