Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #412: Flamingo

Should you ever fear a guy called the Flamingo?  They aren’t the most frightening of birds.  Mostly they’re known for standing on one leg and being pink.  Or sometime lawn ornaments.

But somehow, Batman got a foe that not only goes by that name but is supposed to be an incredibly frightening assassin.

Now, to be fair, the character’s name is “Eduardo Flamingo,” and the name and outfit might be supposed to look more into a flamenco dancer, but that’s a different spelling.  He also drives a custom motorcycle, to the point where most of the images I found of the guy on a Google Images search showed him riding one.

Of course, Googling “flamingo batman” also popped up some other odd images.

Anyway, Eduardo Flamingo first appeared in Batman #666 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly.  He may or may not have been associated with Professor Pyg’s Circus of Strange, but the bottom line is this guy rides into town, goes looking for his victims, kills them, and then sometimes eats their faces.  He’s not known for his emotions in the sense that he doesn’t have much if any, and when he and Batman first faced off, he was scooped up by an Earth digger and dropped down a cavern, but no body was ever found.

So, we got a guy with a custom motorcycle, a preference for pink, and a tendency to eat faces.  He must have come back many times and…he’s one of those guys who pops up in the background.

To be fair, his first story was less about him and more about a rivalry between Dick Grayson’s Batman (with Damien Wayne’s Robin) and Jason Todd’s Red Hood where the methods and such were up to debate and Flamingo was just the mutual villain that they were all looking for.  Flamingo did manage to shoot Damien and mess with Jason’s own temporary sidekick Scarlet, but what I recall of the story was more that if either pair of vigilantes had taken on Flamingo themselves and not been trying to beat each other to the catch, then Flamingo probably would have gone down much faster.

But he did appear on an episode of Gotham.

I don’t recall if he wore the pink jacket for it.

Anyway, that’s Flamingo, a guy with a lot of evil in him but not enough appearances to really allow him to live up to whatever potential he has.