Saving Face, but Losing Sanity,
the famous faceless of fiction

by J. Russell Pelt

In the mid-1930s, the rescue of his kidnapped son by a mysterious stranger first led Baltimore police detective Dick Tracy to investigate rumors among the underworld of a faceless man known as The Blank.  At first, it appeared that The Blank aspired to take upon the role of night-time vigilante as been assumed by the likes of The Shadow in New York City, but Tracy soon found that his true intentions were far less altruistic.  The Blank’s victims had all been members of a gang which included Frank Redrüm, who’d supposedly died while escaping from prison ten years before.  By this time, the only surviving member the police could find was a heavily bearded, jowly sea captain named “Stud” Bronzen.  Ultimately, the Blank was captured by Detective Pat Patton in the midst of attempting to murder Tracy with a decompression chamber aboard Bronzen’s salvage vessel.  In custody, the Blank’s “face” was quickly found to just be a patch of flesh-colored cheesecloth glued to his face, and easy to remove.  He was revealed to be, as suspected, Frank Redrüm, his face heavily scarred by a prison guard’s gun blast, which caused his fellow criminals to abandon him years ago.

At the beginning of this adventure, Junior Tracy’s kidnappers recognized The Blank, yet they were supposedly his first victims from his old gang.  From this I propose that Frank Redrüm had already hunted down other criminals, perhaps those who had also rejected him, both to facilitate a reputation in gangland as a force to be reckoned with, and to test his tactics.  He needed the practice – his mask was difficult to see through, so he depended upon surprise and trickery to conquer his enemies rather than direct confrontation.  Redrüm’s run as the Blank, the first (and only) of the mysterious vigilantes of the Thirties to be successfully caught by the police, was well-publicized, and so began a series of events, inspiring one after another, about men without faces...

A few years after the Blank case ended, stories trickled in from France of a murderous nobleman defeated by a faceless derelict.  This man with no face was Charles Maire, a young socialite whose sister Karel had been stalked by the Duc d’Orterre.  The Duc was reportedly the leader of a gang of Apaches* which were suspected in a sudden rash of prostitute disappearances, and a mad scientist to boot as Charles soon learned.  Due to Charles’s interference regarding his sister, the Duc had him kidnapped and tortured, using him as a guinea pig for some of his inventions.  Inspired by Redrüm’s ruse, the Duc used a powerful adhesive to glue a patch of porous, artificial skin over Charles’s face, all the while keeping him drugged so he’d believe that a ray device that the Duc had been fiddling with – an experimental laser – had dissolved the tissues of his face.  This caused a mental block which kept Charles convinced that his face had been remolded into a solid wall of flesh, even though he could still see, speak, talk, and breathe.  He was then dumped on the streets of Paris, the Duc hoping that Charles would eventually either starve to death or accidentally kill himself by trying to cut his “face” back open.

The Duc soon afterwards approached Karel with a marriage proposal, and had her kidnapped when she refused.  Thankfully, a strange American wearing a bat-motif cloak and mask helped Charles to rescue her from the Duc, who planned to feed her to a bizarre carnivorous plant, which he’d found and been nurturing with victims brought to him by the Apaches, once he had access to her inheritance.  During this rescue, the Batman would encounter this plant, which seemed to have mild telepathic powers and whose blossoms replicated the faces of the women it’d eaten, but escaped unharmed.  He was also able to free Charles of his mask, having deduced the reality of Charles’s apparent mutilation since his senses and speech were plainly unimpaired.  The Batman would return home with papers from the Duc’s lab on his synthetic flesh experiments, hoping that doctors would find ways to treat scars and skin diseases using them.  Unfortunately, this research would be held up by the war which soon followed, and no more events concerning them occurred until the late Fifties.  Nevertheless, another faceless man spiraled out from these events in the meantime…

At the end of his encounter with the Batman, the Duc d’Orterre was presumably killed when his automobile crashed off a cliff.  In reality, the Duc survived and fled back to Germany, where he continued his research into energy weapons and super-adhesives for the Nazi party under his real name, Baron Heinrich Zemo.  After Germany occupied France, Zemo was forced to hide his face while in public with a velvet hood to protect the Third Reich from propaganda should he be recognized.  This hood became permanently affixed to his head when a container of his super-adhesive was shattered and poured onto him during a commando raid of his lab.  Returning vengeance upon Captain America for this accident would define Baron Zemo for the rest of his life, which ended during a duel with the resurfaced Captain in the mid-1960s.  Years after his death, Zemo’s son, Helmut, would also seek vengeance upon Captain America, only to be severely scarred when he fell into a vat of molten super-adhesive.  Although he’s recreated his father’s synthetic flesh experiments to give himself a normal face at times, Helmut still returns to his father’s featureless hood in his schemes as the current Baron Zemo.

(Incidentally, while we’re speaking of hooded mad scientists, it should be noted that whatever relation Heinrich and Hemut Zemo had to the late Nino Salvatori Sebastiani, a similarly-attired KAOS agent and fabric enthusiast, is unknown.)

After World War II ended, experiments on the Duc’s notes began anew.  After many years of research, one scientist, Dr. Paul Dent, would accept volunteers for treatment with this synthetic flesh.  Unfortunately, one volunteer who came to Dent to have a scar treated was actually a criminal, Bart Magan, who then kidnapped Dent.  Magan devised an intricate plan by which his gang would replace valued objects with faces – masks, statues, clocks, etc – with cheap copies which Magan would destroy before they could be found out.  Magan did so while wearing a patch of Dent’s artificial skin over his face and calling himself Dr. No-Face, hoping to cultivate the illusion that No-Face was Dr. Dent, driven insane by a failed experiment which destroyed his face.  From his previous experience with Charles Maire’s delusion, Batman easily saw through Magan’s scheme and eventually captured him and his gang, rescuing Dr. Dent.

Unfortunately, Dent’s artificial skin was flawed, as its prolonged use on wounds communicated an unforeseen toxicity, and so Magan later died, poisoned by the treatment upon his scar.  Professor Aristotle Rodor would update the process using a bonding gas to apply the synthetic flesh, now called “Pseudoderm”, to real skin, but the toxicity problem remained, rendering it useless for medicine.  With the help of Wayne’s government contacts, Rodor then offered Pseudoderm to federal authorities, where it soon became part and parcel to the Impossible Missions Force for quickly created lifelike masks.

This would result in the next faceless man, an investigative news reporter named Victor Szasz.  Better known by his on-air name of Vic Sage, he was a right-wing but philosophically alert TV journalist whose early life is shrouded in mystery.  What is known is that he was raised in an orphanage, a potentially abusive environment which probably began his ruminations on justice and fairness to begin with.  Some Wold Newton researchers believe him to be a son unknowingly fathered by “deceased” criminologist Denny Colt, alias The Spirit, with his occasional foe, a larcenous Parisian libertine known as P’gell.  Incidentally, a similar origin is rumored for the reformed soldier-of-fortune Marc Spector, alias the Moon Knight (who also wears a featureless mask and hood), a child of female mercenary Sand Saref.

In the mid-Sixties, Vic Sage uncovered an attempt to sell government equipment to third world powers by a Dr. Arby Twain.  Twain was Rodor’s assistant, and among the items he was smuggling was Pseudoderm.  Rodor tried to stop this sale himself and so bumped into Sage, who happened to be investigating the international black market and had come upon the secret exchange.  Rodor gave Sage an unformed Pseudoderm mask to hide his identity when confronting Twain, and thus was born The Question, a name evocative of his eerie appearance, his investigative style of crime-fighting, and his own musings on right and wrong.  Sage operated as the Question for a few years, possibly fed information by Rodor’s superiors on criminal activities which did not warrant a standard IMF team.

This ended when he started investigating a series of Richard Speck-like murders, only for the Batman to catch the killer first, a nihilistic madman named Victor Zsasz.  Feeling upstaged by Batman and unnerved by what he could only consider a doppelganger, Sage began to massively reevaluate his life.  As a result, Sage became an ardent Objectivist, believing that the answer to his questions was simply a matter of black and white, with the idea of moral grey areas simply a bleeding heart view of moral corruption.  Breaking his ties with Rodor and the IMF, Sage moved to Chicago where he changed his name to Rex Graine – “Rex” to reflect his new feelings of control over his life and fate, and “Graine” for its similarity to Wayne, a subtle jibe at the Batman, whose secret identity he’d learned at some point.  (His new name may also be viewed as a variation of Rick Blaine, a famed wartime freedom fighter and ex-nightclub owner; stories of his anti-hero persona had made Blaine a symbol for the glorification of moral corruption which Sage now despised.)  As he also had visibility problems with Pseudoderm, Sage would also abandon his identity of the Question (stories by DC Comics which claim that it was alter assumed by former police detective Renee Montoya bear further analysis).  In its place, Graine took on the armored visage of Mr. A, by which he became a minor legend among costumed crime-fighters as an ultimate vigilante who ruthlessly protected the innocent and the oppressed from criminals and those who’d failed their moral duties.

The legacy of Redrüm and Zemo would not with Sage, however – he and Rodor had prevented a major sale of government materials, but not Twain’s first, as it turned out.  The Pseudoderm process had already been sold to foreign powers, and so turned up as the effective “epiderm-masks” used by the terrorist organization HYDRA.  Epiderm-masks were used often by HYDRA leader Wolfgang von Strucker in establishing false identities and for infiltration, as well as by agents of HYDRA’s espionage division, Chameleon.  After the virtual destruction of HYDRA during the Death’s Head Spore gambit, various Chameleon agents went off on their own, either using stolen Pseudoderm or more traditional latex and makeup for disguises, to operate as independent thieves, assassins, spies, etc.  The Chameleons are most famous for their encounters with the vigilante Spider-Man as publicized by Marvel Comics, which portray the Chameleons as being one singular individual.  In reality, of course, there have been many former HYDRA espionage agents still active and using the title “Chameleon”, and have crossed swords with the likes of Michael Knight and the modern invisible man, Darien Fawkes.  The Chameleons have also apparently recruited new agents as they either died or retired, including the rogue Pretender known as Alex.

As stated, Marvel Comics hold a single Chameleon in their continuity, and have even created a history wherein the Chameleon was the abused half-brother of infamous big game hunter Sergie Kravenoff, alias Kraven the Hunter, based on one’s employment of Kraven during an encounter with Spider-Man.  Apparently inspired by stories of adventurer-turned-vigilante Richard Henry Benson, one Chameleon went to great lengths to become an even greater master of disguise by making his face malleable.  Working with an unscrupulous plastic surgeon named Will Carver, this Chameleon had his epidermis surgically and mutagenically altered, rendering his flesh ash white, even hairless, and his face undefined and featureless with a recessed nose.  Carver had infused his flesh with an improved, non-toxic form of Pseudoderm with a degree of malleability, enabling the Chameleon to take on the appearance of any person at will, done so with a special belt which can record images of people with a miniaturized holographic recorder, then electronically stimulate his flesh to appropriate their appearance – hair, skin pigmentation, and all.  Carver was apparently even able to create artificial lenses derived from Pseudoderm which were implanted in the Chameleon’s eyes, enabling him to change eye coloring.  This Chameleon returned to his criminal career deadlier than ever, starting with a kidnapping spree wherein he replaced himself with a series of millionaires, including a lengthy stint disguised as newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson during which he used the Daily Planet as an out-right propaganda machine against Spider-Man and New York’s other super-heroes.  His involvement in a gang war during this time, possibly sparked by the involvement of himself or another Chameleon, is less certain, however.  Stories based upon these escapades plus the nature of his “self-improvement” were reported by Marvel Comics years later.

The Chameleon would not be the only beneficiary of Carver’s experiments with improving Pseudoderm.  Shortly after his business with the Chameleon was concluded, he used it for another burn victim, Angelica Jones, a.k.a Angeltop, permanently restoring her face.  Unfortunately, Carver was almost immediately murdered by her afterwards, and he took the secret of perfected Pseudoderm with him.  He left notes behind, however, which eventually made their way into the hands of the more ethical Dr. Peyton Westlake, who was also able to conquer Pseudoderm’s toxicity but could not stabilize the formula, resulting in synthetic flesh which would begin to sag and disintegrate after lengthy exposure to light.  He was on the verge of success when his fiancée, an assistant district attorney, ran afoul of a mob-affiliated realty developer, who retaliated by having Westlake attacked and his lab bombed.  Miraculously, Westlake survived, but his face was virtually destroyed.  Setting up an underground lab, Westlake allows the world to believe him dead as he continues his Pseudoderm experiments, hoping to one day restore his face permanently.  In the meantime, he’s become an underworld legend, the Darkman, using his technology both to steal money from criminals to finance his experiments, as well as to take revenge on the people who ruined his life.

The last known person to date to have “benefited” from Baron Zemo’s synthetic flesh experiments first appeared in the late Eighties, although his tale predates the Chameleon’s surgery.  Harley Niav (née Harley Edward Flintheart, Jr.) was the son of a fallen Shakespearean actor, and had long left England for America to pursue the acclaim which had eluded his father.  A brilliant actor on the rise, Harley became known for learning to simulate voices and mannerisms, and to heavily research lifestyles for the roles he played, gaining such skills as working medical knowledge and even gangland connections.  His break-out role would have been co-starring with his uncle, Vincent “Vitamin” Flintheart, in a production of Sleuth, when his understudy tampered with the brakes of his car, causing it to fly off an embankment and crash.  Instead of dying, Harley survived, although his face was severely scarred.  Dropping out of sight while he sought out help, Harley eventually found Carver, who used Harley to test his experimental Pseudoderm formula.  Unfortunately, while non-toxic, this first test was a failure, as Harley’s restored face after a few hours eventually sagged and bulged into a near-formless mass.  Fearing the loss of his medical license, Carver secretly had Harley institutionalized at an unscrupulous sanitarium, possibly with the help of the Chameleon.

Over the years, Harley found that his face was also malleable, although he did not have the access to technology the Chameleon did and so had to learn to reform his face by hand.  Finally, Harley was skilled enough that he escaped the sanitarium by murdering his doctor and assuming his likeness.  Since then, Harley has shown, much like his father Edward Lionheart and sister Miranda, a macabre and melodramatic tendency towards crime, seeking both material gain as well as revenge on those he’s felt wronged him.  For whatever reason, Harley, or Putty Puss as he’s become known, has taken to bedeviling the now-retired detective Dick Tracy, plus his friends and his associates, even going so far as to trap Tracy in a wax museum, recreating his most infamous close calls with death, while masquerading as Vitamin Flintheart.  Perhaps his obsession is simply inspired by the past association of his uncle and Dr. Carver with the detective; others fear Putty Puss may have truly gone insane, and that he now believes himself to be Anyface, a fictional face-changing criminal from Al Capp’s mock-comic strips about Dick Tracy.

What further developments will occur from the legacy of Frank Redrüm and of Pseudoderm technology, only time will tell.

*Les Apaches were members of a Parisian underworld subculture during the late 1800s and early 1900s.  The Apaches were especially associated with the Montmartre district of Paris, which was also home to the famous Moulin Rouge dance hall and nightclub.

Bibligraphy:
Wold Newton articles
Fifteen Tales from a Dead Man’s Chest essay by J. Russell Pelt
Lethal Luthors: A Deceptive Brilliance – William Luthor essay by Dennis E. Power
Luck of the Parkers essay by Al Schroeder
There Are Pretenders Among Us essay by Brad Mengel

	Comic strips, comic books, etc.
52 comic book series, May 2006 - May 2007
Action Comics #55, December 1942 – “A Goof Named Tiny Rufe”
Amazing Spider-Man #1, March 1963 – “Spider-Man vs. The Chameleon”
Amazing Spider-Man #15, August 1964 – “Kraven the Hunter!”
Amazing Spider-Man #307, October 1988 – “The Thief Who Stole Himself”
Avenger magazine #1, September 1939 – “Justice, Inc.”
Avengers #6, July 1964 – “The Masters of Evil!”
Avengers #15, April 1965 – “Now, By My Hand, Shall Die a Villain”
Batman: Shadow of the Bat #1, June 1992 – “The Last Arkham”
Blue Beetle #1, June 1967 – “Who is the Question?”
Captain America #168, December 1973 -- “And a Phoenix Shall Arise”
Detective Comics #34, December 1939 – “Batman in Paris”
Detective Comics #319, September 1963 – “The Fantastic Dr. No-Face”
Dick Tracy comic strip by Chester Gould, October 1937 – “The Blank” sequence (Frank Redrüm alias The Blank)
Dick Tracy comic strip by Max Allan Collins and Rick Fletcher, January 1982 – “Return of Angeltop” sequence
Dick Tracy comic strip by Max Allan Collins and Dick Locher, October 1987 – “Putty Puss” sequence
Dick Tracy comic strip by Max Allan Collins and Dick Locher, June 1989 – “Dick Tracy and the Wax Museum” sequence
Li’l Abner comic strip by Al Capp, May 1947 – “Anyface” sequence
Strange Tales #153, February 1967 – “The Hiding Place!”
Strange Tales #158, July 1967 – “Final Encounter”
Web of Spider-Man #54, September 1989 – “Wolves of War
Werewolf by Night #32, August 1975 – “The Stalker Called Moon Knight” 
Witzend #3 by Steve Ditko, 1967 – “Mr. A”

	Movies, television, etc.
Casablanca motion picture, 1942
Darkman motion picture, 1990
Invisible Man TV Series, Sci-fi Channel, September 2000 – “Beholder”
Little Shop of Horrors motion picture, 1960
Little Shop of Horrors stage play, 1982
Mission: Impossible TV series, CBS, 1966 - 1973
Knight Rider TV Series, NBC, December 1984 – “Knight of the Chameleon”
The Return of Maxwell Smart motion picture, 1980
Pretender 2001 TV movie, TNT, January 2001
Theatre of Blood motion picture, 1973
Theatre of Blood stage play, 2005