50 Greatest Super Villains In Comic Book History

11. Two-Face

(Write-up by Skip Harvey, Caped Crusades Editor)

I believe in Harvey Dent. I really do. Of all the villains in Batman’s Rogues Gallery, Two-Face is the one I find the most compelling.

The perfect example of the complex, nuanced characters that make the Batman universe the richest in all of Comicdom, Harvey Dent is as intriguing as the Caped Crusader himself. To call Two-Face a villain may be an accurate description, but it falls far short of what makes him the brilliant foil he is. Instead of the flat, hand-wringing, Snidely Whiplash-type villain that Joel Schumacher strained out of Tommy Lee Jones, the real Harvey Dent is comprised of layer upon layer of internal turmoil. A man so tortured by his deeply repressed rage that the incident that scarred his face birthed a wholly new entity. His personality split, psychologically and even aesthetically, kept in check only through his dependence on a physical artifact.

Two-Face’s doubled-sided Liberty Dollar represents the raw power of his psychosis. With the random chance of the coin flip, Dent clings desperately to reality, keeping at bay the compulsive identities dueling for control. Without the coin, Two-Face would undoubtedly spiral into a complete psychotic break.

As with all good villains, Dent is hard to blame for who and what he is. A crusader for justice, he fought against the evil that men do — that he knew he was capable of doing. Being mutilated by one such man destroyed the last remaining threads of his faith in the law or the pursuit of righteousness. Harvey Dent had become Two-Face: the living embodiment of man’s struggle with chaos and order.

His duality, the persona born out of being wronged by man’s cruelty, mirrors Batman’s tumultuous motivations. While Bruce Wayne chose to wield his pain as a weapon against evil, Two-Face used his to gain revenge on a society he blames for being evil itself. Nothing else matters, in his mind, besides getting what he wants at any costs.

In that way, more than almost any character, Two-Face is the scarred side of Batman’s coin, and thus one of the greatest, most enduring villains of all time.

Next: No. 10: The anti-life crusader