Two-Face

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* 2016
* 2018

**Harvey Dent**, also known by the moniker “**Two-Face**”, is an Irish-American criminal as well as former criminal lawyer, prosecutor and district attorney of Gotham City. He is currently a patient in Arkham Hospital and has been since July 2021.

As district attorney, Dent took aim at the Falcone Crime Family until it caught up with him in 2018, leading to his disfigurement and eventual switch to the side of illegality. Dent embraced his violent urges and tendencies as the criminal “**Two-Face**”, however became increasingly dependent on his father’s coin to make decisions.

## History

### Background Information

As a boy, Harvey Dent grew up in Gotham the son of Christopher Dent, a politician, and his his wife Lucy Dent, a disrespected housewife. As a child, Harvey had an older brother named Murray. While Harvey was an obedient child and the "good boy" of the two, Murray was more prone to defiant behavior, such as starting little fires and burning objects for the sake of it. One day, the two brothers were left home alone, and Murray dared Harvey to play with matches. Harvey reluctantly accepted, but ended up accidentally setting fire to a curtain. At that point, Murray pushed his brother into setting fire to another curtain, and the flames spread to the wallpaper. Harvey rushed for a bucket of water, but inadvertently locked Murray in the room where the fire had started. Despite his brother's pleas to help him and get the door key, Harvey went into a state of shock and let Murray die.

An evil man, Dent's father would gamble, get drunk, and abuse the boy and his mother with his nightstick; with his favorite "game" being flipping a coin promising to spare the child a beating if the coin landed tails, to give the child a "chance" to escape a beating. His father's status as a retired cop also prevented the proper authorities from intervening. Dent spent much of his early life suffering from various mental issues, notably bipolar disorder and paranoia.

Harvey was very close to his mother, and he always loved the way she would comb his hair and dress him, telling him how handsome he looked. Although Harvey himself didn't believe that his father was nothing more than an abusive lout, he realized that as long as others believed it, he might one day find an opportunity for a better life with his mother. His wish came true at age 10, when his father moved out of the house, saying that he couldn't stand the sight of either of them, and took up residence in a rented room closer to his work. After that and up until the age of 13, Harvey only saw his father once; on the street accompanied by a middle aged woman who closely resembled his mother, and he never visited nor sent cards.

As a teenager, Harvey was repeatedly suspended and expelled from school; and was once sent to an Arkham boys’ rehabilitation home upstate after Harvey tied his father up and left him trapped in their house for days until the police finally found him. While Harvey was at the home, his father attempted to turn over a new leaf and melted down his coin, reminting it into a coin with only two-heads as a symbol that he would never beat Harvey again.

One night at age 16, he came home late from his after-school job at a local pharmacy and found his mother hanging from a knotted sheet attached to the ceiling around her neck. Despite letting Detective Al Grooms look into the case of her death, the police could not determine whether she had committed suicide or was murdered. As a result of this incident, Harvey was left with his father to care for him. However, Christopher Dent was soon admitted to a mental hospital; leaving Harvey mostly alone in a dark apartment filled with an unidentifiable odor and the cracks and groans of an old building, pitied by his classmates at school and the priests at the church that his mother sometimes attended. Harvey convinced himself that the abuse was his fault, developing mixed love-hate feelings towards his father. On one occasion, he even scratched the left portion of his face with his fingernails as self-punishment.

At the time, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with Hebephrenic Schizophrenia, also known as Disorganized Schizophrenia, a serious psychotic disorder. A later diagnosis stated that he suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder, or even Multiple Personality Disorder (also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder). However, all this changed when Harvey took interest in law. The more he delved into it, the more his condition improved, to the point that when he entered college he appeared to be completely normal. It was in his studies that he simply found his vocation within the law, which made sense to him since it transformed the chaos of human existence into logic, fairness, and reasonable rules that could be obeyed, offering stability and structure.

Earning his history and pre-law majors at age 21, Dent began his law career as the clerk for a supreme court judge and rose rapidly to popularity by playing hard by the rules, hoping to stand up for Gotham by cleaning up the crime and corruption that he came to hate. He was driven by memories of abuse from his father, as well as the police's failure to stop it, which gave him a deep hatred of corrupt cops and led him to pursue a place in Gotham's Internal Affairs Division sometime later.

He became a lawyer and law professor, teaching classes at Gotham University. While teaching classes Dent became friendly with Bruce Wayne, who (believing they would have chemistry) introduced him to his future wife, art student Gilda “Grace” Gold. There, also he met a young student named Janice Porter, who fell in love with him. When Harvey became engaged to Gilda Gold, Janice relocated to Harvard, and ended up becoming a district attorney in Boston.

By 2011, Dent had become one of the best defence attorneys in Gotham, having successfully exonerated some of the most famous criminals in Gotham. Harvey also acted as the lawyer for the McKillen crime family until he began to have doubts about working with such dangerous clientele. Feeling his talents could be better applied to the right side of the law, Harvey become Gotham's youngest assistant district attorney at the age of 26.

During his early days in the office, Harvey met Dr. Pamela Isley and they started secretly dating. Dent was completely hypnotized and proposed to her just after one week of meeting her. However, after having dinner with her at the Rose Cafe, Harvey was poisoned and fell into a severe coma. Bruce Wayne discovered that Isley was responsible and took an antidote from her. After that, Harvey recovered and Bruce told him to drop his relation with Isley.

As assistant D.A., Harvey was nicknamed "Apollo" for his good looks and success. Harvey soon came to be known as a honest, incorruptible attorney. One of Dent's first cases involved the arrest of Mario Falcone, son of Carmine "The Roman" Falcone, head of the Falcone Crime Family and king of Gotham's underworld. At a certain point, Harvey fell in love with a colleague named Carol Bermingham. However, he didn't want to break his marriage vow to Gilda, and they both decided that it would be better if Carol left Gotham. Dent devoted years of his career to try and prosecute Carmine Falcone. For this reason, Falcone used his connections to hamper Harvey's career and keep him a simple assistant D.A. Once or twice, Harvey even came close to indicting him. However, his attempts were always frustrated when witnesses suddenly changed their testimony or vanished.

Harvey also spearheaded an initiative to weed out police corruption by investigating each cop, including those who ended up working in the city's recently-established Major Crimes Unit (MCU). While many of these cops, along with several corrupt courthouse officials, gave him the unflattering nickname "Harvey Two-Face", others became inspired by Dent's investigations and offered to promote him to District Attorney.

### The Long Halloween

In June 2017 Harvey Dent met with Batman and police captain Jim Gordon. The three agreed to a pact to end Falcone's crime reign, bending but never breaking the law to achieve it.

Harvey Dent confessed to his therapist that he felt he was battling between the good and evil within himself, leading to the struggle between his dual personalities of Harvey Dent and “The Judge”. Harvey claims to have spent a great part of his life trying to repress evil urges that were not fitting for a man of his world.

His struggles led Harvey to separate this hidden evil from his personality. Harvey had many friends and an amiable personality, but as the Judge, he’d become more mysterious and violent. As time passed, The Judge grew in power and Dent would act out more sexually and violently, with some even claiming he was the serial killer Holiday. After indulging in his darker side repeatedly, the results of his actions as the Judge and his associations with the mob eventually resulted in his disfigurement, and his acceptance of his two-sides as the criminal, 'Two-Face'.

Sal Maroni, believing Dent to be Holiday, kidnapped Dent after the murder of his father on Father's Day. Maroni tortured and disfigured Dent, scarring half of his face before leaving him to die. Dent was rushed to a hospital but escaped into the sewers. In exile down into the Gotham sewers, Dent came into contact with living zombie, Solomon Grundy. Dent became inspired by Grundy’s story of two-lives, and began to believe himself that his own life wasn’t over as he thought.

Upon leaving the sewers, Harvey became aware that Sal Maroni was killed whilst he was hiding out. With this information, he gathered a gang of ‘outcasts’ and ‘freaks’ for a “ceremony” at the Falcone penthouse. Harvey led the group to Falcone’s office, before announcing himself as Two-Face and declaring the “Long Halloween” over. The Batman had interrupted the ceremony, but ultimately failed in stopping Dent from killing Falcone. Two-Face escaped and partook on a revenge spree against those who led to his kidnapping and subsequent disfigurement, before turning himself in to Batman and Gordon.

### Dark Victory

After Two-Face's imprisonment, Sofia Falcone-Gigante, Carmine Falcone's daughter, succeeded him as leader of the Falcone criminal empire. Seeking revenge for the murder of her father, she tasked Umberto and Pino Maroni, sons of the late Sal Maroni, with carrying out a frontal assault on the Arkham Hospital, breaking out the inmates, and killing Harvey Dent. The raid took place on the anniversary of Falcone's murder: Halloween. As fate would have it, Batman was at Arkham too that night, visiting Two-Face. The Dark Knight had offered his old ally to undergo plastic surgery and start a new life. However, Harvey took advantage of the resulting confusion to escape. Now free, Two-Face exhumed Carmine Falcone's body from his grave, put it on ice, cut off its left ring finger, and sent it to Sofia as a warning that he planned to take everything from her, piece by piece.

Starting from Halloween night, a new holiday-based serial killer surfaced, targeting both current and former GCPD members. This killer was nicknamed the "Hangman", due to his habit of murdering his victims with a noose and leaving hangman puzzles on the bodies. The clues seemed to point to Two-Face as the culprit: the hangman puzzles were scrawled on Dent's old case files, recently stolen from his former office. Also, being the former district attorney, Harvey knew most of the victims. Even the puzzles' solutions seemed to point to him.

After his escape, Two-Face returned to his old hideout in Gotham's sewers, near where Solomon Grundy lived. There, he managed to recreate an office similar to the one he had during his tenure as Gotham's district attorney, complete with a photograph of his wife, Gilda. Knowing that that would be the first place Batman would look for him, Harvey planted bombs in the office and abandoned it. When the Dark Knight arrived, the explosives activated, but he nonetheless survived the blast. Despite Batman's further attempts to bring his former friend to his senses, Two-Face fled once again. It was eventually revealed that Janice Porter, still in love with Harvey from her law school years, had been secretly entertaining a sexual relationship with him, as well as passing him information on the GCPD investigations. Also, she made a deal with Mario Falcone that he would have been granted protection if he would have passed her (and Harvey as a result) information on his sister Sofia Gigante's activities.

At this point, Two-Face was hell-bent on eradicating the organized crime element in Gotham with help from the "costumed freaks", who he took under his command with the promise of giving them access to warehouses full of untraceable Falcones' money.

On April Fool's Day, Two-Face visited the GCPD headquarters' rooftop, and his quick response saved Jim Gordon's life just as the latter was about to become the "Hangman"'s next victim. Harvey reiterated to Gordon and Batman that he was not the "Hangman", but, given Two-Face's duality, this was not enough for them to completely exonerate him as a suspect. Again as part of his crusade against the Falcones, Two-Face rigged their out-of-town residence with audio equipment, and tasked Calendar Man with tormenting Mario, who convinced himself that he was hearing the voice of his revived father.

On Mother's Day, Two-Face sent the Joker to attack the Maronis, Mario Falcone and Sofia Gigante. Before he could murder Sofia, however, the Clown Prince of Crime was stopped by Batman. On the very same day, the "Hangman" murdered one of Gordon's new task force's members, Henry Gustavson. After one more task force member, Mark O'Connor, fell victim to the "Hangman" on Father's Day, the police commissioner became more determined than ever to catch the killer.  Based on the assumption that Two-Face was "Hangman", Gordon and the remaining members of his task force stormed Gotham's sewers on Independence Day, looking for Harvey and his gang of supervillains. Two-Face held another task force member, Lauren Wilcox, at gunpoint, but denied having anything to do with King's death. When threatened by Gordon with a gun, Harvey chose to surrender and be arrested.

On the day of Carmine Falcone's birthday, while on trial for the "Hangman" murders, Two-Face escaped from the courtroom with help from Poison Ivy, Mr. Feeeze, and Solomon Grundy. In fact, he had planned to give himself up and be tried in advance, in order to obtain all the evidence the GCPD had accumulated on the "Hangman" until then. That night, Lauren Wilcox was murdered by the "Hangman".

Later, Janice Porter visited Harvey in his lair, but he shot her in cold blood when she claimed that they loved each other, to which Two-Face responded that "Harvey Dent is a married man". Janice's body was preserved, and then placed on Mario Falcone's bed while he was slepping. When Mario woke up with a gun in his hand and Janice's body, "his father's voice" suggested that he committed suicide. However, this allowed Mario to realize that he was being manipulated, since Carmine Falcone would never tell his son to kill himself. At that point, Mario discovered where Calendar Man was hiding in his house, and shot him.

Meanwhile, Batman was able to solve the "Hangman"'s mystery. The serial killer was none other than Sofia Gigante, whose motive was to get revenge on everyone who, either directly or indirectly, helped Harvey Dent build his career as a district attorney. The task force members were murdered for the simple reason that they were investigating her, except for Lauren Wilcox, who was actually her infiltrate in the group. Sofia, her secret exposed, beat Calendar Man to a pulp and fled with Mario to the family graveyard, where she smothered her brother with a pillow for dishonoring their father's legacy.

On Columbus Day, Two-Face and the other supervillains launched their final assault against Gotham's five families, killing Umberto and Pino Maroni, Lucia Viti, Edward Skeevers, and Bobby Gazzo. Eventually, in order to flush Two-Face and the rest of his gang out of the sewers, Sofia opened Gotham's gas lines and set them afire. She then attempted to hang Harvey, who was only saved by the timely intervention of Batman. The latter engaged Sofia in a scuffle, but eventually Two-Face shot her in the forehead, paralysing her. Two-Face and the other supervillains fled from Gotham's sewers, now turned into a blazing inferno. By an amazing coincidence, however, their escape route ended in the Batcave. There, the group was confronted by Batman's then-new sidekick, Robin. When the Dark Knight joined the fight, Two-Face held him at gunpoint, proclaiming that Gotham was now his city. However, Joker emerged from the shadows to shoot Harvey, who fell to an apparent death.

In the aftermath of Columbus Day, Harvey was missing and presumed dead. However, Harvey hid out in the sewers with his “bodyguard”, Solomon Grundy, until the pair’s discovery and capture in June 2021.

### After Dark Victory

Until August 2023, Harvey had been treated by Arkham therapist Dr. Ruth Adams. Adams firstly replaced his coin with a 6-sided die, and then with a deck of tarot cards; at first rendering him incapable of making simple decisions such as going to the bathroom, but later giving him the power to make decisions for himself again.

Dr. Adams handed Harvey over to famed psychiatrist Dr Bartholomew Wolper, as a result of her work coming to a natural conclusion. Nobel Prize winning plastic surgeons Dr. Herbert Willing and Dr. Marilyn Crane also begin best-restoring Dent’s face previous to his disfigurement.

## Chronology

### Harvey Dent Chronology

* 1984 - Harvey Dent is born to Christopher “Harry” and Lucy Dent.
* 1995 - Harvey watches his brother, Murray, die in a house fire when he could’ve saved him.
* 1997-2005 - Harvey spends several years in and out of psychiatric hospitals.
* 2001 - Lucy Dent commits suicide. Christopher Dent is sent to a mental hospital; leaving Harvey isolated.
* 2006 - Harvey graduates University and begins his law career as a clerk for a Supreme Court judge. Harvey enters law school and begins dating Gilda Gold.
* 2008 - Harvey and Gilda become engaged. Harvey graduates law school, passes the bar and becomes a defence lawyer for the McKillen Crime Family.
* 2011 - Harvey switches from defender to prosecutor.
* 2011-2015 - Harvey becomes assistant district attorney for Gotham City, nearly indicting Carmine Falcone on a few occasions.
* 2016 - Harvey begins associating with the Batman. Harvey and Gilda get married.
* 2017 - Harvey Dent becomes Gotham’s district attorney, with Vernon Fields as his assistant. The Dent household is bombed, while Harvey begins to struggle again with split personalities and declining mental health.
* 2018 - Harvey is disfigured and snaps, becoming the criminal **Two-Face**. Two-Face claims the city as his own and gets revenge for his attack, before turning himself into authorities.

### Two-Face Chronology

* 2019 - Two-Face is broken out of Arkham Hospital, and begins to track the serial killer known as **Hangman**.
* 2020 - Two-Face is nearly killed by Hangman, exposed as Sofia Falcone-Gigante. Two-Face manages to get the upper hand and incapacitates her. Two-Face goes missing shortly after and is presumed dead, but no body is found.
* 2021 - Two-Face is found alive, and sent back to Arkham Hospital.
* 2021-2023 - Two-Face is treated by Arkham therapist Dr. Ruth Adams.
* 2023 - Dr. Adams finishes with Two-Face, and transfers him over to Dr. Bartholomew Wolper.

## Deaths

### Murders committed by Two-Face

* **Carmine “The Roman” Falcone**: Shot to death.
* **Vernon Fields**: Shot to death in revenge for giving Maroni tabs on Harvey Dent’s activities, and ultimately betraying him.
* **Janice Porter**: Shot to death in order to frame Mario Falcone, as part of a plot to drive Mario and Sofia against each other.
* **Umberto and Pino Maroni**: Shot to death as part of the Columbus Day massacre.

### Murders connected to Two-Face

* **Angelo Mirti**: Killed by the Joker on orders of Two-Face.
* **Lucia Viti**: Killed as part of the Columbus Day massacre.
* **Edward Skeevers**: Killed as part of the Columbus Day massacre.
* **Bobby Gazzo**: Killed as part of the Columbus Day massacre.

## Criminal and Civilian Contacts

* Commissioner Gordon
* Rachel Dawes
* Anthony Garcia
* Janice Porter
* Marion Grange
* The Joker
* Poison Ivy
* The Scarecrow
* The Riddler
* The Mad Hatter
* The Penguin
* Calendar Man
* Solomon Grundy
* Mr. Freeze

## Appearances

* Turning Points (cameo)
* The Long Halloween
* Dark Victory

## Trivia

* Dent’s 1969 Lincoln Continental contains hidden references and details.
	+ Lincoln is an American-owned car company and a luxury division of the all-American Ford Motor Company.
	+ The 1966 Batman TV series’ Batmobile was a Ford Lincoln and was similar in style and appearance to Dent’s Continental, however was a concept car known as the Ford Lincoln Futura.
	+ Dent’s Lincoln Continental licence plate, 660842, is a reference to his first appearance in Detective Comics #66, August 1942.
	+ The car’s yellow colour is a reference to the yellow of the character’s original 1940’s appearances.
* Two-Face’s Arkham Hospital cell number, 0751, is a reference to the character’s cell number Alan Moore’s 1988 graphic novel, “*The Killing Joke*”.