Quick reset if you haven't thought about this character since Saturday morning cartoons. Basil Karlo debuted back in 1940 as one of Batman's very first villains, a horror movie actor so obsessed with playing a monster that he eventually became one. Living clay, no fixed face, unable to ever really be human again. It's one of the saddest origin stories in the whole rogues gallery, and this new series by Jude Ellison S. Doyle and Fran Galán leans straight into that sadness rather than away from it.
Except this book opens with a twist that changes everything you think you know. Karlo was never the only Clayface. There are eight of them, all sharing the exact same clay biology, all completely different people underneath it. Matt Hagen. Preston Payne. Sondra Fuller. A handful of others. This first issue picks one of them, locks him in a cell in Arkham, and lets the horror build from there.
Nobody in the room knows who they actually are
The issue opens on a Clayface absolutely convinced he's Basil Karlo, movie star, the genuine article. His doctor isn't buying it for a second.
Here's the twist the doctor drops on him instead: he doesn't think this is Karlo at all. He thinks he's actually Todd Russell, a lesser known Clayface with a genuinely nasty history hunting people through Gotham's East End before Catwoman finally put a stop to it. So within a handful of pages, the book's already asking you a real question. Is this a wrongly accused legend stuck in the wrong body, or a killer who's fully bought into his own delusion?
What actually happens in issue one
- He breaks out of Arkham by absorbing another person's face entirely, a genuinely brutal sequence, played completely straight rather than for shock
- He makes it all the way to Hollywood, only to find the real Basil Karlo already there, already famous, already doing press junkets, already dating someone
- Somebody else is living his exact life, and doing it better than he ever managed
That confrontation is where the issue actually earns its premise. Standing in front of the man wearing his old name and his old career, our narrator doesn't back down.
Why this one's worth your money
Because it isn't really a monster comic, not underneath. Doyle is using Clayface to talk about fame itself, about identity, about what happens when the version of you that the world actually loves isn't you at all. That's a genuine theme running under the transformation sequences, not just an excuse to draw gross body horror panels, though there's plenty of that too if that's what you're here for.
The timing isn't an accident either. DC has a Clayface film landing in cinemas on the 23rd of October, directed by James Watkins, R-rated, full body horror, with Tom Rhys Harries playing Matt Hagen. This comic is DC laying groundwork ahead of that release, and it's already quietly signalling which Clayface the film is really building toward.
Sold, and worth a read even if you've never picked up a Batman villain solo book before.
Read it yet?
Tell me if you clocked the Todd Russell reveal coming, or if it caught you the same way it caught me. Always up for talking it through.