Clayface is posing as a wannabe actor in Hollywood, chasing his artistic dream rather than supervillaining it up in Gotham for a change. But when one of his compadres gets the part he wanted, will ol’ Basil be able to resist falling back into bad habits…?
Batman: One Bad Day - Clayface is a surprisingly decent Clayface story from Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing with solid art from Xermanico. Rather than this be an origin story for the character, it quite literally is one bad day in Clayface’s life that snowballs pretty quickly until Batman inevitably steps in.
Amusingly, the movie Clayface auditions for is an adaptation of The Killing Joke, which is very meta, not least as the title of this series, One Bad Day, is a quote taken from that famous comic. Continuing the clever meta motif, parts of this book are also structured like a movie script.
Xermanico handles Clayface’s various metamorphoses with skill and imagination and the book looks great throughout. The pattern story gets a little repetitive after the first couple instances. I was still curious to see what would happen next but then it ends simply and a tad too obviously with Batman.
I’m not sure Kelly/Lanzing did much either to make Clayface a more understandable character - all we know is that he’s a smidge insecure, which probably explains why he never made it as an actor. A profession where rejection is a constant? Bad choice my dude.
Still, Batman: One Bad Day - Clayface is a fairly good standalone book for a character that doesn’t have many, despite his many decades in print. I enjoyed it just fine - it’s up there with the Riddler and Catwoman additions in the One Bad Day series as worth checking out if you’re a fan of Batman’s rogues gallery.
Cumface
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