Two-Face is pretty much my favorite Bat-villain, but I have an odd relationship with the character that was drawn into sharper focus after viewing The Dark Knight film. Aaron Eckhart managed to make Harvey Dent such a compelling hero that, even though we knew what was going to happen to him eventually, we were sad and crushed when he finally became Two-Face, and then once he was, things stopped making much sense. That’s when it really hit me that Harvey Dent, the lawyer on the edge, is a much more fascinating character than Two-Face, the ludicrously-disfigured killer who just blends in with the rest of the Arkham Asylum nutjob chaff.
So when I picked up Batman and Robin #23.1, which through the magic of Villains Month in the wake of Forever Evil is also entitled Two-Face #1, I was hoping writer Peter J. Tomasi would be able to get me fascinated with what’s become of Mr. Dent, but it only served to remind me what a wasted opportunity the whole character was with the New 52 switchover. Ideally, Two-Face could have been reverted back to Harvey Dent before the fall, and they could have spent a lot of time establishing and developing the relationship between Dent and Batman and Jim Gordon again, because Dent is a hell of a lot more interesting when he’s in that pressure cooker, fighting his demons and riding that line between justice and criminality. When he’s trying to live up to the standards set by Gordon and Batman just as they are trying to live up to his. But no, they just threw him in an Arkham Asylum scene right off the bat, giving nobody anything to work with. There’s something troubling when what a character was is a thousand times better than what it is. Sure, Two-Face has had some good stories, but the best ones tend to involve his original fall from grace.
So what’s this here story, then? We open with Two-Face standing on the Batsignal, musing that nobody’s answering it and Gotham is burning. He flips his coin to decide whether or not he’s going to save Gotham or make it bleed. Scarecrow shows up, catches the coin in mid-flip and offers Harvey a place in the new Secret Society of the Crime Syndicate… which is weird, because the Crime Syndicate just publicly announced their Secret Society over in Forever Evil, which means it’s not really a secret anymore, but I digress. After some angry snarling and debate, Two-Face takes the special Secret Society coin on the condition that his coinflips are always final, and flips that one to make his decision, and it comes up Save Gotham with the head of Owlman on the coin.
Two-Face’s version of “saving Gotham” is walking around shooting criminals, rounding them up in the Gotham City Courthouse where he used to work, and using coinflips to pass summary judgment between life imprisonment or instant execution. That is, until some Society goon shows up and mucks everything up, which prompts Two-Face to murder everybody and declare his deal with the Society null and void. Then, he flips his own coin for the decision about what to do with Gotham, and this time it comes up ‘make it bleed.’
First up, artist Guillem March makes this a great book to gaze upon, because when done right, the twisted visage of Two-Face is visually arresting, and March goes all out with it. He’s also got some amusing designs for the low-rent goon squad made up specifically to get murdered this issue, with names like Scallop and Bootface and Bathead – a guy with a batarang sticking out of his head. The strongest moments are when Two-Face is walking through the courthouse, seeing the carnage wreaked upon the employees there, and flashing back to his D.A. days when all these corpses were living people he would call friends, and March handles laying that out very well. There are also some continuity glitches between this issue and Forever Evil #1, as in that book, we see Two-Face present at the big Crime Syndicate presentation, after making his coin flip in front of the Riddler and all the Arkham escapees. In this issue, he does the same deciding coin flip in a completely different place. Not a great sign.
Unfortunately, though, the story boils down to Two-Face being some ugly dude in a silly suit who shoots people no matter which way the coin falls. He’d be so much better if, when the coin came up clean heads, he would actually act like Harvey Dent rather than just the same killer pointing in a slightly different direction. Warring personalities in his head, an actual dichotomy where the good side is actually earnestly good instead of just a spiteful version of his former self would make things more compelling – a coin flip actually determines his direction and his behavior, and it only changes when that direction hits a really strong wall in its path or a fork in its road. Rather than just being this malevolent jerk, if half the time, Two-Face was actually doing good deeds and helping people, that sense of tragedy that permeates his origin story would remain, and we’d be much more involved in what he does in this incarnation of Gotham’s former white knight.
As it is, though, Two-Face is little more than a triggerhappy thug with a more striking look than most, and the more masses he murders, the less we seem to give a damn about him or who he used to be, because there’s no turning back with this high a body count. Well, there could’ve been with the New 52 switchout. Too bad nobody thought to do that.
