“We meet Matt at a real turning point in his career and then, very quickly, at a real turning point in his life,” Harries explained. “It’s a horror, but it’s a thriller. It asks, How far would you go to reclaim your life that you’ve built?”
That description does not fit the character we saw in Creature Commandos. In that show, Clayface acts like a typical bro, as he hits on female students while in the form of Professor MacPherson and spends his evenings trash-talking online video game opponents while eating junk food. Hardly the three-dimensional figure that the movie seems to showcase.
Comic fans know that Hagen is only the second person to use the name Clayface, a criminal treasure hunter whose body transformed after being exposed to a mysterious ooze. Other Clayfaces include scientist Preston Payne, who injected himself with Hagen’s blood to cure a rare disease, Sondra Fuller aka Lady Clay, Payne and Fuller’s son Cassius, and the ill-fated law enforcement officer Peter Malley.
Even though Clayface director James Watkins admits his version of Hagen is “an amalgam”—”We’ve pinched elements from all over the place,” he explained—one still has to wonder: Why not just pick a different version of the character to feature in the movie? That way, they could avoid the confusion with Creature Commandos.
Neither Safran nor Flanagan nor Watkins has an answer, but it doesn’t really matter. Not only is Clayface a mutable character, but all of superhero comics can change to meet the moment. Within just the world of Batman comics, sometimes the stories are gritty and hard-edged and sometimes they are goofy and over-the-top. Sometimes, they make the villains into sympathetic monsters, and sometimes Batman fights remorseless humans. Some of Batman’s adventures are made for young readers, and sometimes he’s adults-only.
Part of the reason we still care about Batman, almost ninety years after he debuted, is because he can change to fit into any sort of story. While the DCU certainly wants to follow the MCU’s model and bring a shared universe to the big screen, it has to follow the comics’ lead and accept that Superman may act one way in his own stories and be different when playing a supporting role in a different story.
