Who is Magpie, and what is this Batman villain doing in HBO’s The Penguin? Here’s everything you need to know about Sofia Falcone’s Arkham Asylum “friend”
The Penguin has been defiantly resistant to dabbling too deep in the Batman canon. A spinoff of the more gritty and grounded The Batman, the HBO show has zeroed in on its titular Batman antagonist and the much more street-level mafia war kicked off by the events of the film (and, y’know, Penguin’s own assassination of the would-be successor to the Falcone family’s criminal empire).
Episode 4 changes that. A flashback to Sofia’s time in Arkham Asylum gives us a glimpse at the true background of the Hangman, and brings in another Batman villain to boot.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for episode 4 of The Penguin.] Who is Magpie?
In The Penguin, Magpie goes out of her way to introduce herself as Magpie, not Margaret, and if you have any notion of what kind of world Gotham is in, your ears might perk up.
Magpie is a lower-level Batman villain who first showed up in The Man of Steel #3. She really hasn’t been prominently featured in much of the comics or in the on-screen DC universe, but we do have some consistency for her character across the iterations we’ve seen. She was born Margaret Pye, and has coveted shiny objects her whole life. When she got older, she took a job at the Gotham City Museum for Antiquities in order to be closer to such valuables.
