Previous Post I'm not sure you're quite right about the Riddler wanting to be the smartest man in the room - nearly but not quite. It's not about him wanting to be one-up, it's about him wanting to put the other guy one-down. It's about making the big guy look stupid. He's the kid in the class who pins the note on the back of the bully. Dr Doom wants to be the smartest and has to prove it. The Riddler just wants to fool the smartest to show they have feet of clay. He's got "little man" syndrome even worse than the Penguin, except he doesn't want to climb on top of everyone else, he wants to trip everyone else down into the mud - a pratfall to prick the elite. And let's not overlook that his need to riddle has been presented as a pathology. He wants the thrill of teasing the tiger. He wants the rush of "nearly got caught". It's a form of mental extreme sport. Riddler as detective feels a bit wrong to me. The Riddler's not about SOLVING riddles as much as SETTING them. He's the DM, not the player. He constructs webs to tangle others, he doesn't venture into others' webs himself. A "legit" Riddler solving crime does it by setting traps. He's the security consultant catching the Shadow Thief when STAR Labs gets targetted. He's the consultant Waller uses to snap the trap back the other way when HIVE's trying to infiltate Checkmate. He's the guy who sets up the scam to convince Luthor of Superman's secret identity being Hal Jordan. And in every single instance he's building in a chance for his adversary to get away if only they're really as good as advertised; he never believes they are. I think the Riddler's not about the solutions, he's about the mysteries. He doesn't give the answers to his own riddles. Why would he give away answers toother people's puzzles? He might find them out for his own personal satisfaction but then he might just walk away and leave people wondering. Finally, there's a big streak of childishness in the original conception of the Riddler. He's about "I have a secret". He's about "I know something you don't and I'm going to tease you with it". He's about "Nyah nyah can't catch me!" Maybe that's why in the oldest Riddler stories it's always Robin (Grayson) who's so good at decoding the Riddler's clues. That's not a criticism of the Riddler (after all, Joker is another villain whose earliest behaviour was slapstick childish) but it does mean that any really serious backstory for Ed Nygma has to tell us what made him like that. IW

You raise good points, but as I think about this, I realize that this actually adds to one of the tension-points I mentioned earlier - ie. making sure the audience is always at least slightly suspicious of the Riddler himself. Like Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, or Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, there should always be something slightly strange and untrustworthy about Edward Nygma - indeed, in the one story idea I mentioned, about the Riddler intentionally making Batman think he'd committed a crime that he hadn't, I was thinking very much of a Xanatos Gambit in the style of the Fourth Doctor in "The Invasion of Time," with Eddie's girl Friday playing the part of Leela (Tom Baker has a very scary laugh).

The Riddler as a detective SHOULDN'T be a perfect fit - after all, it's his SECOND choice as a career. The Riddler as a riddle-solver is like a heroin addict at a methadone clinic - he's trying to wean himself off a lifestyle that he knows is bad for him in the long run, but he still misses the short-term fixes afforded by his former lifestyle. This maintains the tension of wondering whether he might ever slip up, as addicts often do, and it makes him satisfyingly mean-spirited when he comes up against some aspiring games-master ("What the @#*! is this? You call this a DEATH-trap? I was designing better stuff than this before I even had a COSTUME, you little @#*!").

It's also worth noting that, in the wake of the coma that robbed him of his knowledge of Batman's secret identity, a further side-effect seems to be that the Riddler's compulsion to leave clues is now cured.