The Ventriloquist

Arnold Wesker is a mild-mannered, meek Gotham City criminal whose violent criminal persona is channeled entirely through Scarface, a wooden ventriloquist dummy he controls. Wesker genuinely believes Scarface acts independently, making the puppet the dominant personality behind their criminal enterprises.

Few villains in Batman's rogues gallery unsettle quite like The Ventriloquist, the meek, soft-spoken criminal mastermind who debuted in Detective Comics #583 in 1988, conjured by the legendary creative team of John Wagner, Alan Grant, and Norm Breyfogle at the height of the Copper Age. Across nearly four decades of DC storytelling, this deeply unsettling figure has haunted the pages of Batman, Detective Comics, and Batman: Arkham Unhinged, holding their own alongside Gotham's most iconic faces — the Joker, Two-Face, the Riddler, and Robin among them. That kind of company speaks volumes about the weight this character carries in the Batman mythos. With 67 catalog appearances, a key issue to their name, and a publishing history stretching all the way to 2025, The Ventriloquist is proof that the most enduring Gotham villains don't always need brute force — sometimes, a quiet voice and a sinister puppet are more than enough.