Comics Review: "Penguin: Pain and Prejudice"

- by Señor Editor, 15 May 2012

I like the Penguin.
I always did, but the problem with him is that there aren't many stories about him that are actually good. He's often considered a joke of a villain in Batman's rogue gallery and equally often he's portrayed as one, too. When I heard about the Gregg Hurwitz and Szymon Kudrański "Penguin: Pain and Prejudice" 5-part mini series that recently wrapped up and apparently showed the character some respect, I knew I was gonna check it out.

I'm gonna avoid plot spoilers in this review (this is still a fresh comicbook) but "Pain and Prejudice" seems to go the "definitive Penguin story" route. That can be both a good and a bad thing.

On the good side, Penguin doesn't really have a definitive, be-all, end-all story and his reputation among fandom could use a boost. His origin is revisited here in flashbacks and some ideas from previous stories about the character are used again, but it all works well together. On the other side, it seems to be a trend in DC comics that most of the villain solo series/graphic novels are of the "definitive"/origin/Year One, Two etc variety lately. While I'd definitely like to see more original stories starring those iconic characters, that might not be a problem at all to other readers.

Hurwitz does a good job with writing Penguin. His Cobblepot is at the same time classy, tragic, cruel and, well, freaky. When you see how he got the way he is, you feel sorry for him. And then you see what he's willing to do to people just for the sake of securing his hard-earned reputation of a man to be feared... Hurwitz balances it all well and the Penguin is a stylish, strong character here. One could argue that the way his personality is presented here isn't very subtle, but it's not something very distracting.

What I enjoyed  the most  here though, is the  art. Szymon  Kudrański is a young Polish artist, who  I  admit I never heard of before. He does a fantastic job here. The Penguin's look is a huge part of who he is and WHY he's like that. Some artists have a tough time making Oswald look right - he's often shown as just a small fat guy with a longer than average nose. Kudrański (See? No problem spelling his name! I can spell  "Straczynski"  & "Sienkiewicz"  right  any  day  of  the  week,  too! It probably has something to do with where I'm from, though.) makes him look just the right amount of awkward and menacing. I'm looking forward to seeing more of this guy's art. Meanwhile, you can check out a lot of it on his blog.

Buy this series. It's easy to track down. There may not be much here about the Penguin that you didn't know before if you're a longtime reader, but this is a quality Penguin story. Those don't come very often (in fact, the last Penguin story that I thought was great was his team-up with Kadaver in the Grant/Breyfogle days...) and if you want to see more of them, and not just yet another story about the Joker that doesn't offer anything of value, it's important to show DC that there's a market for Penguin stories.
The guy's been around for decades, help him spread his wings a little!

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Tagged: comics, Reviews.

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