One of my favorite characters I’ve ever created is the Pink Flamingo. I had a lot of help from a number of artists in the early days of Big Bang Comics, especially my BB comics buddy and partner Chris Ecker, aka Tom King.
Within a week of deciding to develop the Knight Watchman strip along the lines of classic Dick Tracy and Batman, Chris had devised a complete Rogue’s Gallery of colorful villains to populate the strip. Some we got to use: Quizmaster, Mr. Mask, Grandfather Clock. Some we never got around to: Paper Doll, Cheshire Cat, the Card Shark, Count Fledermaus, Ma Doppel and her Doppel Gang.
None of those characters were directly based on any of Batman’s or Tracy’s foes. As with the heroes, we tried to give the Big Bang villains a unique origin of their own. Quizmaster got a little close to the Riddler, but he was based around the TV game show scandals of the 1950’s. His modern day incarnation is a much darker and scarier fellow, and I’m still hoping to get that story told one of these days.
All of which brings me back to the Pink Flamingo. When Chris showed me his list of characters and story titles, I said something along the lines of “Um, I have one character left over from Megaton that could work. He could be something of a visual combination of the Penguin and the Joker. Remember the Pink Flamingo?”I don’t know if Chris had ever seen the original design that Gary Thomas Washington drew during his two and a half issue run on Megaton. Pinky would have appeared in the second or third issue of the new color Megaton book. Unfortunately, even the first color issue never made it out. By 1987 orders were dismal.
We hoped that expanding to four or five books would make the distributors take us more seriously. Unfortunately, we contributed to and got mired in the glut of independent books and orders dropped to nothing.
Megaton Special #1 featuring Youngblood was solicited and received orders for about 1,000 copies. It was cancelled. Five years later, Rob Liefeld’s book sold millions of copies in its debut at Image Comics. (To be honest, Rob was a big, big star by 1992 though).
Chris loved the Pink Flamingo and we got to work fleshing him out. He became Pinkerton Fleming, a wealthy contemporary of Reid (Knight Watchman) Randall’s family with a scandal in his past. My original concept was that the Pink Flamingo was the criminal mastermind of Midway City, Moriarty to the Knight Watchman’s Sherlock Holmes. He was a decadent, seedy character who mostly worked behind the scenes pulling strings and controlling others like puppets, always maintaining an semi-honest appearance.
I just loved the name: Pink Flamingo. It brings to mind images of kitschy, gaudy, vulgar bad taste, from the plastic lawn ornaments to John Water’s classic movie. He would be a pop artist of crime, hiding in broad sight. But he would never dress up as a Flamingo.
Did I mention that Pinky is gay? That fact had nothing to do with his criminal life. He wasn’t a pervert or child molester. The Pink Flamingo is merely getting even with a society that ostracized Pinkerton Fleming.
Chris started writing a pulp novel at that point in 1992 titled “The Feathers of Doom”. He set it aside at one point and I sort of stole it, adapting it as a 1938 era back-up story which ran in Image Comics first issue of Graveyard Shift. The back cover (Deductive Comics #30, shown here) was by Mark Lewis and the story itself was drawn by John Thompson.
Gary Washington’s Flamingo looked like a young, hip metrosexualish character. Ben Torres adjusted and aged the character for Graveyard Shift and Pinky got creepier, tackier and more evil. Since then, he’s appeared in every era of Watchman stories: Golden Age, Silver Age, 70’s, 80’s and beyond.
He’s been a pretty versatile character. We used Pink Flamingo in the Fagin role in “The Boys of Bad Town” which combined elements of Oliver Twist, Boys Town and the Bowery Boys, and he acquired a junior sidekick of his own in “The Pink Flamingo’s Kid Sidekick”. Chris Ecker says “He’s probably the one bad guy character who might have a chance at figuring out Reid’s and Jerry’s true identities, but I don’t think he really cares about that.” After all, the game is played out with the Knight Watchman and Galahad.
