Scans_Daily

What would I want Flamingo to be?

Okay, given the lack of any real ostentatious, loud, silly, campy stuff from the Joker for a while and the fact he's basically been nothing but a dull killer since DKR/TKJ, why couldn't we have a had a loud, tacky, overly flamboyant madman with some real character? Like some sort of adjustment of the BTAS Joker, who now reads as entirely unlike the contemporary Joker, with some mad schemes, some deathtraps? Or some art obsessed madman, a riff on the Nicholson!Joker of Batman '89 or something like Sander Cohen of Bioshock? If he's going to kill people, do something interesting with it, something weird and lurid like, I don't know, he has a demented obsession with making people do the one-legged standing pose like the actual bird (which would be, say, a parallel with the pretty unnerving rabbit masks during that particular section of Bioshock). Hell, maybe he doesn't even need to kill them to do that, maybe he forces people to stand like that or they set off some manner of booby trap. You could even go places with the Prince reference from the Quitely cover.

Anything would have been more promising than 'oh, he doesn't talk, he has no real character because he was lobotomised, but he eats people's faces after killing them'. Because as much as he was progressing the Batman formula at the time, Grant's villains seemed to attempt to do the same, but their reasons for being are either trite or cliche (Flamingo) or Grant was being too clever for his own good and thinking we couldn't dig up the references on our own (Pyg).