Two-Face #4 – Christian Ward, Writer; Fabio Veras, Artist; Ivan Plascencia, Colorist
Ray – 10/10
Ray: This series was recently confirmed as a planned six-issue arc, and while I would have happily read more of it, I’m fine with Ward doing it this way – because this is a tight, increasingly brilliant character study that’s going to go down as one of the most iconic Two-Face stories. Harvey Dent’s tight balancing act, keeping his evil side locked up in his mindscape while he pretends to be him as an attorney for the criminal underworld, has increasingly fallen apart and now he faces a trial of his own – held in the mind, as his other half makes the case to a mysterious robed judge that he should be the one in charge of Harvey’s body. And to make his case, he takes us back – before the acid, to when Harvey was a young boy with an ambitious, abusive drunk of a father, and a kind mother who taught him a terrible coping mechanism – to bottle up all his negative emotions and put them into another part of him – a shadow.
And so Harvey’s imaginary friend, his shadow, starts to grow in influence. First he’s just “Shadow”, then he becomes “Scarvey”, and then he’s shoved away once again once Harvey is free of his father’s influence. That is, of course, until the acid came. Other writers have toyed with the idea of Harvey being unstable long before the acid, but none ever did it this effectively – giving us both the origin of Harvey’s duality, and a brutal story of where the coin actually came from. The mindscape setting for the issue is fantastic, letting Veras give us some great visuals of just how warped the inside of Harvey’s mind is. But this issue wouldn’t be nearly as good without one big factor. Villain protagonist stories are hard to do, and different writers have given us stories that make us sympathize with Harvey. But I never thought we’d see one that made us sympathize with Two-Face, and that’s at the core of what Ward is pulling off here.
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GeekDad received this comic for review purposes.
