10 Things DC Comics Want You To Forget About Two-Face

4. He's A Total Rip-Off

We know we're starting to sound like a broken record at this point, and there's that whole "there's nothing new under the sun" thing, but seriously now. Not content with biting on The Shadow in their creation of Batman and copy a Conrad Veidt look for The Joker, Dark Knight co-creators Bill Finger and Bob Kane also purloined the pop culture of the recent past in putting together Harvey Dent's look, gimmick and MO too. Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde wasn't particularly recent when Two-Face first appeared in the early forties, but artist Kane says that he pretty much ripped off the 1931 film version from his childhood for the look of his new villain, simply combining the pre-and-post-transformation looks of Fredric March into one ghastly visage. The good/evil dual personality of Jekyll and Hyde also figured into the unpredictability of the early Two-Face, who could do either righteous or nefarious deeds depending on what a coin toss told him. The other major influence in Dent's origin actually came from another pulp hero whom Finger and Kane had strip mined for parts in the creation of their most enduring superhero. The Black Bat was a crime-fighting vigilante with a bat costume, so a lawsuit between his publishers and DC was somewhat inevitable. What the courts failed to notice was that Two-Face's origin was totally ripped off from the Black Bat, too, who was a District Attorney that was disfigured by an acid attack from a criminal in court and so decided to take the law into his own hands. Which should sound familiar, if you've been paying any sort of attention.