So, Supergirl has
resumed airing with a brand new episode that featured one of the more off-beat
Superman villains: The Toy Man.
The episode was a solid entry and an interesting reworking of the Toy Man’s
character, drawing from his original identity as an older toymaker criminal
while also making him the deranged father of series supporting character
Winslow Schott Jr. It’s overall a
very solid handling of an actually pretty troublesome character within the realms
of Superman villains. Most of
Superman’s foes that are interesting enough to come back more than once are
defined by their power and ability to go head-to-head with someone as strong as
Superman but Toy Man has always been an outsider in this realm.
He doesn’t have
any powers or even a robo-suit like Lex Luthor, just his crazy toy based
inventions. Even the idea of him
using toys as weapons is a little odd, something that sounds cut more from the
realms of Batman or the Flash, to the point that Batman the animated series concocted their own toy collector
villain. Supergirl mostly handled these elements well by slotting Toy Man’s
creepiness into a familial center, tying into the show’s overall themes of
family conflict but there is one show that did the character even better: Superman the animated series.
