Villain redesign

[Restingvoice]

I want to redesign White Rabbit, since I like the idea that she can split into two and therefore she's impossible to catch, but I don't have an idea yet. I don't want to just giver her a suit. Marvel already has a White Rabbit that looks like that. So I'm thinking to use the mirror element, Through The Looking Glass, focus on the splitting into two ability.
The pink domino mask can stay. That's fine. It's cute. I'm also keeping the pink and white color scheme. I just don't know what the clothes will look like yet.
Maybe something fluffy, something that has rabbit fur, but not a massive fur coat. She needs to be able to run.
She needs to wear a running shoes. Pink and white.
A cute pink running shorts that's still pretty tight enough to be sexy but not as overt as a lingerie?
Of course, no tight corset. She needs to run so she needs to breathe.
So she'd be more like a sporty character I guess?

[scary harpy]

THREAD RESURRECTION!!!

The Cavalier II - Morgan Drake.

A somewhat androgynous but always fashionable (mis)adventurer, Morgan Drake was the daughter of a successful businessman who managed to raise his hellion of a daughter into following in his footsteps, with Morgan building a significant independent fortune by her early twenties. Growing bored of this business life, though, Morgan pursued a passion for fencing, acrobatics, and other pseudo-Batfamily activities… albeit always form a very self-interested place. She also collected memorabilia from the first Cavalier, Pyle, as she was fascinated by him.

Then her dad lost his entire fortune and was humiliated by the Great White Shark.

Morgan, still financially secure herself, was incensed, and decided to confront the Shark personally. Things went badly, and Morgan wound up having to defend herself with a sword… and found she loved it. She loved it even more when she successfully escaped with the Shark’s boat. So she decided to practice some more, fine tune her performance and look, and basically have the most adrenaline junkie “give me a challenge” career she can, not really altruistic or immoral, but more a very fine tuned and classy variation of Roxie Rocket, with a strong sense of “form,” though not honor (she freely admits she’s a thief and occasional killer for fun.)

Morgan Drake is genuinely one of the best sword fighters on the world, and is frequently hinted to be *very* much on the level of the Batfamily, but is obsessed with “good form” for her own pride. She *does* for instance, carry a firearm, but it’s a single shot pistol she only uses when neccessary, and always creatively.

And here’s her “reverse Zorro” design:
Attachment 120565

I could see a female Cavalier working...

I love the idea of a female Cavalier!

godisawesome, thank you for resurrecting this thread.

[scary harpy]

Johnny Witts

He was a non-costumed bat-villain who loved to match wits with the Dark Knight. He seemed to replace the Riddler for a time.

I would reimagine him as Nathan Witz alias Johnny Witcraft; he would Riddler’s Harley Quinn. He would be clever, capable and in awe of Eddie.

Johnny Witts reappeared in the pages of Harley Quinn.

He moved from Gotham and became a real-estate agent...corrupt, of course.

I didn't read the story, but this is as good an update as any.

[Frontier]

I want to redesign White Rabbit, since I like the idea that she can split into two and therefore she's impossible to catch, but I don't have an idea yet. I don't want to just giver her a suit. Marvel already has a White Rabbit that looks like that. So I'm thinking to use the mirror element, Through The Looking Glass, focus on the splitting into two ability.
The pink domino mask can stay. That's fine. It's cute. I'm also keeping the pink and white color scheme. I just don't know what the clothes will look like yet.
Maybe something fluffy, something that has rabbit fur, but not a massive fur coat. She needs to be able to run.
She needs to wear a running shoes. Pink and white.
A cute pink running shorts that's still pretty tight enough to be sexy but not as overt as a lingerie?
Of course, no tight corset. She needs to run so she needs to breathe.
So she'd be more like a sporty character I guess?

I think her Future State look worked out pretty well.

[Restingvoice]

I think her Future State look worked out pretty well.

Oh I haven't seen it

[godisawesome]

Here’s brief one on a more popular villain, and only regarding their look:

Penguin

Why is he so ugly and funky? It’s not (just) because he was born that way.

It’s because of a lifetime of beatings and accidents caused by being a particularly stubborn, bellicose, and determined.

His nose has been horrifically broken, his jaw busted and heeled in an awkward way, his hands are so gnarled he keeps them in gloves, and his hunch that he gets sometimes is because he got busted there as well.

Now, this also means he’s very familiar with his pain threshold, and thus very hard to intimidate. It also adds to why he enjoys the finer things now; he went through hell, and he likes his little slice of heaven.

[Mutant God]

Catwoman - Archaeologist Patience Philips finds an ancient Egyptian artifact and accidently unleashes a dangerous cat deity who possesses Patience and acts like an ill tempered noblewoman while speaking with a French accent. (A combination of Halle Berry's Catwoman and Eartha Kitt's Catwoman with a some Maxie Zeus mythology gimmick).

[Jim Kelly]

I have a deep love for "Beware of--Poison Ivy" by Bob Kanigher, Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Giella, in BATMAN 181 (June 1966), which is one of the earliest Batman comics I read. Still the story doesn't make much sense, even by 1960s standards. But I want it to make sense, so I created my own fan fiction which explains how this story could have happened in my head canon.



Playboy Bruce Wayne has taken his ward Dick Grayson to a "Pop" Art show at the Gotham City Museum, and the two both gaze longingly at the Arthropodic Threesome, who the Pop Art images say are Public Enemy Nos. 1, 2 and 3. Now if they were really public enemies would they be the subject of a Pop Art show at the city's museum?

In Kanigher stories, Bruce seems to always be interested in imparting Hugh Hefner ideals to young Grayson. And I imagine Dragon Fly, Silken Spider and Tiger Moth are pop icons and objects of male fantasy. In my world of Batman for this period, there was a grey area where some so-called super-heroes and super-villains were performance artists--in sort of a mixture of the W.W.E. and AMERICAN GLADIATORS. They put on public performances that were filmed and may have broken certain city bylaws. The Arthropodic Threesome were the top female "super-villains" and thus called Public Enemies in the P.R, but not actually listed as public enemies by the F.B.I.

They can be a nuisance at times, getting in the way of legitimate law enforcement, yet relatively harmless. Poison Ivy takes this all too seriously, which is what gets her in jail and then involves Bruce Wayne in trying to reform her.

For the Arthropodic Threesome (arthropods include both spiders and insects), I had worked up back stories for each of them and some new costumes designs. Tiger Moth was the character that interested me the most and I invented a romance for her with Killer Moth.

[scary harpy]

download (3).jpg

Marcia Monroe - Queen Bee, agent of CYCLOPS.
The Brave and the Bold #64 (March, 1966)

From what I've read and remember, this was a truly awful Batman story.

I would reimagine Marcia Monroe; I would rename her Honey.

Her theme would be bees, flowers and honey, of course. She would be an independent villainess who is not in love with Batman.

Her costume and her drones' costumes would be updated somewhat.

With these minor changes, I think she would have some potential.

[godisawesome]

Here’s more of a “faction” redesign; as a fan of AEW, I’m a big believer that factions are a good way to shore up and keep attention on lesser characters by tying them to bigger ones. It works for Ra’s Al Ghul’s faction, after all. It’s also less about totally redoing characters and more about integrating them together.

Bane and his Kingdom

Bane’s origin is the same as it’s always been, albeit his backstory emphasizes another big event he was involved with besides just Knightfall: Legacy, in particular how he was allied with Ra’s at the time before their fallout and Bane began hunting down Lazarus Pits to damage Ra’s and his organization. Part of his repackaging is making it explicit that Bane has successfully carved out a major niche in the global underworld that explicitly occupies some of the vacuum left behind by Ra’s’s fall (and furthered upon Talia’s own rebellion); while Bane still has a goal of taking Gotham from Batman, his actual “9 to 5” job is running his empire.

Bane runs his empire from Santa Prisca, but his actual organization is pretty small but dangerous; he runs it more like Attila the Hun than Caesar Augustus, demanding tribute from gangsters and tyrants in a decentralized “shakedown” type of feudal empire. He doesn’t deal with the distribution of drugs, human trafficking, blackmail, smuggling, or the day to day political corruption; he simply fines whoever the boss of a city or territory is, demand recompense for not annihilating them, and occasionally gets involved when ever something interests him. It should also be noted that he personally despises human trafficking, and charges far more exacting tributes from such criminals, and gleefully enjoys punishing them if they cross him.

Peña Duro itself is reimagined as a hug, sprawling prison complex, with everything from open air ruins of the colonial era all the way to post-modern Superman facilities; the place was a Cold War black site used by both sides, and Bane maintains it as a particularly inescapable prison for people he’s paid to hide from the world. Most of its original prisoners were evicted by Bane, whether they were violent criminals or political prisoners. Weirdly, Bane doesn’t seem to particularly care that this has put the island in a state of civil war between the nominal leaders around the central city who owe him tribute and a rebel group founded by the political prisoners that dominates the coast… possibly because he had a friendly history with their former leader…

More to come…

[godisawesome]

Lady Vic, Bane’s retainer

Replace Blockbuster with Bane as her patron, and establish a funky little history between them; the Marsh-Mortons and the Dorrances had an old family feud back in England that led her to think Bane was acting on… only to find he had no interest in the feud, was grateful for having his parentage confirmed, and was something of a kindred spirit to her.

Since she lost her family estate due to its upkeep, Bane was the one who bought it back and they have a very old fashioned liege-lord, leal-warrior thing going on… but with a somewhat humorous side-hustle of her helping to educate him how to act like a nobleman in polite society.

Black Spider

A newer “leal-warrior” of Bane, our old Gotham rogue has a unique way of being paid by Bane: Bane simply gives him accurate dossiers on criminals that Black Spider would like to murder, and pays for the expense of his travel and tools. Since Black Spider is very much a serial killer of drug dealers here who constantly suspends his victims’ bodies in “nets,” some of the black humor of the character comes from the fact that he’s really unlike any other mercenary in DC; he just wants to kill drug lords, and he’s obsessed with it.

Of course Bane and he know that it’s likely they’ll someday oppose each other; Bane still gets paid in tribute from drug lords after all, even if he doesn’t manage those trades himself. It’s just that so far they’ve had a pretty convenient business relationship.

”Bird” Barsad and the Company of the Condemned
Bane’s “prime minister” for his empire and his rank and file henchman - a merging of his crew in Arkham Origins and Dark Knight Rises. All of them were once prisoners of Peña Duro, and Bane’s escape and freeing of them combine with the fear and awe he inspires to achieve a fanatical devotion, but everything else about them is usually *very* practical. None of them have costumes beyond tactical gear, their tactics always exploit their numbers, and they all have some kind of smaller scale Venom enhancement - whether as one-use injectors or lesser version of Bane’s own system.

Vengeance, the Rebel “princess”

I like some of the character’s concept, but I think she becomes more interesting if she’s almost a reverse of Talia Al Ghul. Bane did not have her “created”, and instead discovered the operation that created her and was enraged by it; seeing another child imprisoned at birth is not something he likes to see. Instead, he assaulted the base holding her when she was young, brutally murdered everyone, freed her, and then dropped her off with his ex, who happens to be the political prisoner who leads Santa Prisca’s rebels.

The reversal here of Ra’s situation is that Bane doesn’t want to dictate any part of his “daughter’s” life, and when she starts to support her foster mother against him, he’s hilariously proud of her… and then her foster mother dies at the hands of one of his men. Now, his daughter has named herself Vengeance and seeks to overthrow him herself… and he’s okay with that.

[Lightning Rider]

Catwoman - Archaeologist Patience Philips finds an ancient Egyptian artifact and accidently unleashes a dangerous cat deity who possesses Patience and acts like an ill tempered noblewoman while speaking with a French accent. (A combination of Halle Berry's Catwoman and Eartha Kitt's Catwoman with a some Maxie Zeus mythology gimmick).

Reminds me of Cheetah (Barbara Minerva).

[Lightning Rider]

Mutant God was killing it in this thread though. A couple of gold nuggets.

[godisawesome]

Crime Doctor

Matthew Thorne is a callous, greedy but highly skilled surgeon who lost his medical license and was almost arrested after being implicated in the illegal harvesting of a patient's organs to replace those in a richer, unscrupulous client.

So... because he still wants to live well, he found a patron in his second cousin Rubert "Boss" Thorne as a combination on-call mafia medic, cutting edge black market surgeon... and organ harvester of Gotham's vagrant population. He has also, at times, "minded the margins" for Boss Thorne's organization by performing his harvesting on victims of Thorne's empire, before reducing the rest of the body to whatever else can be profitably sold form it, disposing and dispersing evidence of their murders while off-setting whatever it cost to kill them in the first place.

The truly sickening part of the Crime Doctor's operations is that sometimes the only way you find out someone was murdered is when you find their organs inside someone else...

...And he's growing antsy at Leslie Thompkins cutting into his supply...

Lock-Up

Gordon's arch enemy.

Basically, imagine him as the patron saint of all the worst aspects of the "Thin Blue Line/Blue Wall of Silence," with the truly twisted part being that he sees himself as defending his "Brothers" by targeting IA, media members, defense lawyers, Gordon, and anyone else trying to clean up Gotham's police department, even though it's clear the "brothers" he's defending are corrupt criminal themselves.

The "Lock Up" name comes from what was one of Gotham City's most prolific and powerful police cliques/gangs, and which Gordon first made a name for himself - and delayed his rise to Commissioner for - by taking down. It had members in both the Department and in prison security, had strong ties to the GCPD Union, and had it's own emblem that combined a chained lock and a skull all over the place (think the way the Punisher skull has been co-opted by the right wing). Lyle Bolton escaped that purge, and now works as a seemingly menial prison guard at Blackgate... while actually using the gang's resources to run his own terror campaign and illegal prison system.

Lock Up wants to have the same intimidation aura as Batman, but towards civilians and "rat" cops.

[godisawesome]

A big one.

Two-Face

Changes in background: Harvey Dent was first diagnosed with DID when fairly young, and had it seemingly tightly controlled through early therapy when his main law career began. Since such a diagnosis would be a political liability, Harvey hid it and even broke his own ethical code to do so, which only added to the mounting pressure and stress which gradually worsened the condition. The only person he allowed to know about it was Gilda, his wife, which initially seemed to help... before the Holiday murders occurred: Harvey suffered a handful of blackouts and lapses in memory that signaled the DID was back in full force, likely catalyzed by the first time he realized that Gilda was an excellent candidate for Holiday. The sheer horror and stress of his condition only made things worse, as he later realized that Gilda couldn't have committed some of the murders and began to suspect that he was doing it as well.

So by the time acid was thrown in his face by Sal Maroni, Harvey was already fractured - and upon initially awakening, it wasn't Harvey who controlled their body, but one of his alters, Big Bad Harv, who quietly carried out a bloody campaign of revenge against Gotham's underworld from his hospital bed while the Harvey alter remained buried. Big Bad Harv would flip a coin on a list of Maroni's contacts and hire killers to go after them, based off a bad joke Maroni made about how "similar they were." Batman discovered this, halted it by giving Harvey a two headed coin without telling him, and mortified at letting this happen to his friend, Bruce Wayne personally sponsored for him to get the best treatment available...

...only for the emerging and horrified Harvey to get impatient at his treatment and convince Bruce to help him get alternative treatment...

...from Hugo Strange.

Strange, of course, abused the crap out of this. He managed to make contact with Big Bad Harv and help him form entirely into a new personality - the Judge - who became Strange's hitman. He concealed this by getting another alternate of Harvey to pretend to be Harvey in exchange for never having to face his crimes... but Harvey deduced that, and managed to communicate it to Batman. The Judge was a skilled fighter thanks to Strange's training, but this mess of a mental disorders eventually turned on itself. Since Harvey was supposedly mostly through his reconstructive surgery, one of the way the personalities managed to force themselves to recombine was thought the physical pain of ripping off some late stage grafts and agreeing to use the coin to resolve any disputes the various personalities have.

So, modern Two-Face is usually a conglomerate of an exhausted Harvey, Big Bad Harv/The Judge, and a smaller assortment of alternates that communicate more through general schizophrenia-like symptoms, with The Judge being among the most cunning.

And since he was most of the way through his reocnstructive surgery, his scars are instead like Phase 1 of facial reconstructure, being more pitiable looking, with the added twist that the scarred side is Harvey, while the healthy side is The Judge.