Cameo from "Batman" #260, featuring the Joker and (NOT) the first appearance of Arkham Asylum!
One of the few Two-Face appearances I don't own happens to be a collector's item: Batman #260, which featured the first appearance of Arkham Asylum dash it all, I completely forgot, that was another issue, and one I'd already posted! Ugh, stupid me. Guess I'm still brain-fried from the long drive back from Orlando. Then damn, why the hell is THIS comic so expensive in every back issue bin?! Harvey's appearance in this comic is just a cameo, but even though it's one of my favorite cameos, I didn't want to shell out $20+ for a single comic, and I don't ever download torrents of comics, partially because I never could figure out how.
Thankfully, I just discovered this seemingly-abandoned Picsaweb account with quite a few classic Batman scans, plus some recent stuff from Under the Hood and Batman R.I.P., about which I couldn't give a pair of pears. And there, among many neat and never-been-reprinted treasures, I found scans of that issue I was looking for, the first scene of which I present to you here:
First off, not to go totally off-topic, some of you may find that image of Batman to be somehow familiar. Here's why:
Yep, it was used for the Superdictionary! A book which, it now occurs to me as a father-to-be, I dearly need to find! Our child must know all about the utter terribleness of Lex Luthor stealing forty cakes!
The book kicks off with the first one of the earliest appearances of Arkham, forever changing the location of Bat-Villain incarceration from the previous locale, the blandly-named Gotham Penitentiary. We all know of the asylum's Lovecraftian roots, but Denny O'Neil made it even more explicit in the first panel:
New England? Makes me wonder if Gotham's nearby, or if the criminally insane are shipped over to another state!
I love that Harvey saves Batman, but that enjoyment is tempered by the fact that Harvey didn't want to do it of his own volition, but was forced into action by the coin. Still, I like to think that he says those lines with a sense of sadness, that he knows he doesn't deserve thanks because it wasn't his choice any more than anything else. Even if the bad side did come up, he might not necessarily have WANTED to kill Batman, but that's just what he would have had to do.
If there's one thing that O'Neil understood then (and still understands today, as evidenced by the "Face of Gotham" story with Two-Face Impostor Gracchus), it's that Two-Face has to abide by the coin's rulings, but that doesn't mean that he has to like it.
A primary storytelling lesson is that "actions dictate character," that what a character does reveals who they are. Thus, having a Two-Face who just blindly goes along with the coin without question or reaction is kind of a nothing character. But a Two-Face who is actually in conflict with the coin is far, far more interesting. He can't defy the coin because the one thing which has given his fragile life meaning would be taken away (an interesting prospect unto itself for another story), but he can still express his independent thought no matter what the coin says, and thereby establish an actual character and personality to Two-Face.
That said, the Two-Face that's established here isn't my favorite, but it's amusing enough to see him as a villain who is mildly annoyed at the fact that he HAS to occasionally be good. That pretty much shoots a hole through my preferred reading of the previous page, and shows Two-Face as someone who, damn it, really did want to kill Batman, but the stupid coin said otherwise! At least it indicates that there is a heroic side inside Two-Face, even if it's only brought out under protest. That's pretty neat right there.
Thankfully, I just discovered this seemingly-abandoned Picsaweb account with quite a few classic Batman scans, plus some recent stuff from Under the Hood and Batman R.I.P., about which I couldn't give a pair of pears. And there, among many neat and never-been-reprinted treasures, I found scans of that issue I was looking for, the first scene of which I present to you here:
First off, not to go totally off-topic, some of you may find that image of Batman to be somehow familiar. Here's why:
Yep, it was used for the Superdictionary! A book which, it now occurs to me as a father-to-be, I dearly need to find! Our child must know all about the utter terribleness of Lex Luthor stealing forty cakes!
The book kicks off with the first one of the earliest appearances of Arkham, forever changing the location of Bat-Villain incarceration from the previous locale, the blandly-named Gotham Penitentiary. We all know of the asylum's Lovecraftian roots, but Denny O'Neil made it even more explicit in the first panel:
New England? Makes me wonder if Gotham's nearby, or if the criminally insane are shipped over to another state!
I love that Harvey saves Batman, but that enjoyment is tempered by the fact that Harvey didn't want to do it of his own volition, but was forced into action by the coin. Still, I like to think that he says those lines with a sense of sadness, that he knows he doesn't deserve thanks because it wasn't his choice any more than anything else. Even if the bad side did come up, he might not necessarily have WANTED to kill Batman, but that's just what he would have had to do.
If there's one thing that O'Neil understood then (and still understands today, as evidenced by the "Face of Gotham" story with Two-Face Impostor Gracchus), it's that Two-Face has to abide by the coin's rulings, but that doesn't mean that he has to like it.
A primary storytelling lesson is that "actions dictate character," that what a character does reveals who they are. Thus, having a Two-Face who just blindly goes along with the coin without question or reaction is kind of a nothing character. But a Two-Face who is actually in conflict with the coin is far, far more interesting. He can't defy the coin because the one thing which has given his fragile life meaning would be taken away (an interesting prospect unto itself for another story), but he can still express his independent thought no matter what the coin says, and thereby establish an actual character and personality to Two-Face.
That said, the Two-Face that's established here isn't my favorite, but it's amusing enough to see him as a villain who is mildly annoyed at the fact that he HAS to occasionally be good. That pretty much shoots a hole through my preferred reading of the previous page, and shows Two-Face as someone who, damn it, really did want to kill Batman, but the stupid coin said otherwise! At least it indicates that there is a heroic side inside Two-Face, even if it's only brought out under protest. That's pretty neat right there.