Badass Crime Lords

We all know superheroes are a criminal's worst nightmare. They have the skills of veteran police officers or armymen and the incorruptible passion for justice of hardened vigilantes, the worst of both worlds. They can't be intimidated or bought, and most of the time they can't even be murdered due to their anonymity, and that's before accounting for their superhuman prowess. In this situation, even the most powerful Mafia dons would fold like cardboard, try to fade into the background and hope for the best. Some others, though, will fight tooth and nail to hold onto their criminal empires. Some not only manage to hold their own but even thrive in a cityscape dominated by super-powered freaks with nothing but their wits, armies of disposable goons and goold old human viciousness.

This thread is for them.

I know this one is cliche but Kingpin. I like the guy.

Yeah, the fact that Fisk looked non-threatening…until he breaks down a table with one punch or basically managed to control New York when the city itself is crawling with heroes, villains and nutcases and still survives to this day makes Kingpin a badass crime lord. Better than Silvermane, the Rose or the Maggia.

Back when Sinister Dexter was goo- ,oka- at least entertaining it had some pretty cool and funny ideas for mobsters. They didn't tend to live very long though.

Is there any comic book crimelord who can rival the Kingpin?

In cape, not so much. Maybe one of Batman's rouges.

Yes, but not in Western comics.

Sin City?

That's mostly due to contrivances and bad coordination between writers. If all the Marvel superheroes in NY were working together against organized crime, in an organized manner, Kingpin wouldn't stand a realistic chance.

Ain't that a thing about Marvel Heroes? The fact that they are really disorganized as hell? I mean, we got 14 different Super Teams running around NY..yet they usually fight each other more often than not?

You can say the same thing about Gotham. I mean:

>>>/a/

Roark wouldn't last the week in Gotham, Metropolis or Marvel New York. Boss Wallenquist might be a bit smarter, but we saw no evidence that he was a physical match for Fisk.
Kingpin only survives because he fights normal humans, or supers with a code against killing. If The Punisher ever got serious with him he'd be dead. The one time he sent an assassin after Nick Fury, Fury just hovered outside his window in one of his flying cars, took out his office with a rocket launcher, and told him if he picked a fight with SHIELD they'd just kill him.

Gotham's villains only exist because Batman chases all the other superheroes out of Gotham.

As shown by Aaron's run in Punisher MAX. Granted, the execution left a lot to be desired but it's there.

616 Frank's problem with Kingpin is that, the few times he's targeted Fisk, he decided to start at the bottom and kill his way through his organisation, working his way to the top until one of them is dead.
Then, you know Frank gets distracted by a squirrel or something.

I guess there's Hunter Rose, but he's pretty much a cape villain.
Hanayama Kaoru is really the best match. Although he's closer to being a 19 year old Japanese version of Walter from The Mask.

That's called bad writing.

Bane?

Or he'd send Nuke or Bullseye or some superpowered hitman after him and The Punisher might end up dead

fucking classy, but was there ever Holla Forums related material for it?

As a human mob boss starts accumulating and relying on superhuman enforcers, he steadily loses relevance as the boss. He would end up being the one working for the superhumans, merely managing the criminal syndicate that enriches the superhumans protecting it.

user your shiftkey is broke.

Frank's taken on The Reavers, I don't think Retarded Rambo is going to be a problem. His plastic subdermal chicken plates are good for tanking punches, but against a real soldier who knows how to aim and use cover he'd come up short.
And Bullseye? He throws stuff real good, I get it. But he's a martial arts badguy, hw might give Matt a hard time, but Matt uses sticks. Frank uses rifles and grenades, which trumps a deck of cards, I don't care how hard you fucking throw it.
Remember the Scourge Of The Underworld? Yeah, 90% of the "costumed acrobat" supervillains die when you shoot them in the head. Anything tougher and Frank tends to just level the playing field with explosives and cut out.


I actually have a Streets of Rage comic. Also a Shinobi comic by the same people.


Does Bane count as a cape? I guess he does when he's on Venom. But yeah, his strength and intellect would make him a match. Their organisations would make for an interesting conflict, Fisk rules a large empire by fear and likes to have one dragon, whether it's Elektra, Bullseye, Typhoid Mary or the hitman from Man Without Fear. Bane has a smaller group but they're more fanatical in their loyalty. Different strategic styles, Kingpin likes to be the chess master ruining lives and sending enforcers from his tower, Bane likes to just show up and break you after doing his research.
The real question here is whether Bane can break Fisk over his knee?

To be fair, shooting someone in the head when they're doing tripple 720 degree backflips is pretty hard even for the best baseline marksmen. Although someone like Bullseye could be expected to hit, because that's his thing.
You mean whether he can lift him in the first place.

What time is it? It's storytime. Please.

That's not necessarily true. If the world worked like that, there would be no elderly or physically weak leaders in anything
Superhuman enforcers would still work under a normal boss if the boss was doing a good job getting them their paycheck every week. Fireman might be able to shoot fire out of his hands but if he's a shitty accountant or makes bad decisions, everyone is gonna want the old boss back

Yes, but they would hold the long end of the stick, at any time able to not only leave, but to kill their boss at anything approaching the same risk as a mafia coup, and then simply replace the old boss with a new accountant. And there's nothing preventing a superhuman from being a decent leader.

*kill their boss at anytime, without approaching the same risk as a mafia

They're both packed away in a box somewhere. I don't think I've seen them for two house moves.

Read Batman: Venom. On Venom, Batman was able to lift 630 pounds right over his head. Bane's Venom is a refined formula and it's being constantly pumped into his bloodstream so, assuming he's on it, Bane should have no trouble lifting Kingpin who weighs about 450 pounds at most

The point is that anything Bullseye throws is equivalent to a bullet

Point, but dropping all that weight on his knee strikes me as an unwise course of action.

If he could lift a 450 pound man over his head without fucking his knees up I doubt dropping him onto the point of his knee and breaking his spine would hurt him

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I'm gonna do a brief storytime of one of my favorite stories with Penguin as a crimeboss

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Did they ever have a crossover where Penguin and Kingpin butt heads?

Not that I know of.
And even though Penguin is my favorite DC villain, he would probably lose to Kingpin if they ever fought.
Fisk is just a much bigger class of villain all together and Oswald not only has to constantly fight with or share territory with other crime bosses, he doesn't have any particular interest outside of ruling Gotham (and even when he does expand he always comes back either by choice or due to Batman).
Fisk might not be able to kill or permanently depose Oswald (he's consistently Batman's most successful villain despite his losses and has always bounced back from usurpers), but it would be otherwise a really one-sided match up towards Fisk.

Grendel would be an interesting match-up. Hunter Rose is almost Daredevil using Kingpin's methods, in the same way Millar's Nemesis is Batman as the Joker.
But Rose is much more hands-on. He's more like an evil Shadow, with a network of operatives, but he prefers to TCB himself.
Physically, he's another acrobat, but prefers an electrified double bladed naginata to a billy club. It would make for an interesting bull/matador fight, Rose and his devil's fork against Fisk's body armour and laser cane.
I guess he'd have to dance with whatever dragon Fisk was using that week, I'm sure he could eliminate Bullseye, Elektra, Typhoid or Larks. He might even have to fight Daredevil if goody two-shoes Matt felt he had to stop him killing the fat man. He'd beat them of course, it's just a matter of if they softened him up enough for Fisk to catch up with him. But the guy who fought Batman to a standstill and consistently made Argent look like an assclown could probably dance rings around lardass, even if he demolishes a whole floor of his skyscraper trying to kill him.

Outside of comics, Geese Howard? This is a man who will snap his own stepdaughter's neck and jump off a skyscraper just to piss you off.

You know, his friend could have offer Oswald a deal, just for the sake of old friendships.

Get your business clean, don't make people disappear nor kill them on the streets, become an actual business man, at least on the surface, and let me make your shithole into a tourist spot.

He would probably end the same, but maybe the penguin wouldn't drug him with venom so he wouldn't end eating his lover's head.

Shinobi and Streets of Rage were both serials in Britain's Sonic the Comic when it first began (before it became all about Sonic's world). Streets of Rage got away with some shit, considering it was in a 90's British comic for kids (by "got away with some shit" I mean "mentioned the existence of drugs and had guns that don't shoot stun lasers")

I think that's what I had, collections of those. Picked them up at a remainder book sale in the 90's in Penrith, Australia.
I remember Shinobi was fighting his way up a pagoda and had to fight a guy on stilts…

If Carter had just negotiated for less carnage on the streets instead of marching right up to him and pressing his buttons, he probably might have ended up fine. Oswald didn't want to ruin his life.
But he had to tell him he was going to shut him down, turn the Lounge into a skating ring, and told him Gotham was his city and he was going to take it back. He made it personal for The Penguin.
Apart from mockery of his appearence, nothing gets Penguin more riled up than someone trying to take Gotham from him.

Nice storytime.

This one is always good

The problem with The Penguin as a "crime boss" is that he's one of Batman's most dangerous villains. Allowing him even a small amount of leeway puts law and order in Gotham City in sever jeopardy. The Penguin is too smart for the police to handle, and if given just a little power, he would become insurmountable force of crime. He could corrupt the police force, get Gordon fired, buy elected officials or fund their rivals. It would be the nightmare Batman fights against every night.

Anyway, I'm going to dump Penguin Triumphant now. It's a story that demonstrates that The Penguin is too smart to take lightly.

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End.

Nicely done

Thank you.
I firmly believe this to be one of the (if not the) greatest stories with The Penguin ever written but I was never able to obtain a digital scan of it ever since I lost my physical copy years ago.
It's a story I think showcases the character at his finest without relying on edgy garbage like to showcase why he's a great villain.

Yeah, but then you eventually get back down to the sad fact that there are no Good Men, only cowards trying to look nice. Because otherwise, the good men would engage in some ruthless violence themselves.

See this? This is Batman level crime here.

He's really underutilized nowadays.

Sometimes I wish the Joker had never been created.

He made a pretty good appearence on the last issue of Harley Quinn and apparently he (as well as other rogues) are going to be the villains for a brief arc.
I loathe Harley Quinn, but I'm so starving to see Oswald and the other non-Joker rogues do something that I'm going to start reading it just for them and I'll drop it the moment they get out of Coney Island.

That bothers me more than I care to admit.

My pick for one of the best Penguin stories is "A White Feather for Batman" from World's Finest #49, simply because of how diabolically simple the plot is.


Like everything else Batman, The Penguin has suffered from the decline in quality brought on by shit writers.

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Really, The Penguin was slowly killing Batman the entire time with the white feathers he left on his calling card. White feathers laced with bird flu.

End.

That's because nobody knows what to do with him. Batman, like most capes, has shifted from actual plots to melodramatic garbage. It's hard to have a clever criminal mastermind in that kind of status quo.

And this goes for many of Batman's villains. Like, when was the last time you read Two-Face actually committing "2" crimes instead of playing up the Harvey drama? Maybe 10 years?

Penguin appreciation thread

Eh, "The Temporary Murders" is better.

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The End.

The part I feel is criminally wasted is the "world's greatest detective" part. Batman isn't detecting shit, in his movies and in his games, and truth be told I haven't read many modern batman comics.

So that's where the underground ice palace comes from.
Neat.
I do kind of miss when Penguin had more hide-outs other than the Iceberg Lounge. Writers don't seem to care anymore about giving the villains cool lairs.

That's really a shame, because The Penguin had a really strong first appearence. He not only immediately takes over Gotham's criminal underworld in a single blow, but gets Batman framed for a crime, then breaks him out so that the Gotham police would have a "Shoot to Kill" order out on Batman. Then to top it all off, The Penguin gets away in the end.

That's how he became an incredibly popular Batman villain.

These DC "remastered" comics feel like a fucking punch to the face. They're fucking terrible.

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The End.

Would Shiwan Khan count as a crime lord or something greater?

More of a world conqueror.

He is a step above since he rules over actual crimelords and his aspirations are for global conquest. The final novel he appeared in, Masters of Death, had him uniting most of New York's gangs under his rule.
Typical gangsters and crimelords are usually the kind of enemies The Shadow eats for breakfest while he deals with another threat.
But some, like The Prince of Evil, and The Cobra, manage to give him a challenge.

Thanks OP.

Thanks. Very good, great art.

Delayed gratification for the supreme ruining of their perceived enemies. A crimeboss highlight.

Cape crimelords are pretty cool if you write them properly.

Oh, fuck off. Worm is shit.

Oh, I'd love to see you do better in the same amount of time.

You could say that for everything.

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Then post one then.

I think he's asking you to post a better example.

I kinda like Worm, but it's massively overrated.

Thanks man

I know this isn't a qtddtot but I couldn't find one in the catalog so I guess I'll just ask here. Why does Norman Osborn's hair look so curly like that. I've never seen a white person have that hair style yet for some reason he does. It just looks weird.

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maybe because he (((echo's))). Did it ever occur to you that the green goblin has a long hook nose for a reason?

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Actually now that I think about it that never occured to me. I just assumed he was white.

Is it curly? That's news to me, I always unironically saw it as stripey as it looks in the comics. Might be the autism though.

I guess I should elaborate. I wouldn't say curly so much as having these curled stripes. It reminds me of a black guy's hair. I'd expect it on a black guy but never on a white guy.

You want to fuck him, yes?

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No not really.

looks more like sandman

Looks more like doubles