We Believe in Harvey Dent

In honor of today being 2/22, the intrepid lego_joker decided--for whatever inspired reason--to throw together collages of every single time that Harvey got hit in the face with acid. The result is oddly compelling in a way that's both hilarious and horrible. The colleges in question only cover the comics in the regular continuity, and he has plans to eventually put out a fourth collage of "Elseworlds/Impostor/Rescarring/Other Media stuff" once he figures out how they'll all be put together. I, for one, cannot wait. For now, I'll let lego_joker take over with his collages and notes.

( Behind the cut, all of your favorites: 'Ugh! My face!' 'Aaghh! My face!' 'AARRRGGH!! M-my face--!?!' 'GAAHH--' 'YAAARGHH!!' 'NAAAGGGHHHH!' And many more! )

Part 1

And now, the conclusion of (my review of) Paul Jenkins' Batman: Jekyll & Hyde. At this point, artist Jae Lee left the mini-series for unexplained reasons, and artistic duties were taken up by B:J&H cover artist (and artist of Steps, that story from Legends of the Dark Knight) Sean Phillips.

For many, the loss of Lee is terrible, since he was undoubtedly one of the main draws to the story. Bear in mind, Lee was a rockstar artist around this time thanks to his work on such titles as Grant Morrison's Fantastic Four and his previous collaboration with Jenkins on Marvel's Inhumans mini in 2000. Seriously, as someone who grew up reading Wizard magazine in the 90's, I cannot stress how highly Inhumans was touted as THE shit, and how Lee (less so Jenkins, because the prevailing mentality was "who cares about writers?") was hailed as a superstar. As such, to lose Lee halfway though is to lose pretty much the main driving force behind this series' appeal to most comics readers at the time.

Personally, though, I think that Sean Phillips (who is now far more known for his collaborations with Ed Brubaker in absolutely goddamn brilliant stories like Sleeper and Criminal, not to mention the infamous Marvel Zombies) is a far more expressive and dynamic artist, and I prefer the way he draws Harvey anyway, so I approve. Besides, in a sense, this brings Jenkins' story full circle, considering that this all started with Jenkins and Phillips in Steps. Just be prepared for a jarring bit of artistic whiplash. Then again, considering the big revelations that Jenkins has in mind, perhaps artistic backlash is the least of your worries.



( Ice cream, funny little hats, and traumatic childhood revelations, behind the cut! )

If you want to own Batman: Jekyll & Hyde, the collection is pretty commonly available, and can be purchased online at places like Amazon.com. There's a lot more which I couldn't include, including more Two-Face hijinks and an entire subplot of Batman recovering from the effects of the serum.

Over at Comics Alliance, one of the main writers began his positive review for the new digital comic version of Batgirl: Year One with the following words:


"I'm skeptical of origin stories, particularly ones for characters that are decades old. I mean, honestly -- who cares? Are the specifics that important? Superman is going to be the same character whether he was found as a baby or a toddler. Batman is going to be Batman whether or not he captured Joe Chill. I'd much rather that everyone involved skip all the rigamarole and just get on with the story, you know?"


Something about that stuck in my craw. And not just because I've spent the last five or so years writing an extensive retelling of Harvey's origin as I see fit.

No, it's bugged me for other reasons, such as when people HATED the Billy Quizboy origin episode of Venture Bros. Personally, that episode became one of my all-time favorites because it added an unexpected new level of tragedy and poignancy to Billy and Pete White, who up to that point were little more than two-dimensional minor characters. Others, however, saw "The Invisible Hand of Fate" as a tedious waste of time that detracted from the forward momentum of the main storyline. Who cares about Billy Fucking Quizboy, they asked, when there's a whole other main storyline to follow?

Look, I know that origin stories are INCREDIBLY played-out, especially in movies. I mean, shit, why the hell are we getting yet ANOTHER FUCKING SUPERMAN ORIGIN STORY, when everyone already knows his whole deal and can instantly accept just being thrust into an actual, ready-to-go SUPERMAN movie? I'm tired of everyone trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to origins. There's a reason why X-Men 2, Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight, and Superman 2 (the original Donner cut, at least up until the last ten minutes fucking ruin EVERYTHING) are all vastly superior to their respective first films.

And yet, I feel compelled to challenge Mr. Brothers' hypothetical question about origins, mainly because of the examples he gave to back up his point. First off, a good origin story that change our perceptions of that character, making us view all the stories we've already read in different lights. To start with a loaded example, take Batman: The Killing Joke, which gave us the possibility that the Joker was never actually a criminal mastermind, but was just a poor lonely schlub. If you choose to believe that origin (or even if you consider that it's even one of several possible origins he might have), it casts a whole new aspect--one that is simultaneously tragic and chilling--on everything the Joker was, is, and does.

For fans like me who really love thinking about what makes these characters tick, specifics ARE important. Consider what it actually means to have a Batman who captured Joe Chill versus a Batman who never did. Either version means something very different for why Batman does what he does, whether it's out of his personal vendetta against crime or because he's a good person who wants to see justice done. Both are Batman, but they're different KINDS of Batmen. The specifics have far-reaching implications for the personalities and motives of these characters. In Batman's case, it could mean the difference between a Batman who's an inspiring hero and a Batman who's a vengeful dick.

It's not just limited to comics, either. Take John Gardner's wonderful novel, Grendel, a literary prequel which has forever changed how I'll view the monsters from Beowulf. A good backstory, skillfully told, can add a whole new dimension even to characters who are CENTURIES old, partially because a new telling can better reflect a contemporary viewpoint. So the idea that characters who are "decades old" are somehow LESS in need of new/revised origins is just bizarre to me. As these characters have evolved over the years, so too do their origins need to reflect that development. For a perfect example of how a classic chatacter can be improved by a new origin and subsequent writers building upon that origin, look no further than Post-Crisis Catwoman.

I think I've gone into those ideas several times here, especially every time I beat the dead horse of how much I love Andrew Helfer's "Eye of the Beholder," so I don't need to rehash all those reasons to explain how Harvey Dent has benefited from revised origins over the years, even as some great details have been lost in the shuffle (such as the fact that he originally would donate to charity between crimes).

All that said, not everyone cares about character first and foremost. I suspect some don't give character a second thought, focusing expressly on plot and action above all else. Nowhere was the division of audience preference more clearly divided to me than during the years that Lost was on the air, with seemingly half the audience hooked on the characters' subplots and arcs, with the other half increasingly more interested in the two dozen mostly-bullshit mysteries the show made up on the fly with no real intention of ever actually resolving. Me, I didn't give a shit about what the numbers actually meant, but god damn did I want to know what would happen to Locke, Hurley, Ben, Eko, Lapidus, and pretty much everyone who wasn't Jack, Kate, and Sawyer. The origins and backstories for each character were far more meaningful and interesting than anything we eventually learned about the island itself.

So when I read superhero comics, I don't give a shit about any of the big events. By and large, they're just empty posturing as characters are forced through the motions of some editor's mapped-out plot line, hitting each beat for maximum shock value. Many fans love that. To them, it means progress. It means stories that "matter." But not to me. I'm in it for the characters, both the ones I already know and love and new ones who might work their ways into my hearts. Anything that can flesh those characters out, make them deeper, make them even more interesting and explores their motivations and how they develop, that is what makes their actions MATTER.

Origins and backstory aren't the only ways to accomplish this, but they are an extremely effective one when used well. So to answer Mr. Brothers' hypothetical question: it's me. I care. Specifics are that important, at least for those of us who put character above contrived plots.

Henchgirl and I watched a bunch of the cinematic portraits of characters from DC Universe Online, all of which were pretty damn terrible. The Two-Face one is no exception, where he sounds like some combination of Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach and some kind of goblin. Be warned: the acid scarring is appropriately gruesome and horrific.





Not much to write home about, really, and it just serves to highlight the main problem with most takes on Two-Face, including The Dark Knight. There's just no logical progression from "my face is horribly burned" to "I'm gonna listen to the coin now!"

But I do like how the video's main purpose is to illustrate that Two-Face can just as easily go after villains as well as heroes. I still think that it's perfect that Harvey be an ally for good and evil alike, which is something that not even the classic DC Comics RPGs did with the character.

In 1994, SkyBox put out a series of Batman trading cards called The Dark Knight Saga, which single-handedly introduced pre-teen me to a whole chunk of Bat-history. In fact, when you consider that I hadn't even read Batman: Year One by this point, you might imagine how the li'l Harvey Dent fanboy I was reacted upon seeing this card:








I still have great fondness for that card. DCAU Batman comics regular Rick Burchett does a fine job capturing David Mazzucchelli's Harvey, but in a way that looks rather different than the one we'd see from Tim Sale within a couple years.

The Untold Legend of Batman was a three-part miniseries from 1980 by Len Wein, John Byrne, and Jim Aparo that served as my first introduction to all things Gotham. And what an introduction! The mini served as a perfect distillation of Bat-mythos up to the Bronze Age, all in the framework of a mystery.

Like any good mystery, one needs suspects, and this led to Batman giving a brief tour of Rogues 101, with the Joker and Two-Face getting full page origins. In keeping with the series, they boiled Harvey's origin down to the pure, iconic minimum, and you can bet this page made an impact on li'l Heffie:





Between this and my other earliest comic, the third part of A Lonely Place of Dying, Aparo's Batman cemented itself as the Batman in my mind for many years, and his Two-Face (usually wearing an oh-so-70's white turtleneck) remains one of my personal favorites.

So yeah, you can throw The Untold Legend of Batman on the list of great comics that are sorely in need of being collected. Keep an eye out for the back issues, if you can find them. Sure, it's a bit hokey, but if you have a taste for Bronze Age Batman, this is truly one of the best gems that era ever produced.

Fun fact: I got these issues as prizes in the Batman movie breakfast cereal. I think they just recycled the same crap for the Mario/Zelda cereal. I can still taste them now. Oh, so gross.

Dig that great Aparo Two-Face, eh? I have a deep-rooted fondness for Aparo's turtleneck!Harvey.

While the story I bring you today is sadly not drawn by Jim Aparo, it's a fascinating one nonetheless: Two-Face's canon origin from 1977-1987, as seen in DC All-Stars #14: Secret Origins of the Super-Villains. The key twist to this take is the revelation that Harvey Dent wasn't Maroni's real target when the acid was thrown!


( See for yourself in... The Secret Origin of Two-Face: Double Take! )


It's an interesting take only because it gives Harvey full cause to see himself (and by extension, everyone else) as pawns in the hands of destiny, and he's cool with that. The "vengeance" mentioned in the teaser image doesn't seem to matter to him either way. He's calm, sometimes even joyous in his madness: a common take on the character, especially in the Bronze Age up to the post-Crisis era, and this story gives it a sensible enough foundation.

However, it's precisely this take which makes Two-Face a character who only works as a supporting figure to make others react. He himself is almost a non-character, because action reveals character, and this Harvey makes no action unless the coin tells him so. One could say this applies Two-Face in general, but smart writers know how to subtly reveal character in other ways, which I'll explore in future posts.

This is why Two-Face was (and to many, still is) an under-loved character: because he was less of a character than a foil. As a result, the Bronze Age which brought Two-Face back into comics is also what kept him from becoming one of the greater presences in DC until the post-Crisis era. Yet even now, some writers go back to this take, which is frustrating. It can make for good stories of other characters, but it doesn't make Harvey himself an interesting character.

Text by Scott Beatty (editor and co-author of ROBIN: YEAR ONE) and drawn by Scott McDaniel, who was already well-known for drawing the character in TWO-FACE: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and the DAREDEVIL AND BATMAN crossover.





It's easy to see why so many people hate Scott McDaniel's artwork, but I've always been fond of it. He's just so beautifully kinetic in how he draws action, making him dead perfect for characters like Nightwing, Daredevil, and Spider-Man. Two-Face, however, is another case. This is a character who's not all about the fight scenes and action, and as such, he doesn't play to McDaniel's strengths.

That said, I still like his Two-Face... usually. CRIME & PUNISHMENT was pretty darn great, and there were some excellent pages from the DD/BATMAN crossover, both of which greatly deserve posting here down the line. Hell, he even drew a flashback cameo of Harvey in NIGHTWING that I adore. But this? Ugh, I really don't like this piece, all the less so because it was the Two-Face profile pic online back in the late 90's, no matter what site you frequented.

There are things I like about it, particularly the scarred side, the detail on the gray hairs, and especially the fact that the division is jagged, not a clean cut. I love it when artists actually show some gradation between the scarred and unscarred sides. If I have one big pet peeve with Two-Face art, it's when artists draw it as a clear division between "good" and "bad" sides. That was fine in the Golden Age, and that's where it should stay.

But man, everything else is stylized to a point of inhumanity, as if Harvey never had any human facial dimensions before the acid hit. The clean circumference face is unnatural (what is he, a Charles Schulz character?) and the similarly curved hairline makes him look like he's suffering male pattern baldness.

And while we're on the subject of nit-picky, petty annoyances... seriously, what's with so many artists scarring up his left hand? People were doing this even before THE ANIMATED SERIES, where it made sense with his origin there, but there's no reason why his whole hand should be scarred. At most, his palm should be the only thing that's scarred, from reaching up to touch his burning face, but, eh, I guess that's the kind of specific consistency one can't expect from artists-for-hire.

As for the profile itself, there's not much to say. Pretty straight-forward. Although I like his occupation. He's a professional!

One thing, though: notice the lack of what the coin meant to Harvey, and its connections to his father. That was present in the Sprouce-drawn profile by Mark Waid, but that whole vital subplot is absent here, as it was in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. All we get is the abuse, which robs this origin of anything uniquely powerful about Helfer's origin, essentially making Harvey yet another supervillain case of "I was beaten as a child and now I'm evil!"

It's the single biggest origin cliche for villains, but Helfer actually made it work by adding the psychological element, which was even worse than the physical abuse itself. That's forgotten here, as it will be by pretty much every single other writer to this day, aside from the briefest of allusions in both THE LONG HALLOWEEN and THE DARK KNIGHT.

Maybe it's just as well, as I worry what a lesser writer would do with that complex material. But the fact that it's rarely observed is saddening nonetheless, as that's one of the key things that keeps the character from being just another gimmicky villain with a skin condition.

I love love love DC's WHO'S WHO books in all their incarnations.

I'd collect all I could from my comic shop's 50¢ bin, these collections of pin-ups and bios for characters, many of whom I knew and already loved, many I would come to love, and many that were so clearly of their era that we haven't seen hide nor hair of since. Like, what in god's name warranted the Electric Warrior getting his own two-page spread, PLUS a whole inside cover dedicated to his blueprints?

I just love characters, that's the thing. I loved GI JOE action figures for their bios, which revealed a whole world of character possibilities and stories that I still have a great deal of affection for GI JOE, even if I never liked the show or read enough of the great comics. WHO'S WHO was the same, but for my favorite comics company, and if MightyGodKing hadn't already cornered the market on revisiting classic WHO'S WHO entries, I'd be doing that myself.

Lucky(?) for me, no one is doing this sort of thing for Harvey Dent.





First off, man oh man do I want a cleaned-up version of this image, because wow, does Brian Bolland ever draw one of the best Two-Faces ever. Hardly surprising, since Bolland is God. At least, when it comes to pen and ink.

Although what's up with Harvey standing next to what appears to be the back of a Star Destroyer? Is that meant to be the explosion that undid his plastic surgery? A giant metaphorical bottle of acid? A canon of confetti?

The "touche" joke is cheesy, but considering there are lesser writers who would actually have him saying "TWO-che," it's almost kinda cute. Really, Harvey, do you even know how to use a sword? You just know he challenged Batman to a duel purely so he could make the "touche" pun (not to mention the fact that they're having a duel, period). Finally, dig the panel of Harvey behind bars, which Bolland would essentially reuse for a cameo in THE KILLING JOKE.

To put this in context for people who know enough about comics history to care, this bio is pre-Crisis. Right up until the last two sentences, it only goes up to his rescarring in 1957's "Two-Face Strikes Again," then just barely glossing over his Bronze Age activities from 1971 to 1986.

For that matter, it's not even entirely correctly. Harvey never killed Maroni for revenge. In SECRET ORIGINS OF THE SUPER-VILLAINS #14 (the same issue that introduced the retcon of Detective Dave Davis), Maroni/Moroni was killed from his own bullet ricocheting off Two-Face's coin in mid-air flip. Yeah, seriously. Physics don't work that way. But for the sake of succinct bios, I guess "revenge" is more neat and sensible, as is the divorce, even though we never actually see the fallout for Harvey and Gilda after he becomes Two-Face again.

In the 1987 WHO'S WHO update, DC amended Two-Face's bio to add:

In the recreated DC Universe, Harvey Dent was married before he became Two-Face. It is not known if he married Gilda Gold at that point, or whether he was divorced before becoming Two-Face and married her later. In the recreated DC Universe, Two-Face was responsible for the death of Jason Todd's father (see "Robin, revised")

All of which is still before BATMAN: YEAR ONE, which was incorporated in the next updated WHO'S WHO entry for Two-Face. I'll be posting that one next in this series of Harvey profiles over the years.

Back on the old scans_daily, I posted this story--1990's BATMAN ANNUAL #14, "Eye of the Beholder," twice (three times if you count the entry on fullscans_daily). That's because I frickin' love this story.

It's a story that's borrowed/ripped-off from (THE LONG HALLOWEEN, and subsequently THE DARK KNIGHT) as often as it's been ignored (ROBIN: YEAR ONE), but so far, in terms of a sheer character study, I'm firmly believe that it has yet to be surpassed. Because even when it's not ignored, other writers don't quite seem to have a grasp on the complex subtleties that Andrew Helfer imbued to his new post-CRISIS origin of Two-Face. And attempts to develop it further fall hilariously flat too (why hello thar, BATMAN: JEKYLL & HYDE!).

But for many, it's considered a must-read BATMAN comic, and for good reason. Not only is it one of my all-time favorite comics--BATMAN or otherwise--but it is also just above BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES for being the gold standard on everything related to the character of Harvey Dent.





NOTE: This is the slightly-extended edition of what I already posted on scans_daily, as I believe that this is a story that deserves to be read, even though DC bizarrely hasn't reprinted it since 1995. Why it's not included in the BATMAN VS TWO-FACE collection is utterly beyond me. So until you can find it scouring through the back issue bins or on eBay, I present it to you here in this edited version. Hope you enjoy.


( Once more... the definitive Harvey Dent story )

Finally, a question, readers: do you like my commentary interspersed through the scans like this, or would y'all just prefer I leave my essaying until the end in one big chunk? I imagine some people don't care for my blathering on and just want to read the scans, which I understand. At the end of the day, the comics really do speak for themselves, or they should anyway.