Welcome back to My Hero, where the obscure characters given the spotlight in our Custom Action Figure Collection get a chance to take center stage. Today’s entry is perhaps not the best likeness in the collection, but one where the choice of base figure is the decider: Paul “Two-Face” Sloane!
Getting Lost In A Role
Despite his legendary status as a Batman foe today, Two-Face AKA Harvey Dent actually only had three appearances in the Golden Age before he was “permanently” cured. There would be three imposter Two-Faces who popped up before Dent relapsed into villainy, meaning just under half of the Golden Age Two-Face tales starred fakes. The first and third fakes used make-up to become the villain, so we’re focusing today on the third Two-Face overall and the only one besides Harvey Dent who actually got scarred up, Paul Sloane. His one major Pre-Crisis appearance was in the cover story from 1951’s Batman #68.
Paul Sloane was an actor hired to portray the role of Harvey Dent in a Hollywood film. However, the prop-master’s girlfriend had a crush on the heartthrob actor and the jealous man swapped in real acid for the scene where Dent’s face gets scarred. As a result, Sloane gets scarring very similar to Dent’s and decides that he’s fated to take-up Two-Face’s criminal career too. Batman managed to end his reign of terror by, somehow, tricking him into getting reconstructive surgery. Which is an ethically questionable strategy, but an effective one.
The Takeaway
Despite a similar origin, Sloane’s Two-Face looked significantly different from Dent’s Two-Face. Most notably, his hair remained one color and his face wasn’t green. Why, then, would I conclude the Two-Face in our collection is Sloane?
Well, it’s important to note at the top that I am not working off of the customizer’s notes. It is 100% on me to identify who in the heck each character is – and it’s my responsibility because my brain’s storehouse of esoteric character knowledge dwarfs that of anyone else in the store. I decided that this figure represented Sloane for two reasons:
- I haven’t really seen many characters as mainstream as Two-Face show up in the collection so far.
- The figure itself is repainted lead figurine of legendary actor Humphrey Bogart.
It’s Two-Face, it’s an actor, it’s Paul Sloane, and this week he’s My Hero.
