Appropriately enough for a character who is obsessed with duality, Batman’s rogues’ gallery has included two Two-Faces.
In Detective Comics 66 (Aug. 1942), District Attorney Harvey “Apollo” Kent — a surname later retconned to “Dent,” so we’ll call him that — became deranged when gangster “Boss” Moroni threw acid in his face, turning against the law and its champions, the Dynamic Duo.
“To the bizarre and unpredictable Two-Face, the use of twos is far more than self-conscious posturing, for Two-Face is a man torn in two, a man in whom good and evil play an equal part,” noted comics historian Michael L. Fleisher. “At one point, for example, when Two-Face believes, albeit erroneously, that he has killed Batman, he suffers through a period of torturous remorse.”
“At one point in his career, he is restored to normal by plastic surgery, and there is briefly a second Two-Face, actor Paul Sloane, who is burned by an exploding klieg light while playing Dent on True Crime Television Playhouse,” noted comics historian Jeff Rovin, recounting the events of Batman 68 (Dec. 1951-Jan. 1952). “Sloane briefly leads a life of crime before going in for plastic surgery; not long thereafter, Dent gets back in the act when he tries to prevent a pair of safecrackers from robbing a TV store.”
Safecrackers robbing a TV store? The producers of television sets were raking it in during the 1950s. The percentage of Americans with TV homes had shot up from 9 percent in 1950 to nearly 56 percent by 1954.
“(Dent) is caught in the explosion they’d set and the blast undoes all of his surgery (which, he’d been warned, ‘cannot be performed a second time’)” Rovin recalled. “’ This settles it,’ he declares. “‘This proves I was meant to be a criminal.’”
A guy who bases all his choices on the flip of a coin would, necessarily, have a strong belief in fate.
“I’ve gone back on my word — but never against the decision of my coin,” Dent says.
In Two-Face Strikes Again (Batman 81, Feb. 1954), the half-time fiend straps Batman and Robin to a giant coin and flips it onto a bed of spikes.
Note that the Dynamic Duo’s method of escape from the deathtrap — rejiggering their belt radios into super-electromagnets — is very Batman TV show, although that program wouldn’t premiere until a dozen years later.
Ironic, that, because Two-Face is the one major villain who never appeared on the Adam West show.
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