He’s a comics character. His real name is Charles Brown, though that’s not what he’s usually called (some call him Chuck). And according to this IGN article, he’s about to get his own animated series. But he’s not the round-headed kid that you may be thinking of.

Kite-Man is a kite-and-hang-glider-centered Batman villain that first appeared in Batman issue 133, written by Bill Finger, the long-unacknowledged co-creator of Batman. Now, I don’t have that issue, so I cannot verify that he was given the name “Charles Brown” right off… but if it wasn’t right off, he waited a long while, because the character would not appear again for almost two decades, in a 1979 issue written by my late acquaintance Len Wein. He got kept around as a low-grade garbage villain, the sort of disposable character you could kill of in one series, and then, after some rebooting, have actually eaten by a fellow villain in another. More recently, he’s apparently been getting a lot of use in the adult-targeted animated HBOMax series Harley Quinn. And now he’s getting his own spin-off series.

I’ll admit, not having watched HQ (has anyone noticed that there’s an awful lot of television these days?), I don’t know if they’re even invoking the Charles Brown name for him, or just using Kite-Man. Still, whether they use his name or not, Charles Brown he is.

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