In honor of Arkham Shadow, we present the BEST Two-Face origin - Batman (Vol. 1) Annual 14

 

Is it just me, or is there a bit of self-portrait on the Harvey half of this incredible Neal Adams cover?

Batman (vol.1) Annual #14 - "The Eye of the Beholder"

Written by Andrew Helfer

Pencils by Chris Sprouse

Inks by Steve Mitchell

If you ask a YouTube content creator or your barber or a newborn babe what the greatest depiction of Harvey Dent's transformation into Two-Face is what you're likely to hear about is Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's famous 12 issue limited series The Long Halloween, which has been canonized by the heads of DC as one of the all-time greats. Film fans might point to Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, and video game fans have gotten two unique (and worthwhile in their own right) versions of the story with Batman: The Telltale Series and Arkham Shadow.

But all these fine answers are wrong.

The arc of Harvey Dent's rise and fall was never more richly captured than in the subject of today's article. Andrew Helfer and Chris Sprouse do an amazing job capturing the depth of Harvey's tragedy; of Batman and Gordon's loss of a friend; and of the painful inevitability of degradation and loss that you would expect from a story like this. Paul Dini's work on Batman: The Animated Series has trained the audience to expect horror-tinged psychodrama to be the norm for Batman but here, in 1990, this was a shock to the system and feels like the real genesis point for classic B:TAS stories like Heart of Ice and Mad as a Hatter.

Eye of the Beholder opens with Harvey Dent reliving past abuse at the hands of his father, who he has recently made amends with and visited. It's implied that this generosity of spirit is because Harvey and his wife Gilda are trying to have a child of their own, and he wants to close the generational trauma, but the act of trying is only making it worse; breaking him down further.

It's bad timing for such a thing because Batman and Gordon are on the hunt for the "Senior Slasher" a ruthless and careful serial killer who has dispatched sixteen people over the summer and threatens more. The art and lettering of this annual are deliberately designed to evoke David Mazzucchelli's work on Year One, and I love how we're introduced to Batman here: he's openly admitting that he's not yet capable of dealing with serial killings, and he struggles to get into their heads. The Batman was a persona created to shake down street crime and then work up the ladder to institutional corruption but these kinds of killers move beyond the realm of city politic. If Batman is going to accomplish his mission he has to constantly learn, develop, reassess.

Batman's instincts prove solid and the killer is caught, but there's no physical evidence and he walks on a straight acquittal. Batman and Gordon are both tempted to drop into vigilantism and pick one another up but the killer, in his moment of triumph, brags to Harvey about how he got away with it and suggests Harvey let his own wild side out, when the time is right.

Which Dent promptly takes him up on when blows up his house a few days later.

Gordon sees Dent, one of the few good civil servants in Gotham fading fast after losing the case and introduces him to The Batman. Batman and Dent form a pact where Dent will consult on Batman's major operations to make sure they result in convictions, and for a month Gordon hardly sees either one of them as they rack up huge collar after huge collar.

But Dent is slipping.

Faced with the biggest collar of his life, mob boss Sal Maroni, Dent's mask of sanity is slipping-- he beats an escaped enforcer to death with a baton; he asks Batman to planet evidence or kill suspects who he cannot build a case around, and he cannot recognize that his own Assistant DA is plotting against him with the underworld. The case against Maroni is airtight, and Maroni asks Dent's assistant, Fields, for a weapon to use against him in Court. A gun won't get past security, but something he can disguise as cough medicine...something like acid...

 Eye of the Beholder is a product of its time: the Year One evocation makes it feel like a lost issue of the revelatory Legends of the Dark Knight series that was running strong at the time of its publication. As mentioned Chris Sprouse's pencils are deliberately styled in the vein of that titanic work and its structured as if it is a lost fifth issue of that 1986 arc. Gordon and Wayne's narrative voices are perfectly carried over as well-- not in the sense that they sound identical to Miller's prose but that they sound like extensions of it. We can clearly see how the Batman and Gordon who bonded over Gordon's son being saved have grown into these guys.

What really sets this story apart in my memory of it is how it feels like it anticipates the entire modern form of Batman storytelling. Andy Helfer is better known as an editor than a scripter-- he put together the late, lamented, Paradox label of non-superhero comics for DC that produced Road to Perdition and A History of Violence and he's responsible for the 80's DC Shadow series going off the rails after Howard Chaykin did some incredible work on it. Nothing in that resume would suggest that he had his finger on the pulse of how to modernize the cape and cowl set. Before this story psychology in Batman comics didn't get a lot more complex than "Batman's obsession is sometimes unhealthy" or "Nocturna lowers the moral inhibitions of the men she courts at night."

What Helfer establishes here is Gotham as a kind of war zone of the soul, or perhaps, a chess match since the pieces are all determined by their psychological trauma and cannot escape their fate no matter how hard they try. Dent was abused systematically, and would have dissolved under the trauma of that abuse if he had not found the law. The law gave him fixed points of right and wrong; an objective standard of behavior under which he could contextualize his father's behavior. But the moment that he crosses over from the letter of the law, he's shocked into the radical freedom of choice and can no longer check the monster within him.

The master stroke is that Batman, without ever saying it out loud, realizes that it is his presence as an undeniably good, but illegal force for order in the city that made the temptation too much for Dent to bare. There is no scene where Bruce says so in so many words, but his actions display a guilt for Harvey's condition that isn't born out by simple inability to stop Maroni's attack. Harvey was sane because the law was his God, Batman challenged the idea that the law was justice, and in the resulting moral crisis Gordon could weather the storm, and Dent couldn't. More than Maroni, it was Batman who brought about the monster.

And it is Batman who will spend the rest of his life at war to cage it.