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Someone (WOODLAND WINO, WHO IS APPARENTLY IN DESPERATE NEED OF ATTENTION, SO EVERYONE PLEASE PRIVATE MESSAGE HIM A GREETING,) on the Lethal forums (That one place here that you are probably banned from seeing,) requested that I do a companion piece to my Guide to Gotham City giving details on some of the Dark Knight's less well-known villains. I had already been thinking of doing something along those lines, so here we go. Each part will contain five random villains, some well known, others not probably known at all, but each worthy of learning more about.

The list is in no particular order, and if any of my commentary angers you, cram it with walnuts.

We start off with a villain that is actually four villains. The Clayface moniker, unlike most of Batman's foes, has been a passed along title referring to a wide range of villains, each with different intentions.

The first Clayface, Basil Karlo, was a horror movie star who went on a killing rampage after finding out that one of his classic films was being remade. He had no shapeshifting abilities, he merely donned the mask that he wore in the first movie.

The second Clayface was Matt Hagen, probably the most well-known of the Clayfaces due to the fact that Hagen was the Clayface that appeared in Batman: The Animated Series. However, his origin in the comic book world varies greatly from his cartoon origin. In the cartoons he was a famous actor that was horribly scarred in a car wreck, causing him to accept a proposal to be a guinea pig for a new drug called "Renu-You." And when the concoction restored his career, the head of the company that had supplied the drug, Roland Daggett, forced Hagan to commit crimes to pay the price of the drugs.

In the comics he was a treasure hunter that fell into a pool of chemicals while spelunking in search of booty. He had to return to his pool of radioactive goodness on a regular basis to keep his powers going, and his powers were very similar to the ones he had in the animated series. He died during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, because DC apparently needed to clean house.

The third clayface was Preston Payne. This character is a happy rip-off of Mr. Freeze combined with the Incredible Hulk and the Vulture. Yay.

Stricken by a disease, Payne sought a cure using some of the captured cells of Matt Hagen, which he injected into his own blood stream. This seemed to work fine until he began to melt while on a date. His date freaked, he reached out to comfort her, and when he touched her, she melted.

He built a suit to contain his ickiness, but soon found out that the only way to keep himself together was to touch and melt other people. He died at one point in time, but it was only temporary, and he yet still lives.

And the forth Clayface is Sondra Fuller, also dubbed Lady Clay, just in case you were confused by her gender. She worked for some bad guy group that gave her Matt Hagen's powers. She got her ass beat by the Outsiders, which is sad.

Like some sort of Luchadore festival, Clayfaces I through IV appeared together as a team for while, with the worst team name in the long history of bad team names in comic books.

"The Mudpack."

...

It was during this time that the first Clayface was shown how to be like all of the other Clayfaces, and he is now the bearer of this proud name, carrying on the many successes of those who followed him and died.

His only real success was in breaking Batman's heart during the "Hush" storyarc by making him believe something that just wasn't true. Prick.

Ah, here we go, someone truly worthy of wandering Arkham's halls.

Most people doing something like this would have included the Ventriloquist in this as a partner to Scarface's actions. However, most people doing something like this also will never get laid, so count me as up on them already.

While the Ventriloquist is the actual human being half of the duo, he isn't a bad guy. He's just insane, suffering from multiple personalities disorder which manifests in the form of Scarface, the dummy that he uses shaped like a Prohibition-era mafioso. The two are very seperate people, with the Ventriloquist being very introverted and lacking in self confidence, while Scarface is very much a crimeboss, outgoing, loud, and confident in his decisions and actions.

Their relationship is very abusive, with Scarface continually blaming the weak-willed Ventriloquist for their failures, and sometimes it even gets physically abusive.

Yes, that's right, sometimes the Venriloquist pulls a Tyler Durden and beats the sweet bejeebus out of himself with a dummy that he controls.

Scarface's other quirk, besides actually just being a puppet, is that apparently the Ventriloquist cannot pronounce Ds while doing the voice of his puppets, they come out as a g sound. Scarface's favorite porno would therefore be "Gebby Goes Gallas." This helps to make Scarface annoying and cheesy, which I am grateful for. I mean, rather than just keeping the focus on the deep psychological issues that would cause a man to carve a small wooden man and act aggresively through it, we get lame-ass jokes involving talking with a lisp.

And some writers have even gone farther to defeat the purpose of the character by trying to insinuate that Scarface is actually alive on his own. I'd put a lot of cusswords here, but sufficed to say, Batman doesn't need to be stealing the plotlines of cheesy horror movies to be good.

The Ventriloquist has also used other talking dolls as partners in the past, most memorably a sock puppet during "Knightfall," but for the most part they all suck when compared to the Italian mafioso goodness of Scarface, the most viscious piece of wood ever locked up in Arkham.

Despite having the strangest eyebrows ever (They've sometimes tried to explain them away as some sort of sunglasses,) and appearing in the most recent Batman movie, Mr. Zsasz is somehow relatively unknown. This is probably due to one simple fact, a fact that warms my cold black heart.

Mr. Zsasz, you see, has no superpowers.

He doesn't shoot ice beams, or fly, or lift heavy things with ease, or turn into other people, or do anything at all, really, that is extraordinary. He just kills people. And every time he successfully kills someone, he puts a notchmark on his body using his knife.

Rant time. This is truly what makes Batman such a strong character. He can go from one issue fighting against the Man of Steel himself to fighting against a deranged serial killer with a knife and a pain fixation the next, and he can struggle against and defeat both while still looking relatively realistic. And it is this strange dichotomy that Batman has that makes him such a strong character throughout such a long run. With Batman there is no need to go over the top with the bad guys, because in theory all Batman is is just some guy with a limitless bankroll and a whole lot of drive, determination, and training. End rant.

Mr. Zsasz may have the greatest back story ever. He was happy as a child, with loving and well-adjusted parents. He wasn't abused or tortured. He graduated high school with honors and started his own successful company.

His parents died in a boating accident, and he grieved, but he didn't flip out and kill any one. He was sad, like we'd all be. He turned to gambling to help deal with the pain, and he lost his fortune one night at a casino to, of all people, the Penguin.

This caused some retrospective inflection, and what he found inside of himself was nothingness. He had no purpose in life, no reason for being. And when he looked around at others, he saw the same.

Suicide was the only option. He went to one of the bridges in Gotham and decided to jump. But Gotham is such a beautiful and unique town. He was mugged by a knife-wielding homeless person who wanted Zsasz's wallet before he died. Zsasz look at the man, saw nothing behind his eyes, thanked him for saving his life, and killed him with his own knife.

He had come to the realization that killing the pointless people of the world was a reason to live. And so now that is what he does, and he marks his body every time he succeeds in his goals, so that he'll never forget the people he has helped out.

Mr. Zsasz's only real weak point is that when compared to all of the other nutjobs out there struggling for Batman's attention, he seems rather tame and lame. Cutting yourself every time you slash someone's throat open seems actually rather normal in the mad, mad world of Gotham City. But even so, he plays a pivotal role in Arkham's pantheon of psychopaths, showing that cold-blooded murder still can carry an impact, even without a cheesy gimmick to go along with it.

Roman Sionis was born into one of Gotham's wealthiest families, a family whose fortune was built upon cosmetics. Why, he even knew Bruce Wayne when they were both children.

But while Bruce lost his parents to circumstances beyond his control, Roman burned down his own mansion and killed both of his parents inside, leaving him the inheritor of the family fortune, which he wisely wasted on fast cars and supermodels.

And it was an attempt to save his own floudering fortune that caused him to convince one of his supermodel girlfriends to try an undertested form of makeup that ended up scarring her face.

His fortune and his company were now lost to him, and although Bruce Wayne purchased his pharmaceutical firm in an attempt to help save what Roman had left, Roman took the action as an insult, and in an attempt to "save face" vowed revenge upon Wayne.

He carved a Black Mask out of a portion of his father's coffin, which he himself broke, and started a criminal empire called the "False Face Society," which was a gang of people in masks. He was doing pretty well, up until the moment that Batman kicked his ass. While trying to escape the asswhoopin' he was recieving, he lit the old ruins of the mansion he long ago burned down on fire, and was trapped inside the smoldering rubble, causing the ebony mask on his face to heat up and scar him.

This drove him over the deep end, and he continually tried to kill Bruce Wayne, but wasn't ever successful.

During "No Man's Land," he gave up on the world of organzied crime and became a cult leader, seeing in the earthquake-devasated ruins of Gotham a sick version of himself: Burned and wrecked features that could no longer hide behind a mask. So the Black Mask ditched his ebony mask and began to scar the people of Gotham so that they could finally look on the outside like they really did on the inside. This version of the False Face Society then tried to burn down all of the surviving buildings in Gotham City, trying to finally finish the scarring of the face of the sprawling urban wasteland that the earthquake had started.

He was defeated, but not before doing an extensive amount of damage to both the landscape and the survivors.

He has since gone back to just being a crime lord and peddling drugs, because there aren't enough organized crime figures in Batman's rogue gallery. But he did skin someone and then wear their skin while pretending to be them, and that is pretty neat.

Ah, Jervis Tetch, the Charlie Brown of the criminally insane crowd.

Jervis has been a Batman villain since 1949, but rarely if ever does he get the upper hand. His gimmick is that he creates hats that allow him to control other people's minds, which is where his power comes from. He has mind-controlled everything from his own goons, making them completely loyal, to Robin and Batgirl, making them turn on their mentor, but due to the fact that his schemes almost always include some sort of easilly-removed headgear, things never really turn out well for him.

To make things even worse, during one of his frequent stays at Arkham, where he recieves three square meals a day and sleeps in fairly comfortable conditions, someone found a stash of his mind-control devices and took his name.

Ah, but this just wasn't anyone, oh no, this was someone with a hat fetish who used the devices to creatively steal rare and valuable hats.

Rare and valuable hats.

Rare.

Valuable.

Hats.

And the one hat that this Mad Hatter wanted most of all was the one that was constantly over Batman's head, the mantle of the Bat, rarest of all hats, most valuable piece of cloth EVER. And so he concocted a scheme to get it off of Batman, a scheme that of course failed.

That version disappeared, and when Tetch then broke out of Arkham again, he stated for the record that he had found the other Mad Hatter and killed him, causing the hat-obsessed version to disappear forever, which almost makes Tetch a hero in some small way.

Tetch's thing is not headgear, it is control. He sorely wants the respect, recognition, and undying loyalty of his peers, but is unable to find these things on his own. So he uses devices to get it, and that is what makes him compelling.

He is a great case study in that he shows that even the very intelligent do not just gain respect or admiration, but some people will go to great lengths to find it even when they don't deserve it. He is a man who uses forceful means to gain control of people whom normally would ignore him, shun him, or belittle him. It is his need and desire for this social status that he cannot have that motivates him, and it is not the crime that attracts him to the side of the bad guy, it is the power over others that he weilds as the Mad Hatter. He is, essentially, a thinly veiled rapist achetype.

And with that note I conclude our first visit to the dark halls of Arkham. Until next time, may all your fish be smiling and your coinflips come up good heads.

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