Harvey Apollo, Two-Face--?

[jlroberson]

From the best(and judging from Ebay, the rarest) of all the Batman tabloid comics of the 70s, a...slightly different Two-Face. This is a series of Sunday newspaper strips from 1946, which received its first comics publication in this edition. I'm assuming this is...Jack Burnley?
Anyway. He's a handsome actor, see. It's ironic and stuff. Also, a request: anyone have some Dick Tracy Haf-And-Haf strips?

Comments

[silverzeo]

There sure has been a lot of variations of Harvey's skin condition from being green and slightly burnt/swollen/dead (I don't know what to call it). I think I like the Dark Knight takes of Harvey's deformity, being literally having the half of his body burned.

Warning: nitpicking ahead

[thehefner]

His body wasn't really burned in TDK though, just his face and shoulder. Harvey in BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, on the other hand, was full-body. And while that characterization is perhaps my all-time favorite take on the character, I personally have always found it a bit too much, and kind of missing the point. He's Two-Face, not Two-Body.

Re: Warning: nitpicking ahead

[darkblade]

Also how would he actually walk if his leg was as badly burnt as his face is shown to be?

Re: Warning: nitpicking ahead

[starwolf_oakley]

Maybe some artists just like drawing Two-Face with similar scarring/coloring on his hand.

[kusonaga]

Wow, gruesome ending.

[jkcarrier]

Kind of amazing to think that there was a time when you could show a *hanging* in a newspaper strip. Try to get away with something like that today.

[jlroberson]

Well, back then it wasn't SO strange--consider DICK TRACY and the gory deaths his villains usually had.

[thanekos]

Harvey Apollo.

works better than Harvey Kent.

[deleonjh]

I thought this would have something to do with Phoenix Wright, what with the whole lawyer thing.

[jlroberson]

Speaking of the law: what kind of stupid mobster throws away all chance of appeals and other means to avoid jail by throwing acid in a witness' face during a trial?

The kind whose lawyer is not a happy fella.

[thehefner]

Awesome! Thanks for posting this, I've needed the scans!

I keep imagining Harvey here speaking like Calculon. "I shall rule the crime world... with my awesome... ACTING... TALENT!!!"

I second (hurr hurr) the request for "Haf-And-Haf" Dick Tracy strips! Also, Harvey Apollo is one of FIVE different iterations of Two-Face in the Golden Age!

I would love to see scans of the story with the Two-Face impersonator who's really Harvey's butler, plus the original Paul Sloane story! If we get that one, I could even do a whole post dedicated to Sloane through the years, including the truly lame-ass one by Mike W. Barr and the more awesome one (with unfortunate art) by Ed Brubaker!

[jlroberson]

What I like best is, just as a person who gets superpowers often uses them for no real reason, by instinct, to fight crime, Harvey immediately decides to become nothing more than a stick-up man.

[thehefner]

Well, it was the Golden Age. They didn't really think that big. Hell, Alan Scott had massive power on his finger, and he still pretty much went after gangsters and the occasional zombie, didn't he? At least, on his own, not with the JSA.

But Harvey's bit worked a bit better in the original Harvey Kent iteration: he'd be a stick-up man or a Robin-Hood-style philanthropist, depending on how the coin came up. There was more going on there than just "okay, I'm giving my life over to crime full-time!"

[psychopathicus_rex]

I kind of like the concept of Two-Face as the ultimate legacy villain, an identity assumed by countless people obsessed by the horrific original. It's even plausible - after all, all you would need to become Two-Face is to have half of your face scarred or disfigured somehow, and there are hundreds of ways that that could happen. Acid, fire, car accidents, a stroke - or, of course, something deliberate and removable like makeup. He could be like the Dr. Mabuse of Batman's rogues.

[thehefner]

What a fascinating idea! It'd certainly allow poor Harvey to grow free from his Sisyphean lot in life and explore themes of duality in other ways.

Me, I quixotically hoped that Harvey would stay healed and a vigilante post-ONE YEAR LATER and that the mantle of Two-Face would have been taken up by Alexander Luthor, having survived the Joker's gunshot. I would have loved to have seen that.

[jlroberson]

Nah, this being DC that would have meant you'd be condemned to hearing him explain his entire history every time he showed up. The less Alexander Luthor the better.

[thehefner]

Just makin' lemonade!

That would have been the risk, but hey, if Prime can be made interesting (and I would argue he absolutely has been, as of LEGION OF THREE WORLDS onward), anything's possible!

[jlroberson]

I'd agree that making Prime the embodiment of Nerd Rage was a stroke of genius.

[psychopathicus_rex]

An extra-dimensional Two-Face?
...
Well, it's original, anyway.

[thehefner]

Well, he had no powers left at that point. He'd have to make do with his Luthor intellect, and that'd make him a rather formidable foe.

And hell, Grant Morrison would probably pull something way wackier than an extra-dimensional Two-Face if he had the chance. It's one of the rare times I'm glad he's more interested in original characters rather than using actual Batman villains. He'd probably give Harvey the ability to talk to currency or something.

[psychopathicus_rex]

That'd be interesting, actually. It kind of reminds me of a character from 'The Last Unicorn' - good book, if you haven't read it - called Drin, who was so stingy and loved his money so much that his money loved him right back. At one point, he's trying to track the heroes down, and they're hiding from him with a few of his coins in their pockets, and he just stands there and yells out to his money 'who is your master?' 'Drin', hum the coins, 'Drin, Drin, Drinnnnn', and he just follows the noise straight to them.

[jlroberson]

>>Grant Morrison would probably pull something way wackier than an extra-dimensional Two-Face if he had the chance. It's one of the rare times I'm glad he's more interested in original characters rather than using actual Batman villains. He'd probably give Harvey the ability to talk to currency or something.

You've forgotten ARKHAM ASYLUM, I see. He did that. Only what he did was have Harvey's doctors try to rebuild his decision-making process by weaning him onto more complex things than coins. We see him when they've gotten him on tarot cards. Unfortunately, with so many choices, he can't do anything, including get up to go to the bathroom.

Personally, I always liked that take.

[psychopathicus_rex]

It gets pretty much to the heart of what Two-Face is as a character, yeah. Basically, he's a creature of simplicity - yes-no, on-off, black-white, good-bad. That's his whole belief system - it's why he's Two-Face in the first place. He can't handle complexity - it just confuses him.

[thehefner]

I didn't forget it, I'm just not counting it since I'm taking about Morrison's current run. If he pulled that Thin White Duke of Death thing with the Joker, I'd hate to see what he'd do to Harvey, playing up with some huge ideas about duality themes or talking currency rather than writing him as a character.

And yeah, I liked that take too, and I rather liked the notes he made about Harvey in the script (in the anniversary edition). Morrison's an ideas-first kind of writer most of the time, and many of the characters in Arkham suffered from it (Jervis, particularly, has never recovered), but it actually worked for Harvey.

[jlroberson]

I think I'm certainly the only one around here that did, but I happened to LIKE the Thin White Duke of Death phase. And most of RIP for that matter.

[thehefner]

You're not the only one, I assure you. But me, I just find a perma-grinning one-note ghoul out of a SILENT HILL game far more boring and less compelling than the charming, charismatic, manipulative sociopath who looks like all fun and games on the surface (even Heath was more this Joker than Morrison's).

What did you like about RIP?

[jlroberson]

I guess that for a while it really sustained a feeling of everything going to hell, and of finality. When Morrison goes there he usually creates an exciting story(Planet X held me in a similar way, as did the buildup in FINAL CRISIS), though at the end it often becomes unsatisfying.

[jlroberson]

And since you wrote that, he DID. In Batman 700, a future "Two-Face" has a dead fetus face growing out of his cheek, who's evil, and takes over when the main guy is asleep.

I thought that was kinda cool.

[thehefner]

Agreed! I rather liked that. If it actually was meant to be Harvey Dent himself, I'd have raised an eyebrow, but making a new character to explore those concepts in a different way, yeah, I really dug it.

I dislike Morrison's Batman, so it's weird to feel like I'm one of the very, very, very few people who actually liked BATMAN #700.

[jlroberson]

I like that: a villain as a meme. You could argue many heroes and villains are exactly that.

(But what do I know--I'm still hoping for a story revolving around Number None)

[psychopathicus_rex]

'Number None'?

[jlroberson]

From Doom Patrol, from the 2nd Brotherhood of Dada. Number None is basically a conceptual villain. He's anything that gets in your way. Are you in a hurry in a line but there's this one really slow guy right in front of you? That's him. Are you running up some stairs, and don't see one, trip, and fall on your face? That stair was him. And so forth.

[psychopathicus_rex]

That's an interesting concept, all right.
I was thinking of Two-Face being one of those identities that disturbed or imbalanced types like to take on. You know how you hear about crazy people who think they're Jesus or Napoleon or Robin Hood? This'd be like that, only a bit different, because those people have been dead and gone for centuries - Two-Face would have been in the recent past. The idea is that there have been enough Two-Faces that every fresh crime-spree would start unbalancing people afresh. Anyone could be Two-Face, think the nutty people - the guy I'm talking to right now - the janitor - the garbage man - hell, even ME! Two-Face would start becoming a sort of composite character, an identity taken on by so many people that he would start seeming like a sort of mental plague, a personality that could affect anyone; a situation not helped by the occasional unscrupulous person taking on the identity intentionally to take advantage of the chaos it caused. One little accident - a burn to one side of the face, say - and a guy who was a LEETLE to high-strung would snap and go 'holy crap! I'm Two-Face!' And everybody knows how Two-Face behaves, so the cycle would begin all over again...

[saralakali]

Man, I loved that book, literally to pieces.