Clayface
62 years ago - Basil Karlo is born to Eastern European immigrant parents in Gotham City.
45 years ago - 17-year-old Basil Karlo leaves Gotham for Los Angeles, wanting to become an actor.
35 years ago - 27-year-old Basil Karlo has his big break in 'The Terror”, a horror classic filmed in Gotham City.
15 years ago - 47-year-old Basil Karlo is in a tragic small plane crash, leaving him heavily scarred with too much nerve damage for cosmetic surgery. He begins hunting for a way to restore his face.
10 years ago - 52-year-old Basil Karlo, still in seclusion, contacts Hugo Strange regarding his experiments with Renuyu, an experimental byproduct of a tainted Gingo-derivative Sionis cosmetic. Volunteering as a test subject, Basil finds that the compound slowly restores his damaged tissue, even reversing the effects of aging on his body. Strange monitors the effects, observing Karlo’s cellular structure gradually losing its cohesion.
8 years ago - 54-year-old Basil Karlo discovers that a remake of 'The Terror' is being filmed in Gotham starring Julie Madison. His mind thoroughly damaged by his abuse of Renuyu, He begins using his clay-like face to mimic people on set to terrorize the production, systematically killing cast and crew until he is discovered by Batman. During their confrontation in the rain, the exertion finally overwhelms Karlo's body, which comes apart into mud-like clay. He tries to hold himself together, but is washed away.
5 years ago - Matt Hagen, an infamous and brilliant gentleman bank robber, comes to Gotham, matching wits with Batman, who discovers that Matt Hagen is a character from a movie played by Basil Karlo. When Hagen discovers the truth, Basil Karlo’s identity resurfaces as he becomes a large clay monster, terrorizing Gotham until Batman is able to splatter Clayface and contain most of him before he can be reconstituted.
3 years ago - Basil Karlo escapes his containment during No Man’s Land, barely able to maintain his shape. He attacks Pamela Isley's refuge in Robinson Park, seemingly going after one of the children, a girl named Annie. Tim Drake tracks her parents, Preston Payne & Sondra Fuller, each revealed to be a errant portion of Karlo’s biomass that he soon reabsorbs. Tim deduces that Annie is also part of Karlo, with the most distinct personality yet. When Karlo reabsorbs her she discovers that her emerging personality is still a part of Karlo. Because she is distinct, when she lets go and allows her persona to be subsumed, she can take Karlo with her into ego death, leaving only Clayface. They are brought in by the DEO, where Director Bones ensures the newly emerged Clayface persona is given the correct medical facilities. They agree to start working with the Freedom Fighters.
Modern readers all know what to expect with Clayface; he's simultaneously a huge physical threat, one of Batman's few superhumanly strong enemies, and also a great challenge to Batman's detective skills. Having a huge monster that is both able to masquerade as people and is also an actor at heart and eager to trick people means that writers have a fantastic tool in their pocket to create misdirection in their stories. It's always a shock when the person the story focuses on turns out to be Clayface in disguise.
Given how fine-tuned Clayface seems to be as a Batman antagonist, it's actually kind of surprising what a winding road he took to get there. There have been several fully distinct takes on Clayface over the years tied very heavily to his various publication eras, and it's really only in the world of adaptations that the concept was distilled into the character we now take for granted.
So of course, we decided to get a little creative with him.
Given how fine-tuned Clayface seems to be as a Batman antagonist, it's actually kind of surprising what a winding road he took to get there. There have been several fully distinct takes on Clayface over the years tied very heavily to his various publication eras, and it's really only in the world of adaptations that the concept was distilled into the character we now take for granted.
So of course, we decided to get a little creative with him.
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Clayface's Comic HistoryThe very first Clayface back in Detective Comics #40 in1940 was a very different character. He wasn't a shapeshifting mud monster at all. Basil Karlo was a former horror film actor stalking actors on a movie set wearing a mask that evoked Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera. He had a clay-like makeup that he could use to sculpt his face, but it was entirely a persona that he put on. This makes him part of the very early, very obvious influence of horror movies on Batman's stories, including the inclusion of Bruce's fiancée and professional damsel, Julie Madison.
Karlo made two more appearances, in Detective Comics #49 and in Batman #4, but the name really didn't come back until the Silver Age, when a whole new character was introduced. Matt Hagen was a fortune hunter who discovered a mysterious subterranean pool that turned his body into clay and allowed him to shapeshift. He made fairly regular Silver Age appearances, usually facilitating the sort of wackadoodle sci-fi antics the era was famous for. |
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The third Clayface from 1978's Detective Comics #477 was Preston Payne, a scientist with hyperpituitarism desperate for a cure who makes one with Matt Hagen's blood, which leads (predictably) to his face melting and to a 'death touch' that makes people he touches MELT. which is wild. Payne made a few appearances in that era, but at that point the Batman rogues gallery was pretty packed. The fourth Clayface, sometimes called Lady Clayface, was actually only peripherally a Batman villain, created over in the pages of the Outsiders #21 in 1987, making her the first post-Crisis take on the character. Sondra Fuller was a Kobra operative whose self-loathing led her to volunteer to be subjected to a process that gave her similar abilities to the Matt Hagen Clayface. This version of the character really played with the ideas of Sondra's self-image, depicting her as sort of simultaneously monstrous and beautiful.
All of these various Clayfaces came together in a 1989 story in Detective Comics, creating a group they called the Mud Pack. Pretson & Sondra actually became romantic in this story, and they would go on to have a son, Cassius Payne, who would grow up to become ANOTHER Clayface. At this point, Batman the Animated Series had created their version of the character (based on the Matt Hagen version), so depictions of Cassius Payne generally mimicked that take. |
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The Animated series is really where the concept of Clayface actually came together as the character we now all recognize. Their version uses the name Matt Hagen, and for all intents and purposes IS Matt Hagen, although instead of a fortune hunter, he's an actor like the original Basil Karlo. As best as we can tell, this really is where the modern concept of the hulking brute shapeshifting his fists into weapons really comes from. This is really where we finally arrive at the character as I originally described him; a superpowered physical threat and shapeshifting menace all in one.
The funny thing is that the comics now had a decisive character to emulate, but didn't have a set concept of who this character was. More origins continued to trickle in (Peter Malley was a scientist who merged with a sample of Cassius Payne's skin, Todd Russel was an alias used my an amnesiac monster preying on the ladies of Gotham's East End, Johnny Williams was an ex-firefighter transformed in a chemical plant explosion) all less and less important in the grand scheme of things. One of my favorite takes came in the Arkham Asylum games, where it's implied that the clay monster is actually the original Clayface, Basil Karlo. In the meantime, we've gotten several widely different takes on the character in various animated projects, and as I write this there's apparently a standalone Clayface movie in the works... although which backstory they're going to use on their way to the inevitable shapeshifting clay monster is anyone's guess. |
Our Clayface StoryCreating our version of Clayface presents a really interesting challenge, because while we all have a very clear idea of the destination for this character, how we get there is kind of open-ended. We tried to adhere to what should always be our main focus; to getting what feels as much like the ideal version of the character's story as we can get.
Because of the horror roots of the character, we really wanted to start with the original Basil Karlo story. We had to mix in some elements of the animated Matt Hagen to explain his transformation (and involve perennial mad scientist weirdo Hugo Strange), but by making that transformation happen much SLOWER we created space for that classic slasher film take on the character. In doing so we even created some moments that really pop to me personally; the idea of a slowly-mutating Basil Karlo fighting Batman in the rain (in my head it's in the high steel of an under-construction skyscraper like the end of Darkman), only for his body to finally come apart, like the Fly. The fact that this is evoking so many movie images for me is usually a great sign that we're on the right track. The idea for what came next actually came from Crackpot, the site's pixelart sprite artist; what if we started meeting Clayface's other identities, only to discover that they are each characters Basil once played? |
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The real innovation here, I think, is Crackpot's idea that each subsequent new identity being taken on by these errant portions of Clayface's Biomass is a more and more distinct identity. Matt Hagen is, very simply, a character from an old Basil Karlo movie where he played a gentleman thief. Preston Payne is not just living out a story from an old movie script, he's actually out living his own life, having a family. Sondra Fuller is so unique that she's even forging her own identity, becoming a woman with her own name.
And this leads us to Annie. Fans of the animated series are familiar with the story in which Robin befriends a young orphan girl who turns out to be an errant bit of Clay that has taken on its own identity. We're using that even further, suggesting that Annie is the last and most unique new persona, so completely distinct that when Basil reabsorbs her she has just as much autonomy as the original identity. This is the part that might be a little controversial. It would be completely understandable for people to prefer for Annie to simply have supplanted Karlo, becoming the new Clayface herself. Instead, we chose for Annie to have sacrificed herself to remove both hers AND Karlo's identities, leaving Clayface a blank slate with an entirely new persona. |
Clayface's FutureSo why did we do that? In 2016, during DC's rebirth imprint, Detective Comics began telling a story of a team of Batman's sidekicks all being trained by Batwoman, and among them was Clayface. The idea that this character has turned a corner and is beginning to work toward redemption is very cool, and we decided to do just that, having their new blank-slate persona join a government-regulated team that already employs monsters, becoming a member of the Freedom Fighters.
Again, we just have a very particular visual in mind. This new Clayface flying in a helicopter from Gotham, not to a prison, but to a government medical facility. Director Bones meets with them to discuss their future, and casually asks them if they would like something to drink. Coffee, maybe? Or tea? Clayface asks for tea... and then slowly smiles, realizing that this was the first decision they've ever made on their own. I don't know how GOOD that idea is, but I like it, and I get to do what I want :) |
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