Of all of Batman’s enemies, few come as extreme as the protoplasmic Clayface. A muddy thorn in Gotham’s side since almost the very beginning, the supervillain has been embodied by a number of difference faces and abilities over the course of the last eighty years. Now, the character is getting a six-issue spotlight in Clayface: Celebrity Dirt, a noir-horror limited series by author Jude Ellison S. Doyle and artists Fran Galán and Patricio Delpeche. Just ahead of this week’s issue #1 debut, we spoke with Doyle about his vision for the series and the character, delving into the muddied history of shape-shifting baddie.

Clayface is such a multifaceted character in the DC Universe, with many different versions of the villain in existence. What was the north star of your approach in terms of which one you wanted to highlight?

I actually wanted to bring in as many variations of Clayface as I possibly could to honor that complexity. Without spoiling anything, the series starts with a reminder that there are at least eight Clayfaces in the DC Universe, and that number seems to be constantly growing.

“Clayface” is less an identity than it is a condition, so who winds up with that condition? Who risks turning into a mud puddle or worse, just for the chance to change how they look? There have been a lot of different Clayfaces, all of whom would give you a different answer, and as Celebrity Dirt unfolds, we’re going to dive into the elder lore of the Clayfaces and go deeper into that question of why so many people want to change who they are.

Basil Karlo himself has been through a number of different changes, even serving as a member of the Bat-Family as recently as a few years back. Clearly a flawed character, is your version of Karlo capable of redemption?

What I love about Basil is that he’s always in a fight with himself, and it’s never certain who will win. That’s very literal here, where he’s hunting down the second Basil Karlo, who seems to be evil in some ways that even the original Basil can’t stomach. But it’s also the subtext of the James Tynion run, which I love, and it’s what makes Clayface such a tragic character in Batman: The Animated Series.

Here is someone who got badly injured, who—through no real fault of his own—resorted to a substance to relieve his problems so that he could keep working, and who completely lost control of his own life and body as a result. That’s a problem that so, so many people in the world have had. People in Hollywood, but also just people who got injured and were given a painkiller prescription without being warned that it was addictive.

Basil goes through periods of getting his life together and being a decent guy with a good heart—a guy whose good heart is plagued by thoughts of all the people he’s hurt—but he also falls off the wagon and relapses and causes horrific damage. Both of those people are “really” him, and he’s got to find a way to live with that. In my experience, you don’t get rid of your worst qualities by burying them. You face them and acknowledge them, or else they’ll never let you go.

The miniseries could be considered a psychological horror story with the idea of another person living out one's ideal life. How was that unique angle approached in this case with Basil Karlo?

Basil’s relationship with fame fascinates me. He’s so addicted to being “Movie Star Basil Karlo” that he’s never learned how to be a person. The whole reason Clayface is terrifying is that he lost his life’s dream when it was almost within his hands, and he will do anything—I mean ANYTHING—to get it back.

Letting “Basil Karlo” be a movie star feels kind of inevitable. In our world, there are plenty of guys in Hollywood who have done MUCH worse than Clayface, and they’re all still making movies. It’s almost weirder that Basil hasn’t gotten his comeback. He seems to be the only guy in Hollywood who actually got permanently cancelled. But Basil has been telling himself that just getting his career back will fix all his problems, and I don’t think that’s true, frankly. Is fame actually good for him? Or is it how he got his problems to begin with?

By giving someone else everything that Basil says he wants, we force the question. We make Basil ask whether this “perfect” outcome is actually a good thing for him or for anyone, and decide what really matters to him.

What's the collaboration been like between you and artist Fran Galán? 

Fran’s brilliantly creative and he has a strong vision for his own work, and those qualities have been excellent for the series. I write a fairly detailed script, but Fran always elevates it in ways I don’t expect. In early conversations, he was talking about treating the paneling as cinematography—having tracking shots and zooms and dollies—and I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. But if you look at, for example, the “zoom” in Basil’s exit from the sewers in issue #1, it’s totally clear and perfect.

The other thing is that this script has so many tonal swings, and you need an artist with Fran’s versatility to make it work. You need to be able to do conventionally glamorous and pretty, and then do something slimy and utterly disgusting, sometimes on the same page. Fran nailed that.

Clayface is a pretty underrated villain in terms of the horrors he can inflict on a person, such as sucking them up inside his body or even shrinking and entering theirs. Was it fun devising new sick and twisted ways for Clayface to deliver nightmare fuel to the readers over six straight issues?

This is absolutely my favorite thing about Clayface (or, really, the Clayfaces), and it was my favorite thing about writing the book—his powers are so Protean and unlimited that he can do nearly anything you imagine. He can be as big as a room, or as small as a teardrop. He can be a kaiju-sized monster, stomping a city, or he can be Tom Ripley, conning and manipulating people from behind a stolen face. He has no bones and no organs and hence no end to the number of ways you can distort and manipulate and maim him. There is just nothing you can’t do with Clayface. Hopefully, I did a lot of things, and hopefully, they were all pretty disgusting. But I know that whoever writes him next is going to do even more.
 

Clayface: Celebrity Dirt #1 by Jude Ellison S. Doyle, Fran Galán and Patricio Delpeche is now available in print and as a digital comic book.