One of the biggest missed opportunities of the whole New 52 effort was the fact that nothing of any interest was done with Harvey Dent. It was the perfect chance to revert him back to being the district attorney of Gotham City and really have an interesting dynamic within law enforcement with a wildcard like him in the driver’s seat. Let’s face it – D.A. Dent is a much more interesting, compelling and believable character than Two-Face – that was illustrated very well in The Dark Knight. Two-Face works better as an element of Harvey Dent’s personality – a man riding the fine line between driven and ruthless – than he does as a walking scab with a coin fetish. Don’t get me wrong – there have been some good stories involving Two-Face, but they are never going to be as good as his initial fall from grace, which is hands-down the most compelling origin story of anybody in Batman’s rogues gallery. Two-Face makes for a striking visual as tragedy incarnate, but he’s constrained by his gimmick. Harvey Dent has no such restrictions – he can get involved in anything, from gritty street crime stories to tense political intrigue to relationship drama. The guy could even run for president! He’s just a hell of a lot more useful as Harvey Dent than he is as yet another weirdo in a town full of them.
Alas, when the New 52 began, he was already just another weirdo lumped in with the Usual Gang of Idiots in Arkham Asylum. One can assume that DC at the time was paranoid about fan anger over their big reboot, hence their weird half-reboot of stuff like Batman and Green Lantern. Now, though, they’ve realized that all the old Batman history has to be chucked, and so they’ve got Scott Snyder revamping the origin of Batman in Zero Year, which has spun out into a kind of stealth crossover event. While technically Peter J. Tomasi’s Batman & Two-Face story doesn’t sport the Zero Year branding, it seems he’s embraced that spirit and decided it’s time to erase The Long Halloween and give us a new Two-Face origin as well. Not that anybody would’ve noticed. Say what you will about The Long Halloween, but at least it was a 12 issue event series that really dug into the meat of Harvey Dent’s character, not to mention a dark twist on his wife Gilda. In the New 52, his new beginning is being tucked away into a series that feels like an afterthought once they killed off one of its title characters with Robin.
The new origin continues to unfold in Batman & Two-Face #25, and we don’t have the whole story yet. We know that a woman named Erin McKillan, head of an Irish crime syndicate, was pissed at Harvey for “betraying her family,” and thus she stormed into his office, killed Gilda, and poured acid on his face. Okay. That seems pretty straightforward and uninteresting, but there may be more to it. We’re in the present day in this issue, because McKillan has finally been captured, and that news has brought Two-Face out in he open as he thirsts for revenge. In a bit of cool imagery from artist Patrick Gleason, Two-Face’s “opening statement” is dumping a bunch of acid on half of the bat-signal, dripping it down through the precinct building in which McKillen is being held. Then we flashback to the early days and McKillen’s first jailbreak, a tense chase sequence involving Batman taking a 12-gauge blast to the gut, and then her confrontation with Harvey and Gilda. Seems Erin has a twin sister named Shannon who apparently died, and Erin is pissed about it, and seems to blame Harvey for it. Although Harvey knows her (and apparently has a knack for telling the twins apart, which is a nice subtle duality thing for him), he apparently doesn’t know she’s dead. That doesn’t stop Erin from stabbing Gilda in the heart. Harvey grabs her goons’ guns and kills them in a rage, but not before Erin gets the drop on him and knocks him out.
In the previous issue, we saw that Erin stripped the clothes from Gilda’s dead body to ditch her prison jumpsuit, and claim that Harvey threw her and her sister to the wolves to “feed your blind ambition.” She dumps the acid on his face, declaring she’s revealing his two-faced nature, and his struggle to break free of his bonds involves shattering his coin collection and bleeding all over a double-headed one, so that’s the origin of his coin now – not the dark and disturbing game his abusive father used to play with him as a child to decide whether or not he was going to get a beating or not. Not anymore.
Back to the present, where it turns out that Erin was also a childhood girlfriend of Bruce Wayne from their fancy Roxbury school days, and she’s called him to try and get some protection from Batman – and we learn here that Batman Incorporated has been shut down… so that’s one good thing. Bruce refuses to help her, and she flips out and tries to kickbox him, still believing that she’s in the right because Harvey betrayed her first. Later, she’s in Blackgate and gets jumped by a squad of prisoners trying to kill her at the behest of a mystery malefactor blackmailing them into it. But somehow, Matches Malone shows up to save her from that fate – apparently Blackgate is a co-ed prison? – and break her out, abducting her secretly to Wayne Manor.
While Erin McKillen does seem like an interestingly intense sort of character – something about dropping Batman with a shotgun makes a strong case for her – I’m not sure I like where this is going as far as Harvey is concerned. The implication I’m getting – which could turn out to be wrong – is that Harvey wasn’t so much a dogged justice-obsessed D.A. who would easily turn in dirty cops, but rather he was Harvey Two-Face because he was already playing both sides of the law, if he betrayed McKillen’s family, making him dirty from the start. If that turns out to be the case, it makes Two-Face even more generic, as one more ugly face in the crowd of do-badders. The story in Batman & Two-Face #25 is action-packed and full of curious twists – as well as go-for-broke artwork from Gleason, particularly the violence in the prison fight – and thus, it’s enjoyable, but the Big Picture is certainly concerning. It’s possible – hell, probable – that the story we’re getting from McKillen is twisted and wrong, but the final verdict will have to wait until it plays out.
Regardless, it still feels like an “oh, by the way” sort of character reboot, though. Harvey Dent deserves an epic, but I fear he might be getting the shaft.
