By 
Ever since he first debuted in 1940’s Detective Comics #40, Clayface has been one of Batman‘s most compelling villains. A master of disguise, Clayface can take any form and fit into any situation. The codename has been used by several different people, and Clayface even recently changed his moral alignment to join Batman in the fight to protect Gotham City.
So when news came down that horror master Mike Flanagan had written a movie about Clayface, and that it would be in the DCU, no one was too bothered by the fact that Clayface had already appeared in season one of Creature Commandos. However, DC Studios co-head Peter Safran has complicated issues, telling Entertainment Weekly that the character played by Tom Rhys Harries is “the same Clayface” we saw in Creature Commandos, albeit before the events of that show. While that may be confusing for those who watched that animated series, the fact that the same character can exist in two very different projects is a good sign for the new DCU.
Written by the other head of DC Studios, James Gunn, Creature Commandos followed a group of monsters assembled into a Suicide Squad-style team dispatched to protect a small European country from the Wonder Woman villain Circe. After getting suspicious of an academic working for Amanda Waller named Aisla MacPherson, team leader Rick Flag (Frank Grillo) investigates and discovers that Clayface (Alan Tudyk) has been impersonating the professor as part of a larger plan. With the help of Eric Frankenstein (David Harbour), Flag defeats Clayface, seemingly killing him.
According to Flanagan and director James Watkins, the protagonist of the upcoming movie is something of a tragic hero. Drawing inspiration from the Batman: The Animated Series episode “Feat of Clay” and the Grant Morrison and Dave McKean comic book Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Clayface follows up-and-coming actor Matt Hagen, who starts using an experimental serum to restore the looks he lost when a vengeful gangster carves up his face. The serum starts changing Hagen’s body, granting him new abilities and making it harder for him to resist his darkest urges.
“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.
If the DCU wants to survive, it has to be able to change to meet the demands of the story. With Clayface, they have the perfect shape-shifting character to prove that it can be done.
Clayface arrives in theaters on October 23, 2026.
The post Clayface’s Timeline Confirmation Raises Questions About the DCU appeared first on Den of Geek.
