“You get one warning, chumps—don’t mess with Killer Croc!”
So Mr. Waylon Jones introduced himself in April 1983’s Batman #358 (“Don’t Mess with Killer Croc!” by writer Gerry Conway and penciler Curt Swan). Determined to replace the late Rupert Thorne as Gotham City’s top mob boss, Jones suffered from a genetic disorder that left his skin hard and scaly. He was born in a Tampa slum to a mother who died giving birth to him. His father already gone, Jones was left in the care of his deadbeat alcoholic aunt, and ruthlessly tormented by his childhood peers, who called him “Croc.” After viciously beating one of them, he was sent to juvenile hall, after which he took to a life of crime. At 16, he killed a fellow prison inmate and spent 18 years behind bars. Upon parole, he joined a carnival sideshow and got a job wrestling alligators before making his way to Gotham and running afoul of Batman.
Unlike most of the Dark Knight’s best-known enemies, Croc was presented with some degree of sympathy in his first story, which spanned Batman #359 and Detective Comics #525 and 526. “I’ve spent my life in law enforcement,” says Commissioner Gordon in Batman #359. “When I started, I had nothing but contempt for Croc’s kind. I still despise that sort of human scum. Even so, I know nothing’s ever so simple as we’d like to believe…Not even evil…”
Croc’s bid for power resulted in the deaths of Trina and Joseph Todd, two aerialists recruited by Dick Grayson to help capture him when he extorted protection money from their circus. Their deaths led to their son, Jason, succeeding Grayson as Robin.
Eventually Croc wound up in Arkham Asylum, but escaped and fled to the city’s underground tunnels, where he found a home among Gotham’s homeless, whom he presumably died saving in Batman #471 when the tunnels were flooded.
But Croc survived, lifted to safety by the rising flood waters, though his condition worsened. A form of atavism, it saw him devolve. He grew increasingly dimwitted, and stronger and more reptilian, his claws and teeth bigger and sharper with each reappearance. The situation accelerated when Croc contracted the “Hush” virus, after which he developed the ability to regenerate his limbs, and a taste for human flesh. He made another bid for mob power when he escaped from Arkham in 2010’s Joker’s Asylum II: Killer Croc one-shot, but was betrayed by the very people he thought were his new friends. “They’re the monsters…not me,” he tells Batman. “Put me back.”
Recently, however, Croc may have finally begun to find the acceptance he’s long sought, in the company of Task Force X. He replaced long-standing member King Shark in the 2016 Suicide Squad movie—in which he’s played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje—and the team’s concurrent “Rebirth” comic book.
Killer Croc made his animation debut in the first-season episode of Batman: The Animated Series “Vendetta.” Voiced by 1960s beach-movie star Aron Kincaid, this iteration of the character has gray skin, as opposed to his traditional green, and is a former professional wrestler called “Killer Croc” Morgan. Redesigned to more closely resemble his comic book counterpart in the subsequent The New Batman Adventures, Croc is voiced by Brooks Gardner. A more bestial-looking Croc is portrayed in 2004’s The Batman (voiced by The Animated Series’ Clayface, Ron Perlman), but one more articulate than his on-screen predecessor. In 2013’s computer-animated Beware the Batman, he’s voiced by Wade Williams, who, ironically, played Blackgate Prison’s warden in The Dark Knight Rises.
The Batman: Arkham Origins video game, released in 2013, marked the first time an African American actor portrayed Batman’s most famous African American antagonist—Khary Payton, of Teen Titans, Young Justice, and The Walking Dead fame.
Gotham Gazette Exclusive: Gerry Conway
Gerry Conway chronicled the Dark Knight’s Bronze Age adventures in Batman from #337 to 359 (July 1981 to May 1983) and Detective Comics from #497 to 526 (December 1980 to May 1983). Working with the late great artists Don Newton and Doug Moench, he created Jason Todd, who would become the second Robin, and added a new member to Batman’s rogues gallery in Killer Croc.
You created Jason Todd around the same time as Killer Croc…
Both of them were co-created with Don Newton. I was on a roll at that time working on Batman. I was doing both Batman and Detective Comics. So I had the freedom to really explore the character in a way that some other writers might not have had, and I tried answering some questions that I as a reader had. While I really enjoyed the later Dark Knight direction and the direction in which Denny O’Neil had previously taken the character, I kind of missed the Batman of the ’60s and ’50s, with Batman and Robin as a team; and also the kind of villains that Batman had had back in the day, in the ’40s and the ’50s, which were more influenced by the Dick Tracy–type crime villain. The weird, odd-looking characters that created situations for Batman that challenged him in unique ways. I felt we had gotten away from that to a degree with characters like Ra’s al Ghul, who’s a terrific character but isn’t in the mold of the classic Batman villain.
I wanted to reinvent the Batman-Robin relationship. But since Robin was very much tied into the Teen Titans I couldn’t really do that. It just didn’t feel right. Dick Grayson was too old. His relationship with Batman was less student/mentor than equals, and the kinds of characters we had to work with for villains were more like the Ra’s al Ghul mastermind than the down-and-dirty crime king variety. Killer Croc was an answer to that, because he was more of a street-level villain.
Or below street level.
Yeah. I also had this feeling that since Batman is in effect a creature of the skies, putting him underground would create some interesting visuals and stories, with a villain that’s literally an underworld villain. [Laughs.]
What type of partner did you intend Jason to be?
Dick Grayson was always portrayed as a good kid. Just a perfectly good kid who had a tragic past. I wanted to give Jason a little more of an edge, so that there was potentially some conflict between him and Batman about the moral gray area. That was one aspect of it. Ultimately, he became too much of a Dick Grayson clone. Which is why it was palatable to readers to have him killed off. Because he didn’t differentiate enough, as it turned out.
Killer Croc has undergone very different interpretations in different media.
When you look at those early stories, he was intended to be a fairly physically threatening, violent villain. He was more of a crime boss character, but he was physically intimidating. He had a presence underground in the sewers. That was all part of his mystique. When he was brought into Batman: The Animated Series, I think part of the reason they brought him in was because they wanted a physically threatening character, which would be good for animation. As a result they enhanced him visually. Then when he was brought back into the comics, that was the influence. It sort of multiplied from there. Now you’ve got this 12-foot-tall, semi-human creature. That’s just taking a character and expanding on the original concept. Because the original concept always was that he was a physically frightening character. How you execute that is really up to the artist who’s doing the execution.
Croc might be the only major villain in Batman’s rogues gallery who was created as an African American.
Yeah. I always tried to invoke diversity in my characters, back in the late ’70s / early ’80s. That really wasn’t necessarily a priority, but I really tried to do that. I’m really happy that he has that role.
What did you think of Croc’s appearance in the Suicide Squad movie?
I was glad to see it. I liked it a lot. It’s a pretty good interpretation. It’s actually closer in a lot of ways to the original conception—a human-scale, non-monosyllabic monster. A tortured man. So it’s kind of appropriate.
One of your other Batman creations was mayor Hamilton Hill, who also resurfaced in The Animated Series.
Yeah, I felt so much of Gotham politics was being sidestepped, that there wasn’t enough real political background to this material. You had Commissioner Gordon, but he’s simply the police commissioner. You had people above him who also influence the police. I think Hamilton Hill to some degree was influenced by the mayor in Jaws. The idea of the callow political figure who doesn’t really have the city’s best interests at heart and is influenced by his own political interests. It was a fairly prevalent notion at the time. So creating a character like Hamilton Hill just allowed me to address that. And I always had an affection for alliterative names. So Hamilton Hill just seemed like the right name for that kind of a guy, partly because the character in Jaws was played by Murray Hamilton. It was probably subconscious as much as anything. Much of what I do is subconscious. Or unconscious. [Laughs.]
Which of your Batman stories are you fondest of?
Generally speaking I don’t write individual stories. I write a series of stories around a particular character. I like the Hugo Strange storyline. That was fun. I thought that went well…I was proud of the fact that we ended up doing what amounted to a biweekly Batman, by starting stories in Detective Comics and finishing them in Batman. I liked doing that. I loved the range of stories I did with Gene Colan, just because of seeing Gene Colan’s art on Batman. I thought it was a terrific look for the book. Next to people like Neal Adams and Frank Miller, and of course the original Jerry Robinson and Dick Sprang Batman comics, he was probably the best person to do that character. Because his visual style was just perfect for Batman. All those shadows and darkness. The way that Batman would move in and out of panels. It was terrific. I loved working with Gene on that book.
And I really liked Detective Comics #526, with all the villains in one story, that Don Newton and I did. He was kind of in the shadow of Gene at that point, because Gene’s stuff was so overwhelming. But Don had this really great combination of draftsmanship and storytelling that you really rarely see in comics from that period, when there was much more of an emphasis on big visuals and less on character. He could make a scene of pathos really intense. I really enjoyed Don’s work, and you can see the development of Don’s work over the two or three years that he worked on that book. It gets dramatically better. Then he unfortunately passed away. But he was a terrific artist.
With both Gene and Don, I was writing full scripts. So my actual collaboration with them was less than it would have been if I’d been working Marvel style, where I was working off an artist’s own style. Both of those guys didn’t have as much free range in their storytelling as they would have if they were breaking the pages down themselves. But they both did terrific jobs.