The Penguin

The Cobblepots were old Gotham money, the kind with wings on the family crest, and they put their firstborn in a basket on a winter river rather than let the city see him. What the sewers raised came back decades later wearing a top hat: Oswald Cobblepot, proprietor, financier, collector of grudges, known to the underworld by the name the cruel children gave him first. The Penguin. He is the rare Gotham power who never wears a mask, because respectability is his disguise. From behind the Iceberg Lounge's frosted glass he brokers the city's guns, debts and secrets, and every deal is signed under the canopy of an umbrella that is never only an umbrella: blades, gas, blackpowder, one that flies. The costumed lunatics come and go, the Bat breaks them all eventually, and through every regime change the little man with the long memory remains, counting.