Max’s The Penguin isn’t the primary TV collection to return from Hollywood’s fascination with Gotham Metropolis’s seedy underbelly, however it could be the one most dedicated to staying away from any whiff of Batman or Arkham Asylum’s monikered rogues’ gallery. Working example: Even its one Arkham affected person, Sofia Falcone, aka the Hangman, is straight out of Batman’s nice mafia fiction period.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for The Penguin’s premiere episode, “After Hours.”]
Photograph: Warner Bros. Discovery
The Penguin introduces Sofia Falcone, daughter of the Falcone crime household performed by actor Cristin Milioti, as perhaps the scariest participant jostling for the Falcone crown. Sofia might be a shoo-in to observe her father’s demise in 2022’s The Batman and her brother’s demise in The Penguin’s premiere, however her path is hampered by normal mafia sexism, and likewise the notion that she’s not mentally match to be a boss.
Sofia, Penguin tells us, simply obtained out of Arkham Asylum, and, in a previous life, she dedicated a string of murders. However who did she kill, and why did it earn her the nom de guerre of “the Hangman”? The Penguin hasn’t laid out its personal solutions to that simply but — however the DC Comics tales that Sofia originated in have.
Slightly on Sofia Falcone in DC Comics
Sofia first appeared in Batman: The Lengthy Halloween, a 1996 miniseries from author Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale that’s among the best Batman thriller tales to grace the web page and indisputably one among probably the most cinema-influential fashionable Batman comics. Lengthy Halloween adopted Batman and different characters as they sought the actual identification of the serial killer Vacation, who preyed on members of Gotham’s mafia elite. Sofia is available in about midway via the story, proper after she will get out of jail.
Common jail, that’s, not Arkham Asylum. Quite than the household pariah, Lengthy Halloween’s Sofia is Carmine Falcone’s beloved daughter and greatest enforcer. Additionally she’s, like, a complete brick shithouse nicknamed “Sofia Gigante.”
Picture: Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale/DC Comics
Sofia wouldn’t get her serial killer cred till Lengthy Halloween’s sequel, Batman: Darkish Victory, the place she turned out to be the mysterious serial killer the Hangman. That’s a enormous spoiler for Darkish Victory, however, properly, blame The Penguin, not us.
Who did the Hangman kill?
Because the Hangman, Sofia preyed on police and different regulation enforcement figures (largely corrupt ones, as a result of that is Gotham Metropolis). She would shock her victims with a noose and depart them hanging in plain sight, together with her calling card pinned to their chest: half-finished hangman video games, scrawled on papers taken from Harvey Dent’s pre-villain-turn workplace desk.
The purpose of all of it was revenge: On the climax of The Lengthy Halloween, Harvey (as Two-Face) had executed her father, Carmine Falcone, and all of Hangman’s victims had been individuals who had helped Harvey construct his profession. Sofia, who had survived a fall from Carmine’s rooftop penthouse on the finish of Lengthy Halloween, escaped suspicion for a lot of the story by pretending that the autumn had paralyzed her from the neck down.
The Penguin isn’t the primary “grounded” Batman TV collection to faucet Sofia for the highlight — Crystal Reed (Teen Wolf) performed her for a number of seasons of Gotham. She’s a pure match for a collection trying to mess around with succession within the Falcone household and dabble in a extra conventional true-crime form of supervillain. Sofia dies by the hands of Two-Face on the finish of Darkish Victory, so her comics presence has remained contained inside it and The Lengthy Halloween.
Along with being thriller tales, and serving as origin tales for Two-Face and Robin, Lengthy Halloween and Darkish Victory requested the query: “However how, precisely, did Gotham Metropolis transition from the mafia-dominated underworld of Batman: 12 months One to the chaotic, theatrical crime sprees of a free group of costumed murderers?” A part of that transition, Loeb and Sale put ahead, was that the scions of Gotham’s nice crime households turned to serial homicide and calling playing cards themselves.
However is The Penguin additionally excited about following that individual transition, or will it preserve its dedication to staying away from Batman’s monikered rogues? That’s for the remainder of the miniseries’ episodes to point out us.
