Cluemaster
41 years ago - Arthur Brown is born.
30 years ago - 11-year-old Brown becomes a child prodigy gameshow contestant.
19 years ago - 22-year-old Arthur's daughter Stephanie Brown is born.
18 years ago - 23-year-old Arthur spends his entire fortune to create and star in his own gameshow.
16 years ago - 25-year-old Arthur's show fails, and he is forced to begin working in a warehouse. He begins his career as a thief.
12 years ago - 29-year-old Arthur attempts to fill the void left by the Riddler after he is caught, attempting his own crimewave as the Cluemaster by blanketing his crimes with competing clues to baffle investigators. He barely captures Batman's attention before he is found. He goes to prison, his daughter Stephanie Brown not told that he was a costumed villain.
10 years ago - 31-year-old Arthur partners with Edward Nygma for his mystery theater but is double-crossed and is left holding the blame. When Batgirl reverse engineers their network. He is sent back to prison.
6 years ago - 35-year-old Arthur is released. He stages a much more exotic series of heists exhibiting a much more developed aproach to crime. He is caught by Nightwing & The Huntress.
4 years ago - 37-year-old Arthur is released on a technicality, but when he returns to crime he is perpetually hounded by the Spoiler who eventually gets him arrested again, unaware that she is his daughter Stephanie Brown.
3 years ago - 38-year-old Arthur is among the escapees during No Man's Land, but he manages to evade recapture and goes underground.
2 years ago - 39-year-old Arthur stages a massive ploy to take his revenge on Gotham and on Batman. Stephanie Brown stops him, confronting her father. Revealing her identity as Spoiler to him.
now - 41-year-old Arthur, while still in prison, begins setting up franchise Cluemasters, creating a massive puzzle for Stephanie Brown as the new Batgirl.
Cluemaster is not a good character. Oh, he can be WRITTEN well, if someone decides they want to take a stab at him, but he doesn't bring anything new to the table, or even anything especially interesting. At best, he's a goofily costumed completely redundant C-list villain.
Now, there's precedent for a character in his boat to be rejuvenated by a really talented writer. Gail Simone turned Catman into a fan favorite, and Jeph Loeb found an interesting way to use Calendar Man. But Cluemaster's claim to fame is that Stephanie Brown is his daughter. Her entire initial character concept was that she discovered her dad was actually an ineffective C-list villain. Stephanie is a very cool, popular, high-visibility character, and that means that for her story to unfold properly, Cluemaster needs to remain exactly that; ineffective.
Still, that doesn't mean he can't contribute to the larger story. Hopefully, we've assembled a timeline for him that will keep him what he needs to be, but still give him a role to play.
Now, there's precedent for a character in his boat to be rejuvenated by a really talented writer. Gail Simone turned Catman into a fan favorite, and Jeph Loeb found an interesting way to use Calendar Man. But Cluemaster's claim to fame is that Stephanie Brown is his daughter. Her entire initial character concept was that she discovered her dad was actually an ineffective C-list villain. Stephanie is a very cool, popular, high-visibility character, and that means that for her story to unfold properly, Cluemaster needs to remain exactly that; ineffective.
Still, that doesn't mean he can't contribute to the larger story. Hopefully, we've assembled a timeline for him that will keep him what he needs to be, but still give him a role to play.
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Cluemaster's Comic HistoryCluemaster first appeared in 1966, one of a huge library of one-off bad guys that appeared over the decades. He's so derivative of The Riddler It was actually hard for the writers to avoid mentioning it in continuity, so he was basically set up from the beginning as an unintentional joke character.
This actually set him up as an obvious choice for the Injustice League during the Keith Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis years of the Justice League, as they were largely meant as just a setup to a joke. This eventually led to his inclusion in a team called Justice League Antarctica, a group designed largely to be laughingstocks. Through all of this, whether he was meant to be the butt of a joke or an attempt was made to try to make something out of him, he was always really just a costume in a group shot. There wasn't much of anything about the character to make him interesting at all. The introduction of Stephanie Brown's Spoiler turned that around, because she was meant to be the daughter of an ineffective costumed villain, and all of a sudden Arthur was THE C-list character... notworthy specifically BECAUSE he was unimportant. In a way, he became the poster boy for those hundreds of characters introduced through the years that have never mattered. He's been grabbed up and made more interesting in the years that followed, specifically because he has a tie to the larger catalog of Batman characters, most notably as the final bad guy in Stephanie Brown's Batgirl series. |
Our Cluemaster StoryWe very much don't want to try to somehow make Cluemaster a more relevant character. It's part of Stephanie Brown's story for him to be a C-list baddie, and that's what he should be. Instead of trying to make him more effective just tried to involve him more. He is involved with the Riddler's Mystery Theater (as the bagman) and is the (largely irrelevant) subject of the case worked by Nightwing & The Huntress that led to their affair. Mostly, he just needs to be AROUND.
We do, however, kind of like the idea of him being a central villain in Stephanie Brown's Batgirl. The actual series didn't really last as long as we would have liked and we'd like to milk that premise a little bit, and the idea of Arthur being a still-imprisoned nemesis that does all his machinations behind bars, entrusting other more competent people to do his bidding for him? When you combine that with his relationship with her he actually becomes a fairly worthwhile foil for Stephanie without ever really developing into a competent bad guy himself. |
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