Top 100 Batman VILLAINS

27 - Clayface (Basil Karlo)

#27 - Clayface (Basil Karlo)
First Appearance: Detective Comics #40 (Jun 1940)

"No one laughs at my work!" ~Barlo Karlo

At the core of the Clayface story is this tenet: Every actor wishes they could become their role, to have a thousand faces, but even when Karlo is granted this gift, it's his true face that he can't escape, that consumes him.

I wanted to start it off by sharing my impression of Karlo, because too often comic readers get bogged down in "This is going to be a great fight" or "This is so overdone" and they miss the beauty of the innate truth within a character. All of Batman's villains left on this list provide a universal truth about the human condition. I think a lot of the purpose of acting is to escape yourself, your own fundamental reality, because there is some iniquity within you that you just want to escape. That's Basil Karlo - he loathes himself, he loves himself, he's torn by the things beyond his control and warped by his own desires. From failed actor to madman is such an easy path to go down - your own self-hatred can twist your mind and do strange, terrible things.

For years Karlo has been floating around the DCU, existing as a primal force emotionally and physically. He often embodies the earth around him, and memorably serves as the final boss in Arkham City for just this reason. His appearances in the cartoons is also fairly memorable (I don't speak of BTAS since that was Matt Hagen using the story of Basil Karlo). Regardless, Karlo is a standby character and a fundamental piece of the Batman world, that without which, I think an inextricable facet of the human condition would likely never be explored in the DCU.

Greatest Basil Karlo Story Ever Told:Joker's Asylum: Clayface - The perfect primer for Basil Karlo, you really fall down the rabbit hole in his origin and began to understand how he's simultaneously monster and messiah to those around him.