When he was a child, Harvey Dent’s father played a cruel game with him any night he drank, and that was most nights. He would flip his silver dollar, and if the coin came up heads he would beat young Harvey, and if it came up tails, he wouldn’t. And the coin always came up heads. Harvey didn’t fight back, and he pent up all the anger he felt towards this abuse.
Years later, Harvey would go to law school and graduate with honors. He would meet a young woman named Gilda, fall in love, and the two would marry. He became the youngest district attorney in the history of Gotham City, and was dubbed by the newspapers “Apollo” for his good looks and incorruptibility. And he made it his quest to bring in Gotham’s leading crime boss, Carmine “The Roman” Falcone. In this quest, he made two allies: new police Captain James Gordon, one of Gotham’s few honest cops, and Gotham’s new vigilante, the Batman. The three formed a pact that they would see the Roman brought down.
Over the course of the year that the three worked together, Harvey was pushed more and more towards the edge. His house was blown up by the Roman in retaliation for burning down a warehouse full of laundered money, and Gilda was caught in the explosion. A mysterious killer called Holiday was killing mobsters on major holidays. The Joker beat Harvey savagely, believing him to be Holiday. On father’s day, Harvey had gone to visit his father at the old age home, and he had been told a horrible secret: the coin that his father had used all those years as an excuse to beat him had been two headed, meaning Harvey had no way out. He had been given the coin that day, and had walked away haunted even more. The final straw was when one of the Roman’s capos, Salvatore “Boss” Maroni, turned himself in to go state’s evidence against The Roman. Harvey got Maroni up on the witness stand, but didn’t know that his own assistant, Vernon, was on the take by Maroni, and Vernon had slipped Maroni a vile of acid disguised as medicine. While on the stand, Maroni took out the vile and flung it into Harvey’s face.
The scarring of half of his face pushed Harvey over the edge. He escaped the hospital and took his father’s old coin. He scarred one side of it, and it became the only way he could act: when he flipped the coin, if the clean side came up, he would do good, if the scarred side came up, he would obey his new persona, Two-Face. Two-Face gathered together the first alliance of Gotham’s freak villains, including the Joker, the Penguin, Catwoman, Scarecrow, Poison Ivy, and Solomon Grundy, and on Halloween night
led them on an assault on the Roman’s penthouse. In the fray, Two-Face shot the Roman twice in the head and escaped. He killed Vernon, and then lit the Bat Signal, waiting for his old friends and allies, Gordon and Batman, to come and take him in.
Two-Face next escaped from Arkham Asylum on the following Halloween, stole his old case files, and began finishing the dismantling of Gotham’s mob underworld. A new killer began following the holidays pattern, only this time not killing mobsters but cops. Harvey saved Jim Gordon from the Hangman, as the new murder was called, and told him he was not the Hangman. He continued using his alliance to freaks to dismantle the mob, and over the course of the year, he succeeded in eliminating the Roman’s successor, and even though he was taken in, Two-Face had permanently shifted the balance of power in Gotham’s underworld from the mob to the freaks.
Two-Face’s next plan involved kidnapping Gotham’s new DA and Batman. He lured Batman’s new sidekick, Robin, to his lair and waiting on a double gallows were Batman and the DA. Two-Face’s obsession with the number two led him to let Robin choose which would die. When Robin chose to save the DA by cutting the noose, the double jeopardy of the trap was revealed: with the noose broken, the DA fell, bound into the river, where he drowned. Shocked, Robin wasn’t ready for Two-Face, who beat him savagely. Batman pulled Two-Face off him, but the scars would remain with Dick Grayson for years.
Over the years, Batman and Two-Face would confront each other many times, but the next notable encounter all had to do with one of Two-Face’s thugs. The thug in question happened to have tried to steal from Two-Face, and Two-Face had killed him. It turned out that he was the father of Jason Todd, the current Robin. Jason rampaged through Gotham’s underworld, hunting for Two-Face, and when he found him, he nearly killed him. Only by Batman’s intervention did Two-Face survive.
Two-Face would next encounter a Batman haunted by the death of Jason Todd. Manipulated by the Joker, Two-Face played with Batman, driving him deeper into rage and closer to the edge. Only with the aid of Nightwing and a young man named Tim Drake, who had deduced Batman’s identity, was Batman pulled back. Two-Face was sent away, and Tim Drake became the new Robin.
Two-Face escaped Arkham during the break out orchestrated by Bane, and even though he was quickly recaptured, he escaped again, this time to confront Dick Grayson, who was temporarily standing in as Batman. Two-face attempted to bring down Gotham’s justice system by first crashing the computers and then destroying the hall of records. At the Hall of Records, Two-Face had a petty thug named Harvey Kent, who he had used to escape from jail, and the current Robin in a double jeopardy trap. Dick faced down his past fears and defeated Two-Face, sending him back to Arkham.
When an earthquake hit Gotham, Two-Face, freed by the quake, flipped his coin which came up unscarred, and he began helping people. He ran into Police Lieutenant Renee Montoya, and the two became something like friends. Eventually Two-Face was returned to Arkham, but was released when Gotham became a No Man’s Land. In these harsh conditions, Two-Face became one of the most powerful men in Gotham, controlling a large territory. He made an alliance with Jim Gordon and the Police who had remained, and Two-face helped them clean up parts of the city. But eventually Gordon decided he couldn’t ally himself with a criminal, and he broke the deal. Enraged, Two-Face kidnapped Montoya, who he had become infatuated with, and held her for months before kidnapping Gordon and putting him on trial. While Two-Face was the prosecution, Gordon asked for Harvey Dent to be his defense attorney, and the two halves argued. In the end, Dent won the case, and Two-Face surrendered to Gordon and Montoya.
After No Man’s Land, Two-Face escaped to attend Gordon’s retirement dinner. He also made a play for Montoya. Outing her as a lesbian to the force, something she kept secret, he kidnapped her, saying they were perfect together, as they both led a double life. Montoya rejected him, and Two-Face returned to jail, broken.
When the mysterious Hush came to Gotham, he took Two-face and finally repaired his face, in order to win him to his cause. But Harvey Dent was not willing. Harvey contacted Gordon and got him to stop Batman from killing the Joker. Harvey then had the Joker freed from jail, but whether this was part of Hush’s plan, or one of his own is unknown. Then Harvey contacted Gordon, and the two met Batman on the bridge where he was finally facing Hush. Harvey shot Hush twice, knocking him off the bridge, and he was arrested by Gordon. His fate, and whether this return to being just Harvey Dent is permanent, remains unknown.
At Batman's request and with training, Dent had become a vigilante protector of Gotham City in most of Batman's absence of nearly a year. He was reluctant to take the job, but Batman assured him doing good would atone him of his past crimes. After a month of training, they fought Firebug and Mr. Freeze, before Batman left for a year. Soon, Dent found himself enjoying his new role, but his methods were seemingly more extreme and less refined than Batman's. Upon Batman's return, Dent began to feel unnecessary and unappreciated, which prompted the return of the "Two-Face" persona (seen and heard by Dent through hallucinations).
His feelings of uselessness were compounded by a series of mysterious killings that seemed to have been committed by Two-Face; the villains KGBeast, Magpie, The Ventriloquist, and Orca were all shot twice in the head with a double-barrelled pistol, implying that Dent was the perpetrator. When Batman confronted Dent about these deaths, asking Dent to confirm that he was not responsible, Dent refused to give a definite answer regarding his involvement in these deaths. He then detonated a bomb in his apartment and left Batman dazed as he fled.
Despite escaping the explosion physically unscathed to a motel, Dent suffered a crisis of conscience and a mental battle with his "Two-Face" personality. Although evidence was later uncovered by Batman that exonerated Harvey Dent for the murders, it was too late to do anything to save him. Prompted by resentment and a paranoid reaction to Batman's questioning of him, Dent scarred half his face with nitric acid and a scalpel, becoming Two-Face once again. Blaming Batman for his return (despite Batman's having consistently defended him to the authorities), Two-Face immediately went on a rampage, threatening to destroy the Gotham Zoo (having retained two of every animal - including two humans) before escaping to fight Batman another day. He is currently at large, and his whereabouts and motives are unknown.
Real Name: Harvey Dent
Occupation: Criminal; former Gotham District Attorney
Marital Status: Divorced
Base of Operations:Gotham City
Height: 6ft. 1in.
Weight: 182 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Brown
First Appearance: Detective Comics #66 (August 1942)
Created By: Bob Kane, Bill Finger
POWERS
None
ABILITIES
None
WEAPONS
Double-Headed Coin: Two-Face uses a two-headed silver dollar, one side of which is defaced, the other side clean. Flipping the coin dictates Harvey when making any significant life decisions. If the coin lands on the scarred side, Two-Face will pursue acts of evil. If the coin lands on the unmarked side, he is compelled to commit acts of good. At one point, Dent as Two-Face was so dependent on the coin for any of his criminal acts that he could be easily defeated by taking the coin away from him or preventing him from seeing the result of the flip. The original Earth-Two Two-Face was usually shown at this level of dependency Kent. Dent has since lessened his dependency on the coin flip to whether an situation should be implemented, rather than each individual act.
Typically Two-Face uses a variety of automatic and semi-automatic handguns to conduct his criminal affairs. He usually carries two.
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