Clayface is in theaters today. Katrina Lee’s review covers whether it is any good; this piece covers where Matt Hagen came from, which pieces of DC history the movie is working with, and what it made up. The sections below discuss the film’s setup with light spoilers. Major spoilers, including the ending, are fenced off and come last.
Who Is Matt Hagen?
In the film, Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is a rising movie star living the glossy Coast City version of success when gangsters carve up his face and end his career. He turns to Caitlin (Naomi Ackie), a scientist with an experimental and very much unapproved procedure. It gives him his face back. Then it keeps going.
James Watkins directs from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, story by Flanagan. DC Studios is billing it as its first horror film, and the R rating backs that up.
On the page, Hagen is older and stranger. He debuted in Detective Comics #298, cover-dated December 1961, in “The Challenge of Clay-Face” (hyphen included), written by Bill Finger, penciled by Sheldon Moldoff and inked by Charles Paris.
He was the second Clayface. The first had been around for 21 years, and he matters here.
How Matt Hagen Originally Became Clayface
The 1961 origin is pure Silver Age. Hagen is a diver and treasure hunter who finds a hidden underwater grotto with a pool of something strange in it. Sources differ on what: one recap calls it radioactive, another protoplasm, and DC’s own site settles for “mutated.” He falls in and comes out able to reshape his body into anything.
The catch defined him for decades: the powers are temporary, roughly 48 hours by most accounts, so Hagen has to keep crawling back to the pool. He uses the gift like a 1961 Batman villain, with henchmen and intimidation, and Batman catches him by deduction (a thief who turns into animals must be a man).
Nothing in that story makes Hagen an actor. Nothing disfigures him. He is a crook with a cave.
The comics were not kind to him afterward. He died in Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1986, and in the 1989 “Mud Pack” story (Detective Comics #605–607) he appears literally as remains that Basil Karlo tries and fails to revive.
Why Basil Karlo Matters
Basil Karlo is the original Clayface, introduced in Detective Comics #40 (cover-dated June 1940) in “The Murders of Clayface,” by Finger with Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson. He is a horror-movie actor and makeup man attached to a remake of his old picture Dread Castle. The monster role, “The Terror,” goes to a younger actor, Kenneth Todd. Karlo, sidelined (recaps disagree on whether he lost the lead or was demoted to adviser), murders the cast in the manner of their on-screen deaths, saving Todd for last. “Clayface” is just the mask he wears while doing it.
That is the whole character for 49 years: a replaced performer who turns his craft into a weapon. He had no powers until Detective Comics #607 (1989), the finale of “The Mud Pack” by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, where he injects himself with blood from the other Clayfaces and becomes the shapeshifter modern readers know.
James Tynion IV’s Detective Comics run (2016–2018) made Karlo a team member trying to stay human, with Dr. Victoria October, a scientist introduced in #948, working on a cure. If that sounds like Caitlin, note the direction: October tries to reverse a transformation, while the film’s scientist starts one. Parallel, not lift.
Then came Detective Comics Annual #1 (cover-dated March 2018), “Clay,” by Tynion with Eddy Barrows and Eber Ferreira. DC’s solicitation called it the origin of Clayface, and it reframed Karlo as a rising actor who loses his looks in an accident and, with them, the lead in a film called Second Skin. Reviews add that he rebuilds his face with Renu, a Daggett corporation chemical. If those names ring a bell, the comic was echoing a cartoon.
The Batman: The Animated Series Influence
“Feat of Clay,” the two-part Batman: The Animated Series story from September 1992 (story by Marv Wolfman and Michael Reaves; Wolfman scripted Part I, Reaves Part II), is where the disfigured-actor Matt Hagen comes from. Not the comics. The cartoon.
In animated continuity, Hagen (Ron Perlman) is an actor whose face is wrecked in a car accident. He becomes dependent on Renuyu, a cosmetic cream supplied by industrialist Roland Daggett (Ed Asner), who uses that leverage to make Hagen impersonate Bruce Wayne. When Daggett’s men force an overdose on him, Hagen becomes Clayface.
Flanagan has repeatedly called “Feat of Clay” his formative Batman story and the main inspiration for his script, the one lineage here with an on-the-record source. Watkins, talking to Deadline at Comic-Con in July, described drawing on Karlo, Hagen and the character’s many variations, and looking for the sadness in them. That is as specific as anyone has been.
So the honest picture is layered: the actor-who-loses-his-face hook runs through Karlo in 1940 and 2018 and through animated Hagen in 1992. The film’s Hagen sits on top of that lineage, not just the 1961 comic.
What the Film Changes
The source of the powers. No cave pool, no face cream. Caitlin’s nanocells were built to treat degenerative disease: they behave like embryonic stem cells, replacing damaged tissue with perfect copies, and they learn as they go. Her funding is gone, so she takes on Hagen as a tiny, off-the-books application. No comic we could find has a doctor’s experimental procedure create a Clayface; the closest parallels (Preston Payne’s 1978 blood-serum “cure,” October’s work in Rebirth) run the opposite direction.
The injury. Knives, not a car crash. The film’s Hagen is maimed by gangsters, which makes him a crime victim before he is ever a monster.
The villains. No Daggett, no corporation. The pressure comes from a gangster, Marcus Zabo, and from Hagen’s own business manager, Frank Fitzpatrick. The institutional villain is replaced by personal betrayal.
Transformations tied to feeling. The film suggests Hagen’s changes are bound up with his emotional state. We found no comics precedent for that; animated Hagen’s struggle to hold a shape and Rebirth Karlo’s instability are the nearest cousins, and neither links shape to mood. This is the movie’s own invention, and its sharpest one.
Why the Movie Makes Clayface a Tragic Protagonist
Comics Hagen had no backstory worth the name. The film gives him one: a childhood in the Narrows, where the community center was his weekend escape and where he and Corey Bowery, his oldest friend and a fellow actor, found the thing that got them out. Hagen frames acting as turning pain and humiliation into something useful. None of this has a comics source. It is the movie’s foundation.
It also gives him the 1940 wound. Hagen has been recast in a Gotham musical by the time the treatment works, and his first act with a new face is to turn up at the premiere to show them what they lost. His agent, one of the people who dropped him, tells him flatly that “this business is all surface.” That is Karlo’s grievance, the replaced performer, as a parallel rather than an adaptation, and it turns a shapeshifter movie into body horror about an industry that only values what it can see.
Spoilers: The Ending and “The Performance of a Lifetime”
Warning: this section describes the full ending of Clayface. Stop here if you have not seen the film.
Hagen’s overdose is his own doing: he injects far more of the nanocells than Caitlin’s models allowed. As they multiply, his face changes when he is angry and settles when he is calm, and the people who wronged him give him plenty to be angry about.
Fitzpatrick bled Hagen dry, bribed the witnesses in his civil case and now works for Zabo. He dies first. Corey confesses he fed Zabo’s people names from the old neighborhood in exchange for a movie role; he is found dead on that movie’s set. Then Hagen goes after Zabo himself, slipping into the gangster’s club behind someone else’s face. It gets ugly. Zabo’s girlfriend, Mia, bites into his arm, gets a mouthful of clay and suffocates on it. Then Hagen cuts open his own face and bleeds into Zabo’s, killing him, and the blood crawls back out of the dead man and into Hagen. It is the film at its most brutal.
Caitlin’s fiancé John, a GCPD detective, pieces it together, and Caitlin finally shows him what Hagen can do. In the last confrontation Hagen offers to be anyone she wants, insisting skin is a small part of who a person is. She triggers the kill switch.
The police never recover a body. All they have is her testimony.
Then the film cuts to the papers. With Hagen presumed dead, a review hails him as a revelation: “the performance of a lifetime.” That is Katrina Lee’s key reading of the movie: a man whose whole life was about being seen is finally, fully acclaimed, and only for his own destruction. It closes the loop with Karlo in 1940, an actor who turned murder into a production. The film inverts it: Hagen’s death becomes the role.
What the film leaves open is the body that was never found.
What These Changes Mean for the Character
Comics Hagen was a gimmick with a time limit. The movie trades the pool for a body that will not stop rewriting itself, and the henchmen for the people who knew him before he was famous. It draws on the disfigured-actor lineage that runs from Karlo through the 1992 cartoon and back into the 2018 comics, and adds something that lineage never had: a monster whose shape is dictated by how much he is hurting.
Whether that becomes the print default is DC’s call. But for the first time, the second Clayface has a story that is actually about him.
Clayface comics reading list
- Detective Comics #40 (June 1940) — “The Murders of Clayface.” Basil Karlo’s debut. Finger, Kane, Robinson.
- Detective Comics #298 (December 1961) — “The Challenge of Clay-Face.” Matt Hagen’s debut and origin. Finger, Moldoff, Paris.
- Detective Comics #607 (late October 1989) — “The Mud Pack, Part Four.” Karlo gains his powers. Grant, Breyfogle.
- Detective Comics Annual #1 (March 2018) — “Clay.” Karlo’s actor-turned-monster origin. Tynion, Barrows, Ferreira.
- Batman: The Animated Series, “Feat of Clay” Parts I–II (September 1992) — The disfigured-actor Hagen. Wolfman, Reaves; Ron Perlman as Hagen.
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