The Batman’s spinoff revolving around Colin Farrell’s Penguin is already a villain series but it has the potential to add more rogues to run afoul of the Bat and Gotham’s Underworld.
A leaked casting notice indicates a classic version of Clayface might be included in Oz Cobblepot’s rise to power in some fashion. The description that has people calling out the character as Clayface reads, “Actor who was driven mad when he heard he couldn’t participate in a play due to his deformed face.”
This sounds a lot like the Golden Age and original version of the future shapeshifter, Basil Karlo, who was an actor of the stage and screen. Part of that backstory was borrowed for the action hero Matt Hagen in The Animated Series, but that is where the similarities end – at least until much later when Karlo was bestowed mystical clay by none other than Penguin.
In his initial incarnation, showing up first during the Bob Kane and Bill Finger years in Detective Comics #40, Karlo was a killer who bumped off cast members of the film Dread Castle one by one because he was cut out of the production. To hide his identity, he wore the mask of the main character in his last film, Clayface.
If Matt Reeves goes with a similar storyline, he will stay in the lane of his more grounded take on the Dark Knight, and he may even bring a new murder mystery to the fold.
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However, we should note the casting leak adds the character’s name is Logan and the role is being left open to multiple ethnicities, so the Karlo Clayface speculation could be premature. Add to that this leak comes from 4chan and it’s tempting to take it with a grain of salt – which we encourage until more comes out about the series.
Still, to play devil’s advocate, the casting notice might be indeed accurate and, if so, it lists more names as series regulars. They are “Robert” – a “Handsome, charming, very physically fit, an incredibly ambitious gangster” – “Rupert” – a Caucasian “socialite who is a cruel father and an abusive husband” – and “Supportive but tired wife,” Lynda, “reluctantly dealing with her abusive husband and his troubled son.”
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Betting odds are Rupert and Lynda are the Cobblepots, Oz’s parents whom he rebels against, and Robert is his best friend who hypothetically suffers a grim or debilitating fate at some point in the story – all a simple guess but you can see stuff like this coming a mile away.
No production or start date has been set yet for “Penguin,” if they even call it that in the end, but the leak offers a summary for the show: “A spinoff of The Batman, described as a “Scarface-like” series about the rise of the Penguin character. The Penguin, otherwise known as Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot, is a dapper mob boss and one of Batman’s primary villains.”
Do you believe the leak? Is a Penguin series the right environment for Clayface to make his grand debut in The Batman’s pocket of the multiverse? Is “grounded” the right approach? Leave a comment below.
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