Have Batman villains gotten more monstrous & supernatural lately? Why?
What about it?
I feel like a lot of the comic villains invented in the past couple decades have been either a lot more monstrous in appearance or supernatural in ability.
Ex: Mister Bloom, Barbatos, Smush, etc.
I think this is a trend that has slowly grown over the eras.
Batman villains, even the weird and disfigured ones, used to be primarily explicitly human, but it seems like straight up monsters have become a lot more popular.
The earliest example of monstrous & super-powered villain I can think of is the Mad Monk but he feels like an oddity in the golden age. The next example I came up with is Matt Hagen’s Clayface.
Another phenomenon I noticed is the tendency for older villains to be reimagined in more monstrous forms.
Clayface is maybe the earliest example. The original Basil Karlo was just a guy in makeup.
Doctor Death is a great recent example, and of course they even turned Killer Moth into Charaxes for a time
Not to mention how Killer Croc evolved from just a guy with a skin condition into a literal humanoid dinosaur
While I think Mister Bloom is cool and creepy, he never felt like a Batman villain to me.
Personally I much prefer when Batman’s most disturbing villains aren’t supernatural in any way.
Zsasz, Cornelius Stirk, & Professor Pyg will also be more interesting to me than the literal monsters
What do you think? Have you also noticed this trend? Do you like monstrous villains? Why do you think there are so many modern examples?