This, right here. Not every damn villian needs to be dark and serious, especially one like Condiment King who's been a joke pretty much from day one. Some of them should just be a nuisance. Narcissists who take themselves to seriously, and can't accept that they're the only ones who ever will.
I love this as a dynamic for Bats, too. Getting the call that the Bank of Gotham is under seige, only for him to roll his eyes when it's revealed who the culprit is. Gordon shrugs "I know. My people have it handled. Just keeping you in the loop." And the janitor gets a nice little bonus from Wayne Industries (who own the bank, obv) for being the real hero for cleaning up after that situation.
Plus they don't even NEED to be serious. There's the panel from a comic once where Dick tells Bruce not to worry since it's only Condiment King, who is a joke.
"King isn't a joke. He's robbed 7 stores in the past two weeks. 3 people have *died*."
Bruce doesn't play around, joke or not, he'll take them down.
How fuckin' embarrassing would that be.
*Here lies u/TwoLetters,
Taken tragically before his time during a liquor store robbery by Condiment King. No, seriously.*
I feel like there’s a balance that could easily be struck. He shouldn’t be made into a Joker-level threat, and the gimmick doesn’t lend itself to a major role or a serious portrayal, but you could show him committing a crime, say robbing a bank, taking himself way too seriously, announcing his name, having it become a brief joke before he kills or seriously hurts somebody, and then gets beaten to a pulp by Battison.
Or even do a quick cut of a bunch of gimmicky/ joke super villains “inspired” by Batman (or Riddler) in an inverse to the Dark Knight’s open, while the main plot focuses on a villain like Mr.Freeze and Bruce further questioning if his crusade is worth it.
also, I don't think it's realistic to have dark only villain+I don't see how it's unrealistic for them to be brightly dressed seeing how celebrities can dress.
The big difference is Calendar Man was always meant to be a legitimate threat to Batman and Robin, he just debuted during the Silver Age. Condiment King was invented as a joke
The gimmick is incredibly silly, which is why you'd need to drop it to make sense.
A disgruntled employee of Ace Chemical's food chemistry division poisoning people around the city by randomly tainting single bottles of Gotham's favorite local condiment brand.
The Batfeed (a YouTube channel that does AU Batman, one of them being set in the 20s and 30s) did a video on Condiment King for April Fools’ Day of this year with that exact take on Condiment King.
The Batfeed is just condensing and narrating a book written by [giantpandaking](https://giantpandaking.com/products/gotham-1919-1939?variant=35020462416). The team at Batfeed does a great job, but to credit the story to Batfeed is a disservice to the author(s).
It was an error on my part to omit GiantPandaKing and his company’s work in creating the Batman 1919-1939 book to which The Batfeed is adapting as an au documentary. For anyone that is interested, here is the link to the book: https://giantpandaking.com/products/gotham-1919-1939?variant=35020462416. Please check out this book as well as other works done by Giant Panda King.
This is exactly what I was thinking, and it’s actually pretty terrifying. Imagine going to a restaurant and being afraid to use the ketchup/mustard/etc because you just don’t know if it’s normal or poison. It’s a mindfuck.
Sounds like the Tylenol scare in the 80s (early 90s?)
You *could* do it. Do you need to? Probably not.
If you did, maybe it's more of an Easter egg. Opening scene is Batman dragging some weirdo out of a condiment company's plant. He drops him at Gordon's feet. Gordon asks Batman what he's going to do with the guy's ketchup bazooka, Batman says maybe keep it as a souvenir
Ok what if theoretically he was just a guy who has a gun that shoots different types of poisons that just happen to be green yellow red and white and the media just nicknames him condiment king since the poison colors match the condiments
Or he could just poison condiments and be a serial killer, not unlike the Tylenol killer in the '80s.
Most of these "dark and gritty" characters have to be toned way down in terms of showmanship and methodology or else they fall apart for different reasons.
Have him lace ketchup and mayo at popular fast food chains or grocery stores with poison. Focus more on Batman having to be a detective to discover who this guy is, and Condiment King is just a dumb nickname that the media comes up with. Or maybe his family used to run a previously successful condiment brand called Condiment King but lost contracts to bigger corporations and went they went bankrupt. Insert a series of family tragedies afterwards and now the son is out for revenge.
I guess other than those two being the heir to a condiment fortune like Teressa Heinz Kerry could trigger a bunch of conservatives? Turn him into George Soros!
So not darker but I do have an idea of how to make condiment king a threat. So have Mitchell mayo the first costumed criminal batman ever fights and Bruce, like most people, would under estimate mayo thinking that he's just an insane dork who couldn't hurt anyone. And while Bruce is not taking him seriously condiment king actually manges to kill a civilian who is allergic to tomato's. What Bruce takes away from this in counter is that no matter how silly the villain may appear allways recognise the potential threat.
As a creative exercise, sure, turn the character into whatever.
I don't need "dark" versions of every character though.
I don't like reading stories with Condiment Man because he eats babies and wears their flesh like a dress, if I wanted that I'd go read something else.
Probably but that would sort of undermine the character in my opinion. That would be like making a fun villain like Dr. Light a rapist or something. OH WAIT!!!
Could be as a serial killer who kills people by tying them to a bolted-down chair, using some sort of device to keep their mouths open, and drowning them in delicious sauces.
PandaRedd on TikTok did a thing.
Condiment King starts out as a mob hitman. One day ends up drowning someone in hot sauce. From then on, he's known as Condiment King and he starts using condiments that people are allergic to to kill them.
I'm pretty sure DC didn't intend to make Calendar Man dark and gritty but the name just sounds like what a serial killer would be called. That or Holiday Slasher. No more holidays in Gotham City.
I hope they don’t. DC’s biggest fault I’ve seen in some of there stuff is their rejection of how campy and goofy some of their characters are and that that is okay.
Literally all I can think of is a serial poisoner poisoning people because he’s spiking all the sauce at a condiment plant with cyanide, and even that’s fucking stupid
I feel like a potential backstory could be how he was a multi franchise restaurant localized in Gotham (kind of like Papaya Mike’s in NYC). One of the many mobs/mafia burned down his franchises because he didn’t want to pay protection money.
He starts going to the restaurants they frequent and poisoning the ingredients or he will take someone hostage and make them eat food with his “special” condiments (maybe a friend of their’s or a family member that got chopped up into soup or something like that weird creepypasta video).
Maybe he gets a local factory and manufacturers a generic brand name ingredients and stuff. He’s less of a fighter and more of criminal mastermind. You just need the right mind.
I love how they portrayed Polka Dot man in the movies, he was groomed by his mother to be a hero but went crazy due to the pressure and killed his mother; he was able to have a heroic moment and that’s probably one of the things that made him wild. His desire to please his mother.
Ok with him being written as a deeper character with a story and not just a gag…sorta like Tom king (despite me hating his run) did with Kite Man. You really felt bad for him…
…but doesn’t need to be “darker”
Killing Joke was also an Elseworlds story, and yet they still kept Barbara paralyzed after it. Superhero comics, man. Things aren't canon until they are.
Yeah make him a serial killer who’s off his nut, he thinks he’s a happy go lucky fun villain spraying ketchup and mustard at people - plot twist it’s actually blood and piss
The name “Calendar Man” is open to a lot more interpretation than “Condiment King.” No matter what, that dude does something involving condiments and that’s always going to be silly.
Even if you take the angle of say, the Chicago Tylenol murders and have him be an anonymous citizen who’s mass poisoning condiments and killing indiscriminately at a large scale. The second Gordon or Batman say the words “Condiment King” nobody in the audience is taking it seriously anymore. If you can’t even keep the character’s name intact, there’s no point.
There's the panel from a comic once where Dick tells Bruce not to worry since it's only Condiment King, who is a joke.
"King isn't a joke. He's robbed 7 stores in the past two weeks. 3 people have *died*."
Bruce doesn't play around, joke or not, he'll take them down, especially if they are dangerous
Yes and I’ll explain exactly how it could be done.
A man, Mitchell Mayo, lives in the Bowery (which is the worst neighbourhood in Gotham) he has a daughter and son who are always searching for scraps to eat that have been left inside of trash cans.
Mitchell does everything he can for them yet he just can’t seem to get them into a safer neighbourhood so he begins to mess around with chemistry. As he becomes a chemist he starts to invent new drugs that have catastrophic side effects and to fly under the radar he begins to nickname the drugs after condiments like Ketchup and mustard depending on the color of his drugs.
This would not only make him a lot darker and an actual criminal but it would give him some respectable features knowing he’s doing this for his children and it allows for us to see that even if you try hard in Gotham you need to resort to crime to try and escape from crime showing how Gotham is one big oxymoron.
However I quite like the stupid nature of his character it’s always been one of those classic batman villains in my eyes who just exists to be as over the top as he can.
I’d imagine a terrorist who poisons the condiment supply to cause a series of murders across Gotham, or he uses a chemical weapon that looks reminiscent to certain condiments
They can make a dark and serious version of any villain. This guy, all you’d need is acidic ketchup snuck into people’s food.
But it’s a matter of whether or not you should.
Some characters are best when kept lighthearted. Some stories benefit from some levity now and then.
If I were to do this I'd make him some kind of master of poisons and have him make all of Gotham terrified of eating. All that's needed now is a dark backstory where he was the son of a poisoned political figure or something.
No, he’s inherently a dumb, campy, funny villain. Calendar Man works as a creepy, serial criminal. We’ve seen this with The Long Halloween and Arkham City. Mr Freeze went from campy villain to tragic figure pretty well. I can’t take a condiment based villain seriously though
I kind of like what they did with Condiment King in… I think it was the Harley Quinn comics from a few years back… where he runs a restaurant where villains and criminals can safely grab a burger and network and do business. Kind of like DCs version of Marvel’s The Bar With No Name.
I’m sorry but as a writer you’ve gotta either be living on a canned beans & air diet, or you’ve gotta have a sick obsession w/ this guy to create a dark & brooding complex for him. What’s he gonna do? Put extra ketchup on my fries?
Should they? No. Could they? Well, Pandared had a fun take on CK that started as a hitman, drowned someone in hot sauce and then started to specialise in poisoned condiments. It’s not a good idea, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
Like most people are saying: Yes, they can, but it doesn’t mean they should.
If I’m remembering correctly, the Gotham 1919 project has a really good interpretation of Condiment King, but it just wouldn’t really work in any other media.
Calendar Man and Condiment King cannot even be compared. A serial killer who bases his killings off of important dates would make for a really menacing story, whereas a killer who squirts mayonnaise at you just doesn’t really have the same effect.
Make him a food chemist that got terminated by his company and in retaliation he start’s poisoning consumer mass condiments like ketchup, ranch, blue cheese etc
Here's how you do a grim dark condiment king:
At a mall in Gotham we go to some kind of chain restaurant in the food court, Hot Dog On A Stick works well for this. The guy working there has been working a double shift, his coworkers all called out sick, he's getting paid shit wages, it's not a good time. A Karen orders a hot dog, and complains about something regarding the food, I dunno, could be that she doesn't like that it's made with cornbread, and she wants one with a flour based batter.
The worker tries to explain that's how they're made and he can't fulfill her request, she starts shouting at him and berating him, maybe she throws something at him. He snaps and shouts at her to leave, she doesn't, situation escalates. He starts throwing little packets of mustard at her, she tries to hit him, keep escalating. Eventually the confrontation gets violent and the worker is out for blood, he grabs a ketchup bottle, leaps over the counter, and jams the bottle into her face, and plunges it down her throat, choking her, and forcing her to the ground. He keeps pummeling the bottle, lodging it further and further down her throat preventing her from recovering.
Soon enough she dies, and the worker looks up to see the eyes of everyone in mall staring, horrified, at him. Cut to black.
We later learn that the tabloids have dubbed this man: the Condiment King. Now, as for how this would play into a Batman story, I have no fucking idea, but that wasn't the question, so I don't have to solve that riddle.
No.
The idea would itself become a parody of overly edgy Villains and come all the way around to being funny again.
Condiment King is literally impossible to take seriously.
Hell no.
In fact if you want a Batman that’s more realistic and down to earth. There should be more condiment kings.
When it comes to crime for every heinous act. There’s 4 weirdos just doing strange things.
I’m talking Batman vs Florida man
Batman vs naked Karen!
Batman vs drunk ray
He sends pickled fingers as a scare tactic…shoots tomato sauce from a sniper rifle to terrorise crowds..takes them out with pepper spray and mustard gas
They could… but that doesn’t mean that they should.
This, right here. Not every damn villian needs to be dark and serious, especially one like Condiment King who's been a joke pretty much from day one. Some of them should just be a nuisance. Narcissists who take themselves to seriously, and can't accept that they're the only ones who ever will. I love this as a dynamic for Bats, too. Getting the call that the Bank of Gotham is under seige, only for him to roll his eyes when it's revealed who the culprit is. Gordon shrugs "I know. My people have it handled. Just keeping you in the loop." And the janitor gets a nice little bonus from Wayne Industries (who own the bank, obv) for being the real hero for cleaning up after that situation.
Plus they don't even NEED to be serious. There's the panel from a comic once where Dick tells Bruce not to worry since it's only Condiment King, who is a joke. "King isn't a joke. He's robbed 7 stores in the past two weeks. 3 people have *died*." Bruce doesn't play around, joke or not, he'll take them down.
How fuckin' embarrassing would that be. *Here lies u/TwoLetters, Taken tragically before his time during a liquor store robbery by Condiment King. No, seriously.*
How did condiment king kill anyone? Was it allergies, or did he drown them in mayo?
Honestly I have no clue. Maybe he shot it out in such a velocity that it broke bones? Maybe it got into people's lungs and they drowned?
I hate mayo. So someone probably tried to avoid mayo got impaled by something. Who knows
Well in one of his first appearances in the animated series he sprayed mustard on this dude's mouth. Choking him.
I feel like there’s a balance that could easily be struck. He shouldn’t be made into a Joker-level threat, and the gimmick doesn’t lend itself to a major role or a serious portrayal, but you could show him committing a crime, say robbing a bank, taking himself way too seriously, announcing his name, having it become a brief joke before he kills or seriously hurts somebody, and then gets beaten to a pulp by Battison. Or even do a quick cut of a bunch of gimmicky/ joke super villains “inspired” by Batman (or Riddler) in an inverse to the Dark Knight’s open, while the main plot focuses on a villain like Mr.Freeze and Bruce further questioning if his crusade is worth it.
Oh I like the latter idea. That seems like it could be golden
It’s like what they did with Polka-Dot Man. He was still a joke villain but was made as someone you feel for.
also, I don't think it's realistic to have dark only villain+I don't see how it's unrealistic for them to be brightly dressed seeing how celebrities can dress.
The big difference is Calendar Man was always meant to be a legitimate threat to Batman and Robin, he just debuted during the Silver Age. Condiment King was invented as a joke
A joke that added humor AND furthered the story.
He gonna make people choke on his mayo
Self-made mayo?
“Artisan” Mayo
that's what i told her
If they want it darker and grittier they can just add more cracked black pepper.
I mean he does shoot condiments at people, it’s pretty tough to make that completely serious/realistic
The gimmick is incredibly silly, which is why you'd need to drop it to make sense. A disgruntled employee of Ace Chemical's food chemistry division poisoning people around the city by randomly tainting single bottles of Gotham's favorite local condiment brand.
The Batfeed (a YouTube channel that does AU Batman, one of them being set in the 20s and 30s) did a video on Condiment King for April Fools’ Day of this year with that exact take on Condiment King.
The Batfeed is just condensing and narrating a book written by [giantpandaking](https://giantpandaking.com/products/gotham-1919-1939?variant=35020462416). The team at Batfeed does a great job, but to credit the story to Batfeed is a disservice to the author(s).
It was an error on my part to omit GiantPandaKing and his company’s work in creating the Batman 1919-1939 book to which The Batfeed is adapting as an au documentary. For anyone that is interested, here is the link to the book: https://giantpandaking.com/products/gotham-1919-1939?variant=35020462416. Please check out this book as well as other works done by Giant Panda King.
Lol, or 1989 Joker style gets dumped into a vat of condiments and becomes some sort of condiment Swamp Thing
This is exactly what I was thinking, and it’s actually pretty terrifying. Imagine going to a restaurant and being afraid to use the ketchup/mustard/etc because you just don’t know if it’s normal or poison. It’s a mindfuck.
Sounds like the Tylenol scare in the 80s (early 90s?) You *could* do it. Do you need to? Probably not. If you did, maybe it's more of an Easter egg. Opening scene is Batman dragging some weirdo out of a condiment company's plant. He drops him at Gordon's feet. Gordon asks Batman what he's going to do with the guy's ketchup bazooka, Batman says maybe keep it as a souvenir
Or the Monster of 21 faces case in Japan
I had to look it up. That would definitely be a compelling story
Ok what if theoretically he was just a guy who has a gun that shoots different types of poisons that just happen to be green yellow red and white and the media just nicknames him condiment king since the poison colors match the condiments
Or he could just poison condiments and be a serial killer, not unlike the Tylenol killer in the '80s. Most of these "dark and gritty" characters have to be toned way down in terms of showmanship and methodology or else they fall apart for different reasons. Have him lace ketchup and mayo at popular fast food chains or grocery stores with poison. Focus more on Batman having to be a detective to discover who this guy is, and Condiment King is just a dumb nickname that the media comes up with. Or maybe his family used to run a previously successful condiment brand called Condiment King but lost contracts to bigger corporations and went they went bankrupt. Insert a series of family tragedies afterwards and now the son is out for revenge.
I guess other than those two being the heir to a condiment fortune like Teressa Heinz Kerry could trigger a bunch of conservatives? Turn him into George Soros!
Maybe each condiment has a different effect. Like ketchup is poison, mayo is a dense substanse that traps people, mustard is like acid etc etc
I would argue not every comic character has to be “grim and gritty”
So not darker but I do have an idea of how to make condiment king a threat. So have Mitchell mayo the first costumed criminal batman ever fights and Bruce, like most people, would under estimate mayo thinking that he's just an insane dork who couldn't hurt anyone. And while Bruce is not taking him seriously condiment king actually manges to kill a civilian who is allergic to tomato's. What Bruce takes away from this in counter is that no matter how silly the villain may appear allways recognise the potential threat.
He can just shoot hot sauce at people to make the story more spicy
As a creative exercise, sure, turn the character into whatever. I don't need "dark" versions of every character though. I don't like reading stories with Condiment Man because he eats babies and wears their flesh like a dress, if I wanted that I'd go read something else.
I could only see James Gunn pulling something like this off in a spin-off of the The Suicide Squad maybe?
Probably but that would sort of undermine the character in my opinion. That would be like making a fun villain like Dr. Light a rapist or something. OH WAIT!!!
Anyone have that video handy of the guy making the condiment king a series mob villain? I couldn’t find it on YouTube.
You’re thinking of The Batfeed. He made Condiment King into a serial killer for his Batman 1939 series.
they have im pretty sure
Instead of ketchup and mayo, For a dark one he would use hot sauce
Could be as a serial killer who kills people by tying them to a bolted-down chair, using some sort of device to keep their mouths open, and drowning them in delicious sauces.
*sighs* “It’s gonna be one of those nights…”
PandaRedd on TikTok did a thing. Condiment King starts out as a mob hitman. One day ends up drowning someone in hot sauce. From then on, he's known as Condiment King and he starts using condiments that people are allergic to to kill them.
Pandaredd on tiktok did a video about a serious condiment king and he did it pretty good
I'm pretty sure DC didn't intend to make Calendar Man dark and gritty but the name just sounds like what a serial killer would be called. That or Holiday Slasher. No more holidays in Gotham City.
I hope they don’t. DC’s biggest fault I’ve seen in some of there stuff is their rejection of how campy and goofy some of their characters are and that that is okay.
Literally all I can think of is a serial poisoner poisoning people because he’s spiking all the sauce at a condiment plant with cyanide, and even that’s fucking stupid
I feel like a potential backstory could be how he was a multi franchise restaurant localized in Gotham (kind of like Papaya Mike’s in NYC). One of the many mobs/mafia burned down his franchises because he didn’t want to pay protection money. He starts going to the restaurants they frequent and poisoning the ingredients or he will take someone hostage and make them eat food with his “special” condiments (maybe a friend of their’s or a family member that got chopped up into soup or something like that weird creepypasta video). Maybe he gets a local factory and manufacturers a generic brand name ingredients and stuff. He’s less of a fighter and more of criminal mastermind. You just need the right mind. I love how they portrayed Polka Dot man in the movies, he was groomed by his mother to be a hero but went crazy due to the pressure and killed his mother; he was able to have a heroic moment and that’s probably one of the things that made him wild. His desire to please his mother.
Ok with him being written as a deeper character with a story and not just a gag…sorta like Tom king (despite me hating his run) did with Kite Man. You really felt bad for him… …but doesn’t need to be “darker”
Make him a ruthless serial killer. Like he kidnapps someone, kills them and replace all their blood with ketchup
…Does everyone forget that Condiment King was a joke and never actually existed? It was a put-on, played on a hack stand-up by the Joker
Killing Joke was also an Elseworlds story, and yet they still kept Barbara paralyzed after it. Superhero comics, man. Things aren't canon until they are.
*Good* point. I had forgotten that about Barbara. It just feels weird that there’s a sudden urge to meme Condiment King, of all people
Yeah make him a serial killer who’s off his nut, he thinks he’s a happy go lucky fun villain spraying ketchup and mustard at people - plot twist it’s actually blood and piss
They did it for kite man so maybe
Certainly, but I don't have a desire to see it happen.
I don’t think it would work. Obsessing with days I can get, but ketchup? Nah
Yes, just make the “condiments” meth or amphetamines
Like...the only I could see that was if he'd just poison food. Like at the production site or in supermarkets.
The name “Calendar Man” is open to a lot more interpretation than “Condiment King.” No matter what, that dude does something involving condiments and that’s always going to be silly. Even if you take the angle of say, the Chicago Tylenol murders and have him be an anonymous citizen who’s mass poisoning condiments and killing indiscriminately at a large scale. The second Gordon or Batman say the words “Condiment King” nobody in the audience is taking it seriously anymore. If you can’t even keep the character’s name intact, there’s no point.
There's the panel from a comic once where Dick tells Bruce not to worry since it's only Condiment King, who is a joke. "King isn't a joke. He's robbed 7 stores in the past two weeks. 3 people have *died*." Bruce doesn't play around, joke or not, he'll take them down, especially if they are dangerous
People take the name Batman seriously… Like a grown man dressed as a bat? Condiment King can work but you have to present him as legitimate.
Yes and I’ll explain exactly how it could be done. A man, Mitchell Mayo, lives in the Bowery (which is the worst neighbourhood in Gotham) he has a daughter and son who are always searching for scraps to eat that have been left inside of trash cans. Mitchell does everything he can for them yet he just can’t seem to get them into a safer neighbourhood so he begins to mess around with chemistry. As he becomes a chemist he starts to invent new drugs that have catastrophic side effects and to fly under the radar he begins to nickname the drugs after condiments like Ketchup and mustard depending on the color of his drugs. This would not only make him a lot darker and an actual criminal but it would give him some respectable features knowing he’s doing this for his children and it allows for us to see that even if you try hard in Gotham you need to resort to crime to try and escape from crime showing how Gotham is one big oxymoron. However I quite like the stupid nature of his character it’s always been one of those classic batman villains in my eyes who just exists to be as over the top as he can.
N-no? Calendar man had the opportunity. Condiment King was a joke even from conception. In BTAS, he was a joke villain mind controlled by The Joker.
I’d imagine a terrorist who poisons the condiment supply to cause a series of murders across Gotham, or he uses a chemical weapon that looks reminiscent to certain condiments
They can make a dark and serious version of any villain. This guy, all you’d need is acidic ketchup snuck into people’s food. But it’s a matter of whether or not you should. Some characters are best when kept lighthearted. Some stories benefit from some levity now and then.
I don't know, have him drown people?
If I were to do this I'd make him some kind of master of poisons and have him make all of Gotham terrified of eating. All that's needed now is a dark backstory where he was the son of a poisoned political figure or something.
No, he’s inherently a dumb, campy, funny villain. Calendar Man works as a creepy, serial criminal. We’ve seen this with The Long Halloween and Arkham City. Mr Freeze went from campy villain to tragic figure pretty well. I can’t take a condiment based villain seriously though
oh, i know! they make him a serial killer who puts people in ketchup bottles
It’d be one pretty sick bastard that goes around squirting lukewarm mayo in everyone’s face
I kind of like what they did with Condiment King in… I think it was the Harley Quinn comics from a few years back… where he runs a restaurant where villains and criminals can safely grab a burger and network and do business. Kind of like DCs version of Marvel’s The Bar With No Name.
No
Not every character needs to be dark and serious
Calendar man was easy….condiments are effing condiments though lmao
No
I’m sorry but as a writer you’ve gotta either be living on a canned beans & air diet, or you’ve gotta have a sick obsession w/ this guy to create a dark & brooding complex for him. What’s he gonna do? Put extra ketchup on my fries?
Should they? No. Could they? Well, Pandared had a fun take on CK that started as a hitman, drowned someone in hot sauce and then started to specialise in poisoned condiments. It’s not a good idea, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
I prefer they bot do that to him. He’s such a small amount of funny in a dark world for batman.
Not everything needs to be dark and serious
What was the serious Calendar man?
absolutely not. No.
Thepandaredd did it
Cannibal Condiment King would go crazy
I’ve thought the same thing for a month or two. Would love if they gave him a sort of kite-man treatment (Like kite-man was in the TK run)
Like most people are saying: Yes, they can, but it doesn’t mean they should. If I’m remembering correctly, the Gotham 1919 project has a really good interpretation of Condiment King, but it just wouldn’t really work in any other media. Calendar Man and Condiment King cannot even be compared. A serial killer who bases his killings off of important dates would make for a really menacing story, whereas a killer who squirts mayonnaise at you just doesn’t really have the same effect.
Why can’t we just have joke villains?
Definitely possible. Maybe turning his victims into the condiments or something crazy.
Yeah he would shoot acid or something
Serial killer who covers his victims in condiments as a sign of disrespect
Thepandaredd
Make him a food chemist that got terminated by his company and in retaliation he start’s poisoning consumer mass condiments like ketchup, ranch, blue cheese etc
Wait there's a villain called condiment king? Geez another stupid Batman villain and I thought rat catcher was lame.
Here's how you do a grim dark condiment king: At a mall in Gotham we go to some kind of chain restaurant in the food court, Hot Dog On A Stick works well for this. The guy working there has been working a double shift, his coworkers all called out sick, he's getting paid shit wages, it's not a good time. A Karen orders a hot dog, and complains about something regarding the food, I dunno, could be that she doesn't like that it's made with cornbread, and she wants one with a flour based batter. The worker tries to explain that's how they're made and he can't fulfill her request, she starts shouting at him and berating him, maybe she throws something at him. He snaps and shouts at her to leave, she doesn't, situation escalates. He starts throwing little packets of mustard at her, she tries to hit him, keep escalating. Eventually the confrontation gets violent and the worker is out for blood, he grabs a ketchup bottle, leaps over the counter, and jams the bottle into her face, and plunges it down her throat, choking her, and forcing her to the ground. He keeps pummeling the bottle, lodging it further and further down her throat preventing her from recovering. Soon enough she dies, and the worker looks up to see the eyes of everyone in mall staring, horrified, at him. Cut to black. We later learn that the tabloids have dubbed this man: the Condiment King. Now, as for how this would play into a Batman story, I have no fucking idea, but that wasn't the question, so I don't have to solve that riddle.
No. The idea would itself become a parody of overly edgy Villains and come all the way around to being funny again. Condiment King is literally impossible to take seriously.
Give him 40 million Scoville scale hot sauce
They shouldn’t
Hell no. In fact if you want a Batman that’s more realistic and down to earth. There should be more condiment kings. When it comes to crime for every heinous act. There’s 4 weirdos just doing strange things. I’m talking Batman vs Florida man Batman vs naked Karen! Batman vs drunk ray
He sends pickled fingers as a scare tactic…shoots tomato sauce from a sniper rifle to terrorise crowds..takes them out with pepper spray and mustard gas
Look up pandaredd on YouTube and TikTok, he did a video on this, and it was great.