Celebrating Batman Day 2024 with figures, original art and HBO's The Penguin

At Cereal Creatures we're huge Batman fans, so on this Batman Day, we're doing both a merch haul featuring two figures, our review of HBO's The Penguin and showing off original art!

We hadn't planned on picking up both versions of the Dick Grayson as Batman figure from McFarlane Toys, but I had to have the blue chase version, but as I looked at them both, I actually like the black version better!

Next, a short review of the new HBO series The Penguin.

We're fans of the Matt Reeves The Batman, probably right behind The Dark Night trilogy, so we expected to like the spinoff, The Penguin. This premiere episode took us back to Gotham City from the perspective of the gangster Oz Cobb (renamed from Osward Cobblepot) following the Riddler's flooding of the city and the death of Carmine Falcone. Cobb gets his "Robin" in the form of a wayward teen, who isn't from the Batman mythos and has to deal with the Falcone crime family in the form of Falcone's son and more dangerousy, the daughter--Sofia Falcone, back from her stint at Arkham.

Having met Colin Farrell's Penguin in The Batman movie, we know this is a far drop from the Burgess Meredith or Danny DeVito versions. It's even pretty far from any comic book version. And that's my only complaint. The story hits and the actors are great. If I wasn't such a Batfan, there wasn't a whole lot to connect me to the larger DC universe. There were certainly nods here and there, but it could easily be a standalone series that has nothing to do with Batman.

Hopefully, as the series continues, we'll start to see more familar Bat-things, even nods that weren't in the movie. Our final head-scracther is the choice to change Penguin's name to Oz Cobb. That seemed arbitrary and unnecessary to the story. We look forward to the next episode and the series continues on HBO and Max!

And finally, our Batman Day artwork: