Wednesday, November 21, 2018

Character Spotlight: Veronica Vreeland

I've been doing this for however many years and I still get surprised.

Veronica Vreeland was a character created for Batman: The Animated Series. Seemingly a stand-in for Vicki Vale, she was a Gotham socialite who ran in the same circles as Bruce Wayne and often got caught up in supervillain schemes. She first appeared in the episode "Birds of a Feather" (February 1993), where she struck up a relationship with the Penguin to use him as entertainment for her rich friends. This plan, as if you have any doubts, did not go as she planned.


Twenty-five years later, Ms. Vreeland made her comics debut in DC's Beach Blanket Bad Guys Summer Special #1 (July 2018). The special was a series of villain-centric short stories that all took place during the summer - an odd choice, to be sure, but not necessarily a bad one.


Veronica appeared in a Penguin story, although it was uniquely set in the past when Penguin was still a teenager. The story positioned Veronica as a debutante who Oswald Cobblepot has had a crush on for a long time. Oswald spots the closest thing he has to a friend leaving her house one day and kills him because he thought they had slept together, but at the funeral, Veronica tells him the guy was trying to convince her to go out with Oswald (which is not an idea she was into). The story finishes with "The End - For Now", so maybe we'll be seeing her again soon.


Thanks to Thomas Parks for telling me about this one!

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