This week on Gotham another historical villain from Batman‘s rogue gallery will make her live action debut. In 13 Stitches, an unusual alliance between Penguin and Selina will be forged, as the two will try to outsmart a thief who’s been stealing from them both. The culprit is none others than Magpie, portrayed by Sarah Schenkkan, a kleptomaniac villain who’s been troubling Batman since the 1980s in the comics, and who’ll have here a darker and more goth-like appearance. Before witnessing her debut in flesh and bones, let’s take a look at her paper counterpart.
Maggie Pye was born in Gotham City, possibly the world’s capital of insanity. Since her childhood, she was compulsively attracted to shiny and bright objects, that she felt the urge to possess; because of this form of kleptomania, the other children ridiculed her, and started calling her “Magpie”, 
turning her name into that of the bird she took her habits from. With time, Maggie overcame this obsession and learnt to control it, but it was still there, lingering in the back of her head, ready to come back to the surface… and so it did. A renowned academic, Maggie Pye obtained the job of her dreams as the curator of Gotham Museum, but this experience turned into a living nightmare: all those beautiful objects around her made her old obsession come back, and the awareness that she would have never owned them broke her psyche. She became obsessively jealous of all the visitors who watched what she considered her treasure, and she decided to take countermeasures. Using her childhood moniker, Magpie, she hired a group of thugs whose sole purpose was covering her tracks (and she mercilessly killed anyone who disappointed her, thus keeping the ranks), and then she created perfect duplicates of the antiquities of her museum, stealing the originals and replacing them with the booby-trapped replicas. It was inevitable that the explosions at the museum attracted some unwanted attention, but the shocked, read-headed curator who wore huge eye-glasses wasn’t among the police’s suspects… but the new Gotham’s vigilante, Batman, was a better detective, and started investigating on the woman.
Magpie’s career suffered from terrible bad luck since its very start, as in that same time Superman had come to Gotham City to arrest Batman, only to strike an alliance with him and start a long-time friendship… not that Magpie rejoiced about it, as she was the first criminal arrested by the unstoppable duo. Imprisoned, she came back soon after to reclaim her treasure and steal other goods, mainly jewels, but she was stopped once again by Batman, this 
time accompanied by Robin. As she was separated from her loot once again, she suffered from a major emotional and nervous breakdown, and she was locked into Arkham Asylum, with the many other delusional villains of Gotham. Here, therapy and treatment didn’t do much for her kleptomania, quite the opposite: Magpie started to prostitute herself to guards and even other inmates in exchange of the shiny objects she craved so much, even if this meant to face the disgust of her cellmate, Poison Ivy. Despite their obvious differences, the two eventually learnt to get along, and Magpie used her shiny treasure to get Ivy enough life to dig a tunnel, and escape together… in an attempt that turned out to be even more insane and chaotic than Arkham’s usual. The two prisoners, trying to find a way out, broke into a sealed ward, that had been sealed to trap the Skarva, powerful demons who once haunted the place. The Scarva broke free, and possessed both Magpie and Poison Ivy, turning them into monsters and starting a bloodbath into the asylum. The crisis was solved from behind the scenes by Warren White, who made a deal with the demons, and Magpie came back to her original form. Not even this traumatic experience was enough to make her change life, though: as soon as she was out, she joined Intergang, ready to collect some other treasure to add to her collection…
Margaret Pye is a very disturbed woman, a kleptomaniac obsessed with collecting beautiful and shiny things, compelled by her psychopathy to pursue her “treasure” without consideration for anything else. As Magpie, she’s an expert of traps and explosives, and she’s very skilled in creating deadly replicas of the objects she steals; she’s also a capable hand-to-hand fighter. As wanted a thief as she may be, Magpie still struggles to see the reason behind the manhunt she’s victim of: from her perspective, she never stole anything, she’s merely reclaiming what’s hers by right.
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