The Polka King: Polka-Dot Man As Batman’s Stupidest Villain

Next month will see the premiere of “The Suicide Squad,” Warner Brother’s rebootquel of 2016’s “Suicide Squad,” featuring an alien empress, a mutant shark-human hybrid and the Joker’s psychotic ex-girlfriend.

This post is not about them.

Nor is it about Starro, the giant intergalactic mind-controlling starfish which is the Squad’s apparent antagonist.

No, this post is about Polka-Dot Man, the 61-year-old Batman villain which writer/director James Gunn — for reasons we can for now only hope to fathom — included in this motley crew.

Yes, he’s a real DC villain, not a recent invention — created by Bill Finger, who also co-created Batman himself.

Three years ago, I profiled the Condiment King in a breakout blog post, and followed up with two more pieces examining this Gotham miscreant, who seemed like the quintessential dumb Batman villain with a gimmick.

But Condiment King is Richard III compared to Polka-Dot Man, a character whose schtick is so lame and mockable, he’s the quintessential D-list bad guy boiled down to his very essence. There’s almost nothing interesting to say about this stupid villain, except that he’s a stupid villain. Which, weirdly, is how he made it into one of this summer’s biggest releases.

DOT MATRIX

When it comes to obscure Batman villains, they come in two types — earnest but outdated characters like Kite Man, and more recent jokey inventions like the Condiment King.

Polka-Dot Man, who also goes by Mr. Polka-Dot, is in between. He was created in all sincerity, but it wasn’t lost on Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff that polka dots would be a very odd gimmick for a crook.

It’s part of his M O — while you’re looking at the dots, he makes his move.

“What is a dot? A spot–a speck–a nothing! Yet, by his cunning, one man could make a dot a monstrous menace!” the character’s first issue, Detective Comics #300, states as it teases “The Bizarre Polka-Dot Man!”

Despite his reputation as a weakling, Polka-Dot Man was initially a powerful foe to Batman and Robin. Wearing a skin-tight bespeckled white body-suit, his costume doubled as his weapon. He could pull off the dots and turn them into…anything, apparently.

In this 1962 comic, the dots become a buzzsaw, a getaway flying saucer, a bright miniature sun, a giant bubble, and detached punching fists.

What material these dots are composed of, how Polka-Dot Man came upon it, and why he would use it for this purpose are never explained.

Working with some standard Gotham hoodlums he pulls off several toy and dot-related heists, even capturing Robin at one point, before being outsmarted by the Caped Crusader. The crimes also produce a dot-based puzzle for readers to solve.

“He was created during a time when DC Comics thought kids loved checker patterns,” said comics writer Chuck Dixon, who would use Polka-Dot many years later. “Maybe they thought kids dug polka-dots too.”

FREAK SHOW

After that initial appearance, Polka-Dot Man was discarded and forgotten until Dixon dug him up decades later for “Batman: GCPD,” a four-issue series focusing on Gotham’s police department.

In the opening pages, Polka-Dot Man runs into Sgt. Harvey Bullock–or, more precisely, his baseball bat.

“I’ll polka with ya, freak!” Bullock yells after Polka-Dot Man injures another officer. “Your kind make me puke. The masks and the gimmicks and games. It’s all a joke to you, huh?”

Seeing someone in a white-and-speckled jumpsuit get pummeled by Bullock, the burly, cigar-chomping police detective normally associated with the grimmer, noir Batman creates a striking visual contrast for an opener.

“I really wanted to pick one of Batman’s less notable foes and show how far he’d fallen after failing to make much of an impression on the Gotham stage,” Dixon said. “There’ve been so many one-off, goofy Bat-villains over the years and Polka-Dot Man is one of the lamer ones.”

Polka-Dot Man isn’t seen again in the series, but his complaint against Bullock gets the sergeant in front of an internal affairs board.

Since then, the villain has shown up here and there, normally in the background. His colorful costume is a nice way to punctuate Gotham’s grim cityscape. He often shows up in bars frequented by Gotham crooks, leading some to speculate that he may have a drinking problem.

It would explain a lot.

“The Suicide Squad” won’t actually be Polka-Dot Man’s cinematic debut–he briefly appeared in “The Lego Batman Movie” along with a number of other absurd D-listers. And it’s not his first time in Suicide Squad, either–in “Injustice 2,” a spinoff comic of the video game “Injustice: Gods Among Us,” he’s briefly in that universe’s version of the Squad before being quickly eliminated by its leader, an evil version of Batman, for being “useless.”

At least the Condiment King can switch up sauces now and then. With polka-dots, there just isn’t anywhere to go.

“There was nothing I could do to make Polka-Dot Man more interesting,” Dixon said.

GOON-IES

One-off villains have always played a crucial, if underappreciated, role in comics, and in Batman in particular. Before story arcs became the norm, most comics featured one-time antagonists or anonymous hoodlums. During comics’ Silver Age–roughly the mid-1950s to the 1970s, when goofiness reigned supreme–writers fulfilled the relentless demand for new stories with some truly bizarre antagonists.

For some reason they’re more associated with Batman. Maybe it’s his oddball aesthetic, Gothic noir mixed with sci-fi. Or maybe it’s just that Dark Knight villains tend to get more focus.

Over the years, Gotham accumulated so many bad guys, they formed a sort of ecosystem, with apex predators like Joker at the top, morally ambiguous anti-heros like Catwoman playing both sides, and then the bottom-feeders scrambling for any bit of infamy they can find.

In a city defined by cataclysmic battles between good and evil, everyone gravitates towards a role, even if they’re not 100% sure why.

“We’re misfits–second-class operators–the mugs who get caught while the big guys like Joker hog the limelight an’ all the best crimes!” Killer Moth–you can imagine his schtick–tells Calendar Man and Catman in a 1992 story by Alan Grant.

In “The Wydening Gyre,” by filmmaker and comics superfan Kevin Smith, the also-rans are portrayed as a precursor to their more terrifying counterparts–an opening act for costumed villainy.

“They weren’t criminals so much as egocentric personalities in need of attention,” Batman opines in a voice-over. “A nuisance at worst. The media made stars of the head cases.”

But they’ve also been a valuable reservoir for writers in need of new faces and a change of pace now and then.

The Riddler and Mr. Freeze were both one-issue baddies before the 1960s show picked them from obscurity and made them Rogue’s Gallery staples.

Giving a well-known but derided villain a makeover is a surefire way to please comics fans while creating, essentially, a new character. In “The Long Halloween,” for instance, Jeph Loeb turned Calendar Man–whose original costume looks like it was assembled from daily planners–into a Hannibal Lector-type serial killer, obsessed with dates and time.

Gail Simone rebooted Catman — not exactly obscure, but certainly not an A-lister — into a Tarzan-like figure, who escaped his Gotham loserdom by communing with lions on the African savannah. A laughable villain became a tale of redemption.

Kite Man, on the other hand, saw his life become a tragedy. In “The Ballad of Kite Man,” Batman scribe Tom King used the villain’s earnest goofiness to examine a character regarded as a joke by everyone but himself.

And sometimes they’re just good for a moment of levity. (King often populates his Gotham with goofball villains–everyone from Crazy Quilt to Condiment King–as a kind of visual and tonal pallet cleanser in an otherwise gritty landscape.)

TRAGIC LAUGHS

Polka-Dot Man will surely provide plenty of chuckles in the upcoming ensemble superhero epic. It’s funny that there was a comic book bad guy called Polka-Dot Man, it would be funny if he was included in a squad of hardened crooks, and it’s funny that a movie would imagine such a thing. The whole thing is a barrel of meta-laughs.

But director James Gunn said there’s a tragic aspect to him, too.

“Polka-Dot Man is great, but I did think I needed a character who’s thought of as one of the dumbest ever,” director James Gunn said. “He has a very tragic story that you learn about throughout the film–to be able to add depth to characters who are thought of as the silliest is a fun thing for me to do.”

He gave particular attention to Polka-Dot Man’s costume — not the skin-tight spandex from the comics, but more like a leathery home-made spacesuit.

Gunn tweeted that he wanted a “sad-sack-soldier/b-grade supervillain-with-a-slightly-ill-fitting-outfit-&-goggles look,” and said the costume was his favorite in the entire movie.

Kevin Feige built the Marvel cinematic empire by realizing that there were far more comics fans out there than the studios realized. And as the comics and superhero spheres continue to grow to seemingly infinite proportions, they take on more and more of the self-referential nature of true fandom. Laughing at Polka-Dot Man is a self-deprecating joke about how we’ve all become obsessed with kids’ cartoon books — while simultaneously doubling down on that very obsession.

“There’s some deep digging going on in the IP crates these past few decades,” said comics writer Evan Dorkin. “Some of the most obscure things are now Funko Pop figures, things that were seen as failures are back in action. It’s a weird, weird time.”

It’s nothing new for Gunn, who turned Groot and Rocket Raccoon into household names in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.

And if Polka-Dot Man can get his day in the spotlight, there’s probably hope for us all.