web hosting short URLs photo sharing

Double Duty for Two-Face

Superheroes define themselves by a combination of a core concept, a setting, and an enemy or set of enemies. Of the fantastic villains that populate comics, few enjoy such a defining role relative to their heroic antithesis than DC Comics' Two-Face, a criminal who, with the Joker, helped create a territory of disturbed and disturbing nemeses driven by inner demons to a territory tangent to, but definitely outside, the cosmos we label as "sanity." A mixture of an unmistakable visual presence, bizarre and unpredictable compulsion, and an angle of tragedy make this grotesque creation a fitting enemy for a hero like Batman, himself currently defined as an incarnated, not completely human, obsession.

Beginning, perhaps, as an attempt to render the Jekyll / Hyde concept in a more pulp-comics form (although only retaining one core piece of the Stevenson concept in the notion of a man with two personalities, one pulled towards a higher, good nature and the other towards a baser, evil nature), Two-Face himself became a kind of archetype, spawning a doppelganger who, if less than perfect in his appropriated concept, nonetheless owes, in a fairly obvious way, to the visual treatment of the villain from the territory of Kane and Finger.

Large objects throw large shadows. But an otherwise unremarkable derivation of a character from an established prototype - itself not much of a happening in a self-referent medium like superhero comics - does become interesting when something unusual occurs in the flow of information. In this case, something in the initial idea behind and underlying the man corrupted by personal trauma into following a random event fetish made the translation into comics that, rather than having a history of appropriating other material, instead inspired it.

From a Batman franchise enriched by inspiration from the daily newspaper strip "Dick Tracy," the Batman books would feed material back into one of their conceptual parents, and the figure of Two-Face would appear, somewhat simplified (and copies often do tend to lose detail that defined the original), as Tracy villain Haf-n-Haf.

Finger, Kane, and "Dick Tracy"

Batman appeared in 1939, the creation of Bob Kane and the undercredited Bill Finger. Early Batman stories involved a certain darkness of tone and a degree of monstrousness of his rivals, including a mad scientist who transformed the citizens of Gotham City into giant, lumbering monsters.

Men who deal in ideas frequently recognize the strengths inherent in material they did not create, and Chester Gould's daily adventure strip "Dick Tracy" had a good eight-year head start on Batman's first curtain call in Detective #27. Kane and Finger saw, in Tracy's developing menagerie of enemies, something that could add greatly to the Batman concept, since Dick Tracy, a straight-arrow kind of character himself, recurringly threw himself into the fray against a criminal horde of considerable color and definitely bizarre prospect.

While the two franchises might profit from conceptually-similar veins of idiosyncratic villains, each used these villains differently. For instance, Dick Tracy represented a kind of idealized and upbeat Middle American exemplar of virtues as, perhaps, J. Edgar Hoover might have wished the American public to perceive and idealized or archetypical lawman. Thus, the weirdness of his enemies threw a contrast between one pole of lightness and sanity - law and Tracy - and another of depravity and criminals - the familiar, gimmicky crooks like Flattop and his peers.

Back into Batman territory, in its original form (and in the derivative but sometimes oversimplified, overpurified versions from the eighties onward), Batman, his monstrous enemies, and the dark city of Gotham with its archaic architecture all represented, tone-wise, a single piece. Batman did not shine in opposition to the tide of lawlessness he fought; instead, he became dark so he could move among the forces he sought to undermine by his efforts.

The Gallery of Grotesque Goons

By the 1960s, Batman had a traveling circus of costumed yahoos and goombas to confront, suitable for a variety of storytelling needs. These included creations from the forties such as the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin - all of which would play a role on the television show, and one of whom who had appeared and remained unused and forgotten until revived for television - and later accretions that would ultimately become so numerous, yet thematically connected, that they could represent a community within Gotham City and in a mental institution named "Arkham Asylum" (probably a tribute to the New England horrors of H. P. Lovecraft's works).

Finger and Kane, however, began from nothing when working their first Batman stories, but drew inspiration from the gimmicky gangsters Gould threw against his stalwart detective. A Gould villain would begin with a gimmick, such as the sagging features of Prune Face; he would pursue a carnival of criminality that would throw terror into the civilians of the city Tracy sought to defend; and, occasionally, he would get the better of Dick Tracy (in the short term) and place him in some kind of death trap. A Dick Tracy death trap might involve no more than a few sticks of dynamite, a beaker of acid designed to tip over when someone opens a door, or a railroad spike weighted down with a save and designed to drive through Tracy's chest as a supporting block of ice melted.

By the sixties, these core pieces of "Dick Tracy" had also become fundamental components of the Batman stories in Batman and Detective Comics. Though not always obvious to Batman fans - especially in the absence of a familiarity with Gould's strip, by then in its fourth decade - the child still showed that it owed to the parent.

The Two-Face Concept

As a recurring motif, DC Comics has, for perhaps fifty years, presented the occasional story where a bit of cosmetic surgery and psychotherapy take away the physical and moral injury that turned Harvey Kent / Dent into "Two-Face." A number of contrivances generally undo this change, from almost-immediate convenient explosions to self-mutilation to the appearance of supernatural powers who try, but fail, to repair the man. Indeed, inasmuch as this feature deals with the overuse of ideas, the repeated tale with the failed reform of Two-Face could provide material for a Recycling Bin column by itself, without reference to doppelgangers elsewhere in comicdom.

In the simple, but still core, concept behind Two-Face, a somewhat vain overachieving young district attorney named Harvey "Apollo" Kent (sic) pushed his success a bit to far in the pursuit of the conviction of a deserving goon, who rewarded Kent's diligence with a bath of vitriol thrown in his face. This created a physical injury that split his once-fine looks down a vertical axis into a clean and scarred half; and, after an initial rampage driven by self-hatred, Kent decided to allow a mutilated coin to decide whether he would continue with his life serving good causes or pursue the morally reprehensible but generally more interesting path of a homicidal and demented career criminal. From that point on, Kent would use the flip of a coin as a proxy for a deadened inner moral voice, doing good deeds or bad depending on the outcome of the toss.

Two-face, in this form, appeared in 1941 and still exists, true to this original formulation, sixty years later, in spite of changes of generations of superheroes, retcons, the passing on of the generation of talent that created him, and some slight changes of detail (for instance, the transformation of his name "Kent" to "Dent"). His concept began strong enough to endure, unchanged, after events like the DC Comics housecleaning that followed Crisis on Infinite Earths made significant changes to characters like Superman and Wonder Woman. Perhaps this endurance depended on the archetypical nature of his definition, as an aspect of the Jekyll and Hyde concept that also inspired characters like the Hulk and Eclipso in their first Silver Age manifestations.

And, if we can consider the concept archetypical, than we need not show too much surprise that imitations might appear.

The Haf-n-Haf Concept

In the "Dick Tracy" strip, during the later years of Chester Gould's life, a dualistic character appeared in a sequence that began with a freed convict celebrating the marvels of modern cosmetic surgery in restoring his face which, once upon a time, split down the middle into a scarred half and a clean half. This villain bore the name 'Haf-n-Haf,' suggestive of his injury (but also, unfortunately, somewhat suggestive of a dairy product). Tulza Tuzon, a circus employee already involved in various kinds of petty crime, had lost half his face to an accident with an acid truck (moral: Watch out for acid trucks, assuming such a thing exists), whereupon he took the criminal persona Haf-n-Haf and engaged in a spree of murders which, but for a mishap of justice in the courts, would have sent him to the electric chair. Unlike Two-Face, who began from a position of power and respect - perhaps Harvey Kent/Dent owed somewhat to reformer District Attorney and Governor of New York Tom Dewey to a degree - Haf-n-Haf began low and sank lower, never enjoying a social status higher than "carney" when on his best behavior.

Informed opinion dates Haf-n-Haf from approximately 1967, a date late enough to credit Two-Face with slightly over a quarter of a century of priority. My own source material - limited somewhat to a single Dick Tracy anthology - presents a story with the character from the late seventies, putting a possible gap of close to thirty years between prototype and derivative.

We might dismiss the similarity with some willful resort to believing in parallel creative tendency. After all, Two-Face, as originally conceived, would have fit well in among classic Dick Tracy villains like Prune Face, Flattop, Shaky, or the Blank (or do I misremember someone called "No-Face" here?) Nonetheless, by 1967, and certainly by 1978, DC's mutilated villain had established a tenure as a fixture that would, to one well versed in comics, appear instantly in likeness to Haf-n-Haf.

Furthermore, details of Haf-n-Haf contribute to the notion of the identity of the two concepts. The reformed-version chestnut, played repeatedly by DC, appeared within pages of my own first encounter with Haf-n-Haf; he leaves prison, admiring his fixed face, and, soon thereafter, someone throws acid in his face in a zoo. Then he stops using his given name and returns to the handle he used as a criminal. If the details of visual treatment and personal history came much closer, we might expect Dick Tracy to wear a cape and operate out of a cave.

Given the consistent emphasis of the strip "Dick Tracy" on forensic methods, police technique, and interesting crimes, we can note that the villains that appeared therein did not resort to the same pattern of gimmicks and fetishes that would, by the turn of the sixties, make a kind of surrealistic and ludicrous parade of giant objects out of Batman books. Nor, as mentioned before, did the derivation of Haf-n-Haf from his prototype go very deep; his methods represented less an obsession with duality and more his background as an animal trainer in the circus and some small degree of poetic justice. Thus, he might attempt to use a pilfered snake to kill a witness who helped send him to prison; or he might leave a victim in a trap that, when sprung, would spill acid on the target's face, creating another scarred person like himself (who, should all go off as planned, would die rather than become a rival to the split-face style).

Homage, Pilferage, Resonance, Convergence, or What?

Here I incline to the theory of simple pilferage, though the question of how the information flowed remains less important than what idea moved from where to where. With the death of "Swipe of the Week," we lack a mechanism for recording a consensus on opinions as to the method and intent anyway. Rather than speculate on who and how and then start rooting for primary and secondary sources that could point near the detail we seek, we might view with greater clarity the material itself. It would, after all, require a great deal of rationalization to explain away the similarities, common points that show in hand-picked panels but also on the original pages.

In or out of context, however, we have a likeness. We have dates, with one piece appearing first in the 1940s and another in the 1960s; we have the man struck in the face with acid, more than once; we have the attempt at reform and redemption through plastic surgery, more than once; and we have the visual element, suitable for simple analysis to recognize as the same even as more thoughtful approaches attempt, perhaps unnecessarily, to explain it.

We can't escape the child's resemblance to the parent here, even if Gould's classic police hero took on an inverted role to what he enjoyed in the formative years of the Batman franchise, when a decade of previous history allowed the Dick Tracy strip to provide conceptual source material, rather than inspiration of explicitly pilfered detail, to Kane and Finger's creation Batman. A combination of priority (what appeared first) and scope (more successful pieces tend to inspire less successful ones, much in the way that gases under pressure will expand into a space occupied by less dense material) point a finger in a way that our own logic need not.

Return to the Quarter Bin.
Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

Column 269. Completed 02-SEP-2001.