How The Penguin remixes Batman comics to create an original Gotham crime drama

More than one comic from Batman's 85 years of existence on the page served as a building block for upcoming HBO series The Penguin, a continuation of the Matt Reeves-directed The Batman that features Colin Farrell's return as Oz Cobb. And yet, the series does not feel like a "comic book show." Early on, DC fans predicted the drama might adapt The Long Halloween, one of Jeph Loeb's standout comic arcs from the late 1990s, but only because characters like Oz and the Falcone children had been confirmed for the show. That's since been dispelled.

"There's some great Penguin comics out there, but none are so seminal in the way that some of these other comics are — The Long Halloween and stories like that — that feel like you really would want that straight-up adaptation," Lauren LeFranc, showrunner and lead writer on HBO's The Penguin, explains to Entertainment Weekly. "So there was a lot of freedom in terms of how to shape Oz and what to create in terms of his backstory."

The Penguin feels closer to a prestige crime drama, a la The Wire, rather than something out of Gotham City. Scarface and Scorsese are references thrown out a lot by creatives. "It's imperative that it's different [from the comics]," says Reeves, who returns as an executive producer on the show with filmmaking partner Dylan Clark. "The thing for me was to absorb all of that stuff and feel it vibrating."

Set one week after the events of 2022's The Batman, The Penguin (premiering Sep. 19) tracks the rise of Farrell's Oz Cobb. Once the chief lieutenant of mobster Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) and operator of the Iceberg Lounge, Oz is now gunning to fill the power vacuum in Gotham City after his boss got got. He just has to contend with a few other power players looking to do the same. There are the two heirs to the Falcone criminal empire: Alberto (Michael Zegen), who's looking to push a hot new drug on the market, and Sofia (Cristin Milioti), who's fresh off a no-doubt rejuvenating stint at Arkham Asylum. There's also the other big crime family, the Maronis, led by patriarch Salvatore (Clancy Brown) and matriarch Nadia (Shohreh Aghdashloo).

When LeFranc began her brainstorm, she strategized who could populate Oz's orbit. "I grew up reading comic books, and very rarely did I feel like the women were the most interesting characters," she recalls. "When I was asked to do this, my not-so secret agenda was to create a lot of interesting, complicated women — and to have Oz respect women. That was very important to me because, in the crime drama, oftentimes your main mobster doesn't respect women." Sofia was one such comic character that stood out to LeFranc, given her close proximity to Carmine. She's now the other main lead figure of The Penguin next to Oz.

In the comics, Sofia helps her father uncover the identity of a "Holiday Killer," who ends up being her own brother, before it's revealed that she, too, is a murderer known as the Hangman. For the show, LeFranc had more of a real-world connection. "I thought about Rosemary Kennedy, the lost Kennedy daughter, who they put away in an asylum," she says. "It's unclear how mentally ill she was or if she just did things that they felt were inappropriate and made the Kennedys look bad. Eventually she got a lobotomy. It's a very tragic story, but I thought about that in relation to Carmine and Sofia. What if she came from Arkham State Hospital? Did she deserve to go to Arkham?"

"They're two people who have been so damaged in different ways, damaged by life," Farrell muses of Oz and Sofia, who share a few quietly intense scenes over martinis in their favorite darkened dining haunts. "Her, particularly, as the daughter of one of the two main criminal kingpins in Gotham, and then subsequently as someone who served time in Arkham Asylum and experienced enormous amounts of brutality, which are explored in later episodes." 

"Sofia starts as a character who's a little bit of a cipher," LeFranc continues. "You don't understand what happened to her. You don't understand what her agenda fully is. You just know that she throws Oz off. There's power in throwing a guy like Oz off because he's not easily thrown. As the character evolves, we really deepen her more."

However, Oz's most complicated relationship is with his mother. Another figure pulled from the comics but remixed for The Penguin, Francis Cobb (Deirdre O'Connell) suffers from dementia in her older age. She has these spells where she almost speaks in Shakespearean tongues whenever her son comes to check on her. It's sometimes unclear where in time she thinks she is or what haunting memory has taken hold of her at any given moment, yet she fiercely proclaims her boy is going to take over Gotham one day.

According to Reeves, Francis was one element LeFranc pitched that really excited them by "leaning into the origins of what makes the void [in Oz's life]." He adds, "You can always look at what creates ambition, but there was an origin that created the whole sweep of where the series would go."

LeFranc describes Francis as "a very different sort of mother than you might expect: more biting and their relationship is a little twisted, verging on Oedipal in moments." Farrell notes how significant a role Oz's childhood with Francis plays in the series. "Particularly because of one event that happened and how that's the driving force in his life, and also a source of sorrow, ambition, and discomfort," the actor explains. "There's a lot of flashbacks to Osmond [as] a kid to really be able to get under the hood of the character and get into his psychology and get into what drives the man and what shapes the Oz that we met in the film, but also what shapes the Oz in the TV show."

Our guide through it all is Victor Aguilar (Rhenzy Feliz), another original character created for the series. He's a kid from one of the less-affluent neighborhoods of Gotham who tries to steal a plum-colored car with his buddies. As fate would have it, that car belongs to the mobster known by his enemies as the Penguin, catapulting Victor into one helluva ride in the first episode.

Reeves recalls LeFranc's pitch for the series. "She came up with the idea of Victor and this pressure cooker where you're like, 'This poor kid. This is the wrong moment to be in that place and trying to rip off this guy's car. This is a disaster.' He meets Oz and there's this whole thing. Is he going to kill this kid?"

"Victor and Oz are kind of like the upside down Batman and Robin," Farrell posits. "Victor is his cohort, his conciliary. He's somebody that Oz sees very clearly doesn't have much going on in his life and decides that he might come in very useful, somebody that he can manipulate. I think he does have an affection for the kid, as well, but I am playing a heightened character, Cristin is playing a heightened character, I think Rhenzy as Victor and Didi as Francis very much ground this show in a really emotional place."

Of course, there are plenty of comic book Easter eggs, if not a straight adaptation of a classic comic book arc. Fans might recognize the name of one of Sofia's old inmates at Arkham from back in the day, for example. There are also figures like Carmen Ejogo's Eve Karlo, Oz's lover and a madame of the night. Though Eve appears to be an original character created for The Penguin, DC fans will recognize that she shares a last name with a notable Batman villain, the original Clayface, Basil Karlo. Less literal than Basil, Eve shifts between many different looks and costumes as part of her profession to fulfill her client's sexual fantasies.

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"The great thing about very well-known, highly regarded IP is it gives you this opportunity, but you have to take the responsibility of that opportunity very seriously," says Dylan Clark, Reeves' longtime producing partner. "We learned this on Planet of the Apes." Reeves took over directing the franchise with 2014's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, followed by 2017's War for the Planet of the Apes, also both produced by Clark. "We used that IP to get people excited, but we gave them original stories based on the characters that they loved in a contemporary way so that it was a new telling of it."

Let's now see how the Bat-verse benefits from that tactic.