Part 1 of 2 (concluded in Detective Comics #513) - continues series of full crossovers between Detective Comics and Batman
Second feature - Catwoman, "In the Land of the Dead!" (8 pages)
Letters page - "Batsignals" (1 page)

PLOT SUMMARY

Following a negative response from the parole board to his request to be transferred to a halfway house, Two-Face escapes from Arkham Asylum by using - as Batman soon finds out - a coin similar to his regular prop to hypnotize the wardens.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Gordon is facing mounting pressure by Mayor Hill to resign, Robin is told by his new flame Dala that they should not see each other anymore (quickly revealed to the reader to be a ruse to make Robin think that she is in some kind of trouble), and Bruce Wayne and Vicki Vale rediscover their romantic feelings for each other. However, when a remark from Vicki reminds Bruce of Two-Face's request to be transferred to a halfway house, he leaves her under the first pretext he can think of ...

Don Newton's artwork seems somewhat looser than usual, and whilst that does not harm the shadowy sequences in the halfway house, some of the broad daylight renderings of the individuals involved in this story are affected by this.

FACTS & FIGURES

Readers thus effectively got a fortnightly Batman book, with Batman on sale on the second Wednesday of a month and Detective Comics on the fourth. Whilst DC did not go as far as to actually require readers to buy both books (there would usually be a brief recap of the events in the preceding issue of the other title), reading only one of the two titles could make the storyline seem slightly "jumpy" at times. It was a fairly bold experiment, but DC - and above all writer Gerry Conway - did an excellent job on what certainly wasn't an overly easy project, and it met with the approval and even praise of the majority of readers.

Turning to Batman's very first true villain - Doctor Death from Detective Comics #29 (July 1939) - for the first such crossover (starting out in Batman #345 and then wrapped up in Detective Comics #512 two weeks later), available that same month but two weeks later, Gerry Conway's next villain of choice for such a double take was a far more established character: Two-Face.

First appearing in Detective Comics #66 in August 1942, Two-Face was - according to Bob Kane's autobiography (Kane, 1989) - inspired by the 1931 movie adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, with additional input derived from the pulp magazine character Black Bat, whose origin story also included having acid splashed in his face. Originally named Harvey Kent, this was changed (again according to Bob Kane's autobiography) to Harvey Dent as of Batman #81 (February 1954) in order to avoid confusion with Superman's alter ego Clark Kent, even though his appearances in the 1940s and 1950s were few and far between. Not sitting well with the more campy approach the Batman books were taking in the 1960s, Two-Face dropped completely out of sight (with the exception of a single appearance in 1968 in World's Finest Comics #173) until he was finally brought back in August 1971 by writer Dennis O'Neil in Batman #234, and it was this and subsequent portrayals which really shaped the character and turned him into one of Batman's arch-enemies in a series of now classic 1970s stories.

The MO of Two-Face, summed up for new readers by Gerry Conway and Don Newton in one single panel

Although featuring extensively and regularly throughout the 1970s, Gerry Conway never took any chances during his early 1980s run and always made a point of bringing new or unitiated readers up to speed with a short summary portrayal.