rouge2
03/12/2004, 13:14
Starting what may turn into a series of threads on some of your favourite Clix characters and the best comics they’ve appeared in.
Please feel free to post your favourite storyline, issue or one-shot about the featured character. Give a description too, if you’re up to it. Who knows, maybe someone who hadn’t given this character a chance, might change their mind and check out your recommendation.
Up first:
Clayface III
My favourite story:
“Mortal Clay”
From Batman Annual # 11
Reprinted in “Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore”
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: George Freeman
One of my favourite stories, it takes Clayface III who was always a crazed and demented villain and makes him even more crazed and demented but (paradoxically) at the same time painfully human.
In the story Clayface (Preston Payne) is revealed to have survived his last encounter with Batman and is holed up in an upscale Macy’s-like department store. He hides/sleeps during the day and comes out at night to share the deserted store with his lady love: one of the store’s mannequins. While his obsessions/delusions about a mannequin were not a new aspect of the character, Moore really digs into Payne’s psychosis here, and we see his mind constructing and unravelling his fantasy with dangerous results. His jealousy of his “wife’s” imagined infidelities eventually grows to involve, of course, Batman (“The Man in the Cowl”) leading to a deadly showdown, while also creating great sympathy for the shattered mind of Payne.
Filled with great bits of Alan Moore’s trademark ironic wit (“after all… She can’t live forever”) juxtaposed with some uniquely “Clayface” moments, this story’s a true classic.
Please feel free to post your favourite storyline, issue or one-shot about the featured character. Give a description too, if you’re up to it. Who knows, maybe someone who hadn’t given this character a chance, might change their mind and check out your recommendation.
Up first:
Clayface III
My favourite story:
“Mortal Clay”
From Batman Annual # 11
Reprinted in “Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore”
Writer: Alan Moore
Artist: George Freeman
One of my favourite stories, it takes Clayface III who was always a crazed and demented villain and makes him even more crazed and demented but (paradoxically) at the same time painfully human.
In the story Clayface (Preston Payne) is revealed to have survived his last encounter with Batman and is holed up in an upscale Macy’s-like department store. He hides/sleeps during the day and comes out at night to share the deserted store with his lady love: one of the store’s mannequins. While his obsessions/delusions about a mannequin were not a new aspect of the character, Moore really digs into Payne’s psychosis here, and we see his mind constructing and unravelling his fantasy with dangerous results. His jealousy of his “wife’s” imagined infidelities eventually grows to involve, of course, Batman (“The Man in the Cowl”) leading to a deadly showdown, while also creating great sympathy for the shattered mind of Payne.
Filled with great bits of Alan Moore’s trademark ironic wit (“after all… She can’t live forever”) juxtaposed with some uniquely “Clayface” moments, this story’s a true classic.