On the Riddler
Sep. 17th, 2008 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thehefnerYou know who needs more love? The Riddler.
Like the Penguin, the Riddler is one of those classic Batman villains, one of the true iconic big baddies* that everyone remembers and no one cares about. Why is this? Well, to answer the first part, the reason why they're remembered is obvious: the 1960's Adam West BATMAN show. Burgess Meredith rivals Paul Williams III's vocal performance as what I think of when it comes to the definitive Pengers, and was definitely one of the genuine highlights of that show.
But then there was Frank Gorshin. Everyone rightly holds Frank Gorshin up as the one true non-ironic non-campy element of excellence from that whole show. I've heard people describe Gorshin's Riddler as the only villain on that show who had legitimate menace, that at any moment, this guy could snap from serious to giggling to downright dangerous and right back again within an instant.
How ironic, then, that the Riddler should be left behind in rise of the "grim 'n gritty" era of comics. In the bright and shiny Silver Age of comics, the Riddler (the TV Riddler, anyway) at least felt like a genuine threat, in the Modern Age of Comics--as Neil Gaiman once excellently observed--he's a relic of a bygone era, lamenting the past and wondering where it all went wrong.
There's a poignancy in Eddie's line, "The Joker's killing people, for god's sake!" And it's that very sentiment that touches upon why people these days so often consider the Riddler to be... well, a joke. In this era of Batman, this dark and creepy age where monsters like the Joker and Two-Face fit in perfectly, what kind of threat can the Riddler really pose?
Of course, inevitably, some writers have come along to try and make the Riddler "dark," because to the minds of lazy comic writers, "dark" automatically equals "relevant." One story had him as the Lovecraftian herald for some evil spirit, doing things like choking babies with ping-pong balls and forcing Batman to perform emergency tracheotomy (yeah, wish I had scans to prove that one exists, but here are the covers to said storyline).
But I never noticed just how much the Riddler was considered a has-been (or even a never-had-been to some) until that general assumption was used as the driving force behind HUSH, where Jeph Loeb revealed the Riddler to have been the mastermind behind a massive--and utterly nonsensical--plot-hole-ridden plot to destroy Batman and Bruce Wayne (whom he knew were one and the same). Much as I furiously loathe Loeb and HUSH, I reluctantly grant that he was on the right track here. The Riddler as a mastermind is a great take for this intellect-based character, and would have been a great direction for other, better writers to develop.
Instead, we got the tattooed metrosexual bishie Riddler. Riddle me this: when does my forehead meet a writing desk?
Thank god for Paul Dini. Not only did BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES provide a magnificently smug and brilliant Riddler (with a magnificently smug and brilliant vocal performance by John "Lionel Luthor" Glover), but little over a decade later, Dini would give metrosexual mastermind Riddler a classic case of head-trauma-amnesia (assuming he's not faking) to reinvent the character as a camera-whoring grandstanding private investigator. As a morally dubious P.I. with a dark past still lurking behind the shadows, the Riddler now fits perfectly into the neo-classic noir of Batman's world.
So now he doesn't have to be a threat, not to Batman anyway. But while I hope this current incarnation sticks around for as long as possible before the inevitable reversion to status quo, I still wish we could see more of a Riddler that's a threat while still being the Riddler.
I keep hearing talk of people thinking about the Riddler for THE DARK KNIGHT's sequel, which could go wrong in oh so many ways (see above). I've already seen fan imaginings of Nolanverse Riddler as something akin to Kevin Spacey's character in SEVEN, madly scribbling questions on newspapers, photos, even his own skin (or maybe they're tattoooooooos! OOOH EDGY!)
Ultimately, I realized why we've seen so few good Riddler stories when I read Paul Dini's described Eddie as "a constant frustration" to the B:TAS writing staff, as well as to Batman. The problem, I fear, is simply that the Riddler is too smart, at least too smart for most writers.
Most writers can bullshit their way around the brilliance of characters like Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Lex Luthor, and Dr. Doom. How do we know they're brilliant? They invent all these crazy things! Yeah, but how did they invent those crazy things? The specifics don't matter, just trust us, they're brilliant. And that's fine, you can get away with that.
But with the Riddler, his brilliance has to be revealed by explicitly exploring, step by step, the mental puzzles he creates expressly to stump Batman. Not just anybody, I mean fucking Batman. The riddles are his entire motivation, the triumph of his intellect, all accomplished with style and art. And yes, people might get killed, but that's not the goal. It's just part of the game, part of the risk, part of the fun.
As such, perhaps the best comic depiction of classic (true) Riddler as a real threat comes, mind-bogglingly enough, from this issue of GREEN ARROW written by the otherwise-intolerable Judd Winnick. Following not long after Kevin Smith's terrible (but snappier-looking!) game show host take, Winnick's Riddler would eventually go right back to lame sub-Joker "urban terrorism," but for those four pages, I dare say we come close to a perfect Riddler: brilliant, smug, stylish, whimsical, theatrical, cold, psychotic, calculating, vicious, dangerous, changing any combination of the above from one panel to the next. It's John Glover cool with Frank Gorshin menace, and I love it.
Such a character could fit perfectly in any era Batman story, from the Silver Age to THE DARK KNIGHT, but pulling it off takes a deft hand and a cunning mind. As such, barring the character starring in some legendary and influential "Killing Joke" of his own, I fear Eddie Nigma's doomed to languish in the C-list. I seriously doubt I could write that story to do him justice, yet I will always have a fondness for the character. After all, this is a guy who values theatrics and style, the only villain who would employ jazz hands, rocking the bowler derby and snazztastic suits all the while. Hell, the Riddler even has his own Spunky Lesbian Sidekicks! Two of them! The guy simply rocks, no matter what anyone else thinks.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm dressing up as the Riddler** for this year's "Project: Rooftop--Fights, Flights, and Tights" costume contest.***
*I refuse to ever use the term "Big Bad"
**A Victorian take, specifically. Imagine the Riddler by way of the Shade.
***I just hope there's some way to also submit one or all three of our massive Joker/Harley photoshoot. Maybe I should just send in the ones of us in sexywear? Aw, I wanna submit them all!
Like the Penguin, the Riddler is one of those classic Batman villains, one of the true iconic big baddies* that everyone remembers and no one cares about. Why is this? Well, to answer the first part, the reason why they're remembered is obvious: the 1960's Adam West BATMAN show. Burgess Meredith rivals Paul Williams III's vocal performance as what I think of when it comes to the definitive Pengers, and was definitely one of the genuine highlights of that show.
But then there was Frank Gorshin. Everyone rightly holds Frank Gorshin up as the one true non-ironic non-campy element of excellence from that whole show. I've heard people describe Gorshin's Riddler as the only villain on that show who had legitimate menace, that at any moment, this guy could snap from serious to giggling to downright dangerous and right back again within an instant.
How ironic, then, that the Riddler should be left behind in rise of the "grim 'n gritty" era of comics. In the bright and shiny Silver Age of comics, the Riddler (the TV Riddler, anyway) at least felt like a genuine threat, in the Modern Age of Comics--as Neil Gaiman once excellently observed--he's a relic of a bygone era, lamenting the past and wondering where it all went wrong.
There's a poignancy in Eddie's line, "The Joker's killing people, for god's sake!" And it's that very sentiment that touches upon why people these days so often consider the Riddler to be... well, a joke. In this era of Batman, this dark and creepy age where monsters like the Joker and Two-Face fit in perfectly, what kind of threat can the Riddler really pose?
Of course, inevitably, some writers have come along to try and make the Riddler "dark," because to the minds of lazy comic writers, "dark" automatically equals "relevant." One story had him as the Lovecraftian herald for some evil spirit, doing things like choking babies with ping-pong balls and forcing Batman to perform emergency tracheotomy (yeah, wish I had scans to prove that one exists, but here are the covers to said storyline).
But I never noticed just how much the Riddler was considered a has-been (or even a never-had-been to some) until that general assumption was used as the driving force behind HUSH, where Jeph Loeb revealed the Riddler to have been the mastermind behind a massive--and utterly nonsensical--plot-hole-ridden plot to destroy Batman and Bruce Wayne (whom he knew were one and the same). Much as I furiously loathe Loeb and HUSH, I reluctantly grant that he was on the right track here. The Riddler as a mastermind is a great take for this intellect-based character, and would have been a great direction for other, better writers to develop.
Instead, we got the tattooed metrosexual bishie Riddler. Riddle me this: when does my forehead meet a writing desk?
Thank god for Paul Dini. Not only did BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES provide a magnificently smug and brilliant Riddler (with a magnificently smug and brilliant vocal performance by John "Lionel Luthor" Glover), but little over a decade later, Dini would give metrosexual mastermind Riddler a classic case of head-trauma-amnesia (assuming he's not faking) to reinvent the character as a camera-whoring grandstanding private investigator. As a morally dubious P.I. with a dark past still lurking behind the shadows, the Riddler now fits perfectly into the neo-classic noir of Batman's world.
So now he doesn't have to be a threat, not to Batman anyway. But while I hope this current incarnation sticks around for as long as possible before the inevitable reversion to status quo, I still wish we could see more of a Riddler that's a threat while still being the Riddler.
I keep hearing talk of people thinking about the Riddler for THE DARK KNIGHT's sequel, which could go wrong in oh so many ways (see above). I've already seen fan imaginings of Nolanverse Riddler as something akin to Kevin Spacey's character in SEVEN, madly scribbling questions on newspapers, photos, even his own skin (or maybe they're tattoooooooos! OOOH EDGY!)
Ultimately, I realized why we've seen so few good Riddler stories when I read Paul Dini's described Eddie as "a constant frustration" to the B:TAS writing staff, as well as to Batman. The problem, I fear, is simply that the Riddler is too smart, at least too smart for most writers.
Most writers can bullshit their way around the brilliance of characters like Reed Richards, Tony Stark, Lex Luthor, and Dr. Doom. How do we know they're brilliant? They invent all these crazy things! Yeah, but how did they invent those crazy things? The specifics don't matter, just trust us, they're brilliant. And that's fine, you can get away with that.
But with the Riddler, his brilliance has to be revealed by explicitly exploring, step by step, the mental puzzles he creates expressly to stump Batman. Not just anybody, I mean fucking Batman. The riddles are his entire motivation, the triumph of his intellect, all accomplished with style and art. And yes, people might get killed, but that's not the goal. It's just part of the game, part of the risk, part of the fun.
As such, perhaps the best comic depiction of classic (true) Riddler as a real threat comes, mind-bogglingly enough, from this issue of GREEN ARROW written by the otherwise-intolerable Judd Winnick. Following not long after Kevin Smith's terrible (but snappier-looking!) game show host take, Winnick's Riddler would eventually go right back to lame sub-Joker "urban terrorism," but for those four pages, I dare say we come close to a perfect Riddler: brilliant, smug, stylish, whimsical, theatrical, cold, psychotic, calculating, vicious, dangerous, changing any combination of the above from one panel to the next. It's John Glover cool with Frank Gorshin menace, and I love it.
Such a character could fit perfectly in any era Batman story, from the Silver Age to THE DARK KNIGHT, but pulling it off takes a deft hand and a cunning mind. As such, barring the character starring in some legendary and influential "Killing Joke" of his own, I fear Eddie Nigma's doomed to languish in the C-list. I seriously doubt I could write that story to do him justice, yet I will always have a fondness for the character. After all, this is a guy who values theatrics and style, the only villain who would employ jazz hands, rocking the bowler derby and snazztastic suits all the while. Hell, the Riddler even has his own Spunky Lesbian Sidekicks! Two of them! The guy simply rocks, no matter what anyone else thinks.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I'm dressing up as the Riddler** for this year's "Project: Rooftop--Fights, Flights, and Tights" costume contest.***
*I refuse to ever use the term "Big Bad"
**A Victorian take, specifically. Imagine the Riddler by way of the Shade.
***I just hope there's some way to also submit one or all three of our massive Joker/Harley photoshoot. Maybe I should just send in the ones of us in sexywear? Aw, I wanna submit them all!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Stumbled across a rumor the other day somewhere...
Date: 2008-09-17 07:15 pm (UTC)Also in the same rumor (which, for the life of me, I can't remember where I came across it) they mentioned the Penguin as another villain in the film. There was an actor attached to that part, too... can't clearly remember who, someone like Paul Giomatti maybe?
But, yeah, Riddler is a tough one to write correctly because he's smarter than most writers by a country mile.
Re: Stumbled across a rumor the other day somewhere...
Date: 2008-09-17 07:17 pm (UTC)rumor here
(And Phillip S. Hoffman as Pengy.)
no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 07:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 08:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 08:16 pm (UTC)Re: Stumbled across a rumor the other day somewhere...
Date: 2008-09-17 08:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 08:59 pm (UTC)Hey, there's a wiki entry.
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Date: 2008-09-17 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-17 10:31 pm (UTC)The reason I like Dinis' take on the Riddler is that it proves that Batmans' no-killing-villains rule is a perfectly valid one. Eddie is redeemed. In this case, somehow, everything worked out just fine and I would imagine that Bats is pretty darn happy about that, under his grumpy exterior.
And he's still a fascinating, fabulous thorn in Batmans' side, but in a way that no other character has been before. I think it's a minor stroke of brilliance on Dinis' part.
I'm trying to think of who could write a good Riddler story, and I'm drawing a blank. At least in the comics world.
I think you'd need to bring in a mystery/crime novelist, one who also had a good sense of humour.
I'm reading an author called Chris Brookmyre right now, and I think he could do it. In one of his books he has his hero pull off a bank heist using clowns, obscure indie bands, fine art, fake bombs, fake guns, awful puns and a captive gang of warring football fans. It's a very Riddler-esque bank robbery in that the hero is always three steps ahead of the cops and isn't afraid to gloat about it.
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Date: 2008-09-17 11:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 12:19 am (UTC)I'm disturbed to find myself admitting this, but I'd like to see what Grant Morrison could do with the Riddler.
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Date: 2008-09-18 12:21 am (UTC)Naw?
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 12:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 12:47 am (UTC)Re: Stumbled across a rumor the other day somewhere...
Date: 2008-09-18 01:11 am (UTC)Re: Stumbled across a rumor the other day somewhere...
Date: 2008-09-18 01:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 05:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 02:24 pm (UTC)**A Victorian take, specifically. Imagine the Riddler by way of the Shade.
*drool*
no subject
Date: 2008-09-18 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 06:53 am (UTC)Basically, after the themes of the villains of Begins and Dark Knight, and especially the ending of the latter I think that a third film would do good to focus on the characters that don't fit comfortably into either end of the good/evil spectrum. A bad guy who is ruthlessly pragmatic, instead of just completely reprehensible, or has noble intentions buried under an extremist world view, or goes from Good to Evil in one fridge flat. Thematically, this would also allow the entrance of another character who exists on that spectrum, morality-wise: Selina Kyle.
As an aside, I just had a random thought about who could make a good Riddler: James Purefoy, of Rome-fame (and being the man who was almost V). Really, most of the traits you listed off for Eddie are present in Purefoy's portrayal of Marc Antony, just in a less intelligent and more bloodthirsty form (the smugness is definitely there. Oh boy, is it ever there). He might be a bit too classically handsome, but other than that I think he could do a good job.
And last thoughts, because this comment is long enough as it is: but Victorian Riddler? You should totally have a monocle with a question mark-shaped frame.
WAIT I HAVE MORE TO SAY. The Riddler and The Shade? Talk about a great team-up idea! I'd write it myself, except that it would probably be very difficult to write, and my fiction-writing muscles are already incredibly rusty. Eddie would of course initially annoy the hell of out of the Shade, who would snark on his dress sense and SHUT UP BRAIN I might have doodles a couple of things, if the writing part is currently out of my league.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 06:54 pm (UTC)You're right, that would fit nicely with the introduction of Catwoman, another character I've heard people wonder if she could even fit, since she's not a "threat" or something. The lack of imagination fans have these days, I tell ya.
If I ever do get around to watching ROME, I'll keep that in mind.
Oooh, the monocle could be sweet, I can just see it! Sadly, I'd have the same problem with that as I do with the question-mark cane-topper: I don't know how to make one. But as for eyewear, I'm already going for small round purple-lensed sunglasses, ala the Shade's black square ones. I've had 'em for years, but now they'll go perfectly.
And yeah, actually the Riddler and the Shade would actually make a stellar team-up! Oooooooh.
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Date: 2008-09-20 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-13 02:56 pm (UTC)