We Believe in Harvey Dent

While the risque Birds of Prey musical number from Batman: The Brave and the Bold has become a viral hit among comic sites (Birds of Prey + Gail Simone + dick jokes = success, apparently), the actual episode it's from, "The Mask of Matches Malone!" has still never aired in the US. This is supposedly because for some reason TV censors have some problem airing a kid's show with an entire segment devoted to dick jokes (plus a vagina joke in the opening sequence with Poison Ivy), some of which are so obvious that they're just single entendres. Go figure, right?





Personally, I don't care that much for the most part. I adore that show, but I feel like the musical number left me cold. No matter how effectively it's gotten stuck in my head (In my head right now: "Dum dum da dada, Birds of Preyyy, theoneanonly Birds of Pr--" DAMMIT! STOP THAT, BRAIN! DON'T MAKE ME PUNISH YOU WITH KE$HA!), I just kinda find it mildly irritating, less clever and more "tee-hee, we're being dirty!" As a sexy burlesque for superheroes, Red Hot Riding Hood it ain't. On top of that, I am in the extreme minority in haaaaaating every single musical number from The Brave and the Bold.

Thing is, I adore musicals, and I always wince whenever I hear somebody talk about how much they hate musicals, because while I can understand hating SPECIFIC musicals, I cannot wrap my head around someone hating an entire genre. The work of Sondheim, Rogers & Hammerstein, Webber, Kander & Ebb, Menken & Ashman, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Seth McFarlane, and Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog are not all the same thing, yet they're cut from the same cloth. And chances are, most everybody loves some part of that... um... musical fabric. Yeah. *cough*

I swear, I'm going to explain why all this is relevant to Two-Face. I'm getting there. Promise. I just need to rant a LITTLE bit longer about musicals.

At the same time, there are parts of that (fill in additional awkward metaphor here) which I also loathe. Webber, for one. Fuck Webber. And man oh man, I hate the musical numbers from The Brave and the Bold almost as much as I hate Webber. Maybe moreso, because at least with Webber, there's no crossover in the comics world, where most of my fellow fans are head-over-heels in love with stuff like the entire Music Meister episode. Of course, having NPH doesn't hurt, but ugh, I detested those songs, just as I detested the scene in the otherwise-great "Emperor Joker!" episode, where the Joker sang this atrocity. The fact that it's entitled "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile," makes me wish to god that they'd actually just gone ahead and had him sing the actual fucking song, which would have given the scene fifteen more layers of sadistic delightfulness. You know something is bad when The Batman actually did it BETTER.

But eh, what do I know about music? I'm the guy who thinks the beloved theme song for The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes--which has been hailed as "epic" and "metal," actual quotes--sounds like mall-punk Hot Topic Nickelback claptrap. So YMMV.

Which FINALLY brings us to the actual Two-Face-related reason I am posting the entirety of "The Mask of Matches Malone!" here, for those who haven't seen it. I'm guessing that's most of you. As we've previously seen, the Two-Face of Batman: The Brave and the Bold is awesome. It's one of the very best takes on Harvey that I have EVER seen, managing to be poignant and tragic without ever being angsty or gritty. In TMoMM!, Gail Simone gives us the second major appearance of Harvey in B:TB&TB, using him in a way which...

... well... just watch it for yourself. And do it soon, before it's taken down by WB.







If this were any other comics site, I'd be all about discussing Gail, the Birds, the Bat/Cat sexual tension, and/or the musical number, because that's what most fans generally care about, and I'm sure those'll come up in the comments. But here? Yeah, screw all that.

As always, let's talk about Harvey.


( Spoiler for THE MASK OF MATCHES MALONE! behind the cut )

Crime novelist Greg Rucka's first two DC comic stories kicked off a journey that he'd follow all the way up to his recent, lamented departure from the company. Everything from NO MAN'S LAND, HUNTRESS: CRY FOR BLOOD, 52, CHECKMATE, THE QUESTION, and BATWOMAN, it all stems from these two stories where a pair of Gotham's toughest heroines reluctantly team up with face-related men: one with no face at all, and the other with two too many.

"Two Down," which appeared in Spring 1999's BATMAN CHRONICLES #16, is credited by the first-page blurb as the story where "Rucka first proved his mettle in comics," although the previous issue--Winter 98's BATMAN CRONICLES#15--published Rucka's "An Answer in the Rubble." Maybe the second one was published first, but either way, they make a fascinating pairing. Particularly now, twelve years later, as we know how these pairings fell apart... and how the remnants of the two became one themselves.





( Kick-ass women and the face-themed men who love them, behind the cut )

I'm considering doing a series of NO MAN'S LAND posts focusing on Renee and Harvey, interspersed with pages from Rucka's own novelization of NML, which I think is largely an improvement over the comics themselves. I dunno how interested anyone would be in scans of just words, but I personally find the comparisons damn fascinating, nerd that I am. Hopefully some of you will too.