The character's in-universe real name is Lazlo Valentin, a scientist who suffered a schizophrenic breakdown that led him to become a supervillain who wears a pig mask.

Pyg is an obsessive perfectionist who sees human beings as broken individuals; he commonly kidnaps people and uses surgery and chemicals to permanently change them into mind-controlled automatons known as Dollotrons, and sometimes into human–animal hybrids.

[5] In the story, Lazlo Valentin was an "extreme" circus mob boss until something turned him into Professor Pyg, leading him to begin funding his scientific experiments by selling narcotics to the criminal underworld.

Batman and Robin learn from interrogating his underlings, members of a gang called the Circus of Strange, that Pyg is planning to spread a mind-control virus across Gotham City to hold the population for ransom.

This occurred after the group broke into the Gotham City Police Department precinct that teammate Mister Toad was held in only to find him dead.

Lazlo Valentin was a scientist working for a corrupt United Nations agency known as Spyral and was driven insane by a product that he was developing, which mimics some effects of Alzheimer's disease.

[32] During Robin War, a crossover between several Robin-related publications published from December 2015 to January 2016, Pyg uses an abandoned theatre for his criminal activities while working for the supervillain Brother Blood.

He is hired by crime figure Sofia Falcone in a conspiracy to turn the corrupt police against kingpin Oswald Cobblepot and usurp his criminal empire.

[49] In a story in the 2018 Halloween anthology Cursed Comics Cavalcade, Damian Wayne teams up with the zombie Solomon Grundy against Professor Pyg, after he kidnaps a group of children.

[50] In January 2019, the Mister Miracle creative team Tom King and Mitch Geralds reunited for Batman #62, which was promoted as a "special issue".

He later appears as the main antagonist of "Gotham's Hottest Hotties", where he attempts to create the perfect woman using stolen parts from various attractive bodies, including Nightwing's buttocks.

[citation needed] "Like the Pygmalion of myth, Lazlo fancies himself something of a sculptor—except he doesn't work in clay or marble, he's much more fascinated with transforming living human bodies...

[2] The character uses drugs, lobotomy, and doll masks permanently molded onto people's faces to turn them into genderless Dollotrons, which he believes are perfected human beings.

[54][55] The name Pyg is a shortening of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's play that was adapted into the musical My Fair Lady starring Rex Harrison, which tells the story of a professor's attempt to convert a street urchin into an educated, high-society woman.

According to Morrison, "Movie enthusiasts will know that Rex Harrison also played Doctor Doolittle, who by strange coincidence was famed for teaching barnyard animals to speak proper, so our Professor Pyg mixes all these characteristics and influences together to create a monster who wants to make everything and everyone 'perfect,' as he sees it".

[4] On the DC Comics website, journalist Meg Downey notes parallels between Professor Pyg's view of his Dollotrons and the Greek mythological figure Pygmalion, who carved a statue of a woman out of ivory that was so realistic and beautiful he fell in love with his creation.

[56] Morrison referred to the character's experiments to force biology to conform to his will as an "attempt to dominate and redefine the feminine principle", comparing it to the wire mother experiments performed by psychologist Harry Harlow on infant monkeys and to the proto-mother mythologies of Mesopotamia and ancient Babylon: "The shattered mind of Lazlo Valentin has mashed all of these connections into a frightening personal 'mythos', constructed to justify his deranged activities as Professor Pyg".

[3] Morrison also said Pyg's deranged rants in Batman and Robin Must Die allude to animal experimentation carried out in the US in the mid-twentieth century, including Harlow and John B. Calhoun's Rockville barn rat population research, which collectively influenced the character's origin story.

[8] In Batman #62, Bruce Wayne compares Pyg's love for his work to his own fixation with vigilantism, having built up his ideals and philosophies since he witnessed his parents being murdered as a boy.

[58] Pyg was adapted differently from the comics in the television series Beware the Batman; developer Glen Murakami said, "it's not like we're trying to change it, but we only have 22 minutes to tell that story.

"[59] Chris Sims of the journalism website ComicsAlliance said the changes are "about as far from melting people's faces, stripping in front of a wire mother and dosing Gotham City with a psychotropic drug as you're likely to get".

He creates an elaborate persona of a murderer under the Professor Pyg alias to aid Sofia Falcone's rise to power in Gotham City's criminal underworld.

Executive producer John Stephens said the character was chosen for the show because "He hits that sweet spot of being grotesque and terrifying, but also a little bit in that fairy-tale-esque world".

Cerveris said Pyg takes delight in his actions and sees himself as a mirror image to James Gordon, who also wants to end corruption in the Gotham City Police Department.

[64] Before the Pyg persona is revealed to be fake, Cerveris said he lacks his alter ego's trademark surgical prowess because it was intended to focus more on his relationship with the city and James Gordon, and that the Dollotrons are not the sole purpose of his existence.

Much of his original wardrobe in the comic books was designed by Frank Quitely and is a homage to the Edwardian suits worn by Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady.

[3] The television series Gotham was planned to feature a pig mask that more closely resembled the comic book version but it was deemed "a little too cheery and pink".

Cerveris found the change to be simultaneously comical and disturbing; he had some difficulty acting in the mask due to its weight and the heat underneath, and because it blocked his peripheral vision.

[66] Beth Elderkin of io9 called the character "one of the weirdest villains to come out of the Batman canon" while Bustle referred to him as "one of the comics' modern masterpieces, and one of its most horrifying creations".

[72][73] David Pepose of Newsarama praised the inclusion of Professor Pyg and Jason Bard in Batman Eternal for emphasizing elements of the DC Universe that were underused following the New 52.