I believe in Harvey Dent and you should too.
Harvey Dent is a truly phenomenal character because of everything he represents for the Batman mythos. His role as Gotham’s white knight is what most people overlook due to the tragedy of his life after his accident. His transformation into Two-Face has been changed over the years but the two most famous versions of his origin were in Batman : The Animated Series and The Dark Knight, and rightly so. Each version takes a few liberties with the details but the classic story is that Harvey was a district attorney that cleaned up the streets of Gotham from the legal standpoint of the system. Whereas Batman was the one who would bring them to him, Harvey was the one who would put them away. In the Nolan films, Harvey was a man who had basically been destroyed by the corrupt nature of Gotham but it was Alan Burnett and Randy Rogel that gave us my personal favorite version of the story in Batman : The Animated Series Harvey had always had a struggle within himself between Harvey Dent and his split personality alter-ego : Big Bad Harv. It was when an accident scarred half his face and nearly killed him that he couldn’t separate the two personalities anymore and thus Two-Face was born.
Two-Face is on this list for a lot of reasons, he’s a perfect mirror image of the struggle for all of us. His coin being the only thing that truly controls his choices is one of the things that makes him compelling as a character. He always works best as a man who is a tragic character, he’s not someone who’s completely in control of himself and that’s why he works and why he’s on this list.
