Heel Face Revolving Door / The DCU

The DCU

Heel–Face Revolving Door in this franchise.

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Comic Books

Comic Books

• Batman:
  • Catwoman has been this for decades. Though she had settled on "antihero" in the 90's, the 2011 once again made her an Anti-Villain who occasionally does good things.
  • Harley Quinn has had more than one failed reformation, mostly due to her lingering, err, affections for The Joker — himself probably the Batman villain least likely to have a Heel–Face Turn. Despite this, she's shown to be welcomed by the Justice League in Superman (Brian Michael Bendis).
    • Whenever Harley has her own series, the writers work around this by generally reserving her homicidal tendencies for other villains. Good guys and innocent victims usually end up knocked out or Bound and Gagged at worst. Asshole Victims on the other hand....
  • Poison Ivy, while always a villain when on her own, tends to reform (or at least become neutral) whenever Harley is attempting to reform.
    • She was even a member of the Birds of Prey. Though that was entirely for selfish reasons, and she betrayed her teammates once she no longer got anything out of the deal.
  • Two-Face literally flips a coin to determine whether he'll do something good or bad. In his very first appearance, Two-Face had captured Batman and was throwing the coin for whether to kill or free him. Batman asked what if the coin stood on its edge? and got Two-Face to agree to surrender and submit to plastic surgery and therapy. The coin — substituted by Batman for the real coin — stood on its edge, and Two-Face returned to a normal life. However, he was later injured again and returned to his life as Two-Face.
    • ANY time Two-Face gets his face restored or tries to give up on his evil personality, he always goes back to his old ways. One was even helped along by the Joker.
    • In No Man's Land an act of ungodly luck makes Two-Face a good guy for what looks like weeks if not months. He agrees to help Renee Montoya to try and take care of the weaker people in the city; injured, old, children, etc. Each time he helps he flips a coin, according to Montoya he apparently flips the "good" side over 100 times......in a row. It's possible that the implication there was that Two-Face was cheating. Perhaps he had honestly (temporarily) reformed, but pretended it was all the coin's fault (so he'd have an excuse if he ever turned evil again). And if that's not it, maybe Batman or Montoya just slipped him a weighted coin.
  • The Riddler sometimes went through the door as well, though currently he's a Face. It's unknown whether he will become a Heel again.
  • Lady Shiva wavers between anti-hero or villain.
• The Flash:
  • Captain Boomerang Jr. from The DCU. He started out as his father's replacement in the Rogues, then tried his hand at being a hero as a member of Nightwing's Outsiders. When he and Dick got into an argument about what to do with Chemo, the living chemical weapon that destroyed Bludhaven, they got into a fight and Owen absconded with Chemo to join the Suicide Squad. In Blackest Night, Owen's desire to be with his father again overrode his morals. He fed people to his zombie father, wrongly believing that this would revive him. Including women and children, which prompted Captain Cold and the other Rogues to kill him. Cold lampshaded Owen's Revolving Door nature, saying he was like a boomerang going back and forth everywhere.
  • Dr. Alchemy/Mr. Element (Al Desmond) showed signs of this during the Silver Age. He reformed after his first appearances, took up a white-collar job, and became good friends with Barry Allen, even attending his wedding. Meanwhile he was pulled back into evil, or sometimes just framed for it, by everything from Professor Zoom (twice!) to the fluctuations of a distant star to the machinations of a psychic twin (who turned out to be his own split personality given shape post-Crisis).
• Robin (1993): Despite his short tenure Dodge's desire to be special leads to him stealing a prototype teleporter which he uses to try and become a hero. When he screws that up he blames it on Robin and becomes a villain who sells fatal experimental drugs to finance his "revenge". Then after one of the villains he recruits for his revenge plot takes over from him and the Teen Titans have all but defeated his crew he switches sides claiming to have always wanted to be a hero and seems to die in a teleporter accident fighting the mutineer.
• Shazam!:
  • This Trope could also be named The Black Adam. He started out as a champion of his people in ancient times named Mighty Adam (that's good) then became a brutal dictator and conqueror when his family was killed by a supervillain (that's bad) then millennia later attempted to reform and even joined the Justice Society of America (that's good) then became a not-so-brutal dictator of his country again (NOT the bad part) and later joined a Society of Villains to ensure their safety (that's bad). After said Society betrayed him, he later fought against them when they tried to take over Metropolis (that's good) then went back to being a harsh dictator with plans to form a new Axis Powers coalition (that's bad). When he gained a new family he tried to go back to his old heroic ways and traveled the world fighting evil alongside them (that's good). When this family was killed by supervillains he went on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, murdered an entire country, and fought every superhero on Earth (that's bad, but awesome). Most recently, his wife Came Back Wrong and started turning his people into dirt and he tried to defend them leading to a truly bizarre situation with Black Adam defending innocents from the corrupted Captain Marvel and Mary Marvel (that's good.) Then he got turned into a statue alongside his wife for his troubles and an oh so ominous shadowy figure wants to make them his champions...(that's bad). At least there's a free choice of toppings (that's good)...that contain potassium benzoate (...that's bad). By the Power of Shazam, that is one busy revolving door.
  • Mary Marvel herself applies in Countdown to Final Crisis, starting out good, getting corrupted by Black Adam's power, doing a Heel–Face Turn, gaining her old powers back, and then moronically deciding to accept Black Adam's power and turn evil again after Darkseid has a friendly chat with her (no, that's not a euphemism◊). And then she beats up Donna Troy using Kyle Rayner as a club, among other evulz. If you're wondering, this is just one reason for why 90% of the events of Countdown are subjected to a blanket decree of Let Us Never Speak of This Again both in canon and out.
• Suicide Squad: The Enchantress (June Moon) was introduced in DC Comics' Strange Adventures as a heroine. Then she became a Supergirl villain in Superman Family. Following from that, she became a member of the Forgotten Villains, and then she joined the Suicide Squad, at which point it was established that June was a good person but the Enchantress was her Superpowered Evil Side. In Day of Judgement, Enchantress is an amoral character who has to be pressurised into saving the world from Hell. During this the Enchantress is "killed", leaving June Moon. Later, in a JLA miniseries, they're merged together to form Soulsinger, and then separated again, but the powers stay with June, giving us the heroic Enchantress seen in Shadowpact.
• Superman:
  • Professor Emil Hamilton was introduced as a Mad Scientist who attacked Superman after Lex Luthor took credit for his inventions, in order to show them all! After responding well to therapy, he became Superman's science advisor. When Steel started taking on that role, Emil went mad again and became the villain Overmind, although he blamed this on being taken over by B-13 technology through his robot arm. Once this was dealt with, he and John Henry worked together, thanks to Emil's better understanding of B-13 tech. Then he became convinced that Superman's powers were sucking energy from the Sun and reducing the viable lifespan of the Earth, so he became the Well-Intentioned Extremist villain Ruin and crossed the Moral Event Horizon by targeting Clark's loved ones. In Convergence, he appears to have reformed again, describing working on Jimmy Olsen's Whiz Wagon vehicle as occupational therapy.
  • Some while after Let My People Grow!, Superman managed to turn Brainiac into a good guy by altering his programming. In The Planet Eater Trilogy, though, Superman is forced to reprogram Brainiac back into being a villain, permanently this time, for the sake of stopping the monstrous Planet-Eater (a task which needed a cunning and ruthlessness that Brainiac's good self lacked).
• Teen Titans:
  • Raven who's turned evil and been redeemed or cleansed of evil about 4 times and counting by now. Most of this has to do with attempts to recapture the success and impact of the first time it happened in the Wolfman/Pereze Titans run. That time it was subtly built up over months. The later ones? Eh, they just sort of happen in a rather transparent attempt to drive up sales. Her Face/Heel turning points almost make her The Millstone of Heel Face Revolving Doors if only for the transparency of her subsequent changes.
  • Fellow Titan Jericho is just as bad. He started out good but was driven insane by evil spirits from Raven's father's home dimension. After his father killed him to stop his rampage Jericho clung to existence as an evil spirit being. Years later he was revived and purified of his evil. Then he went evil again due to spending too much time in Superboy's clone Match. Now, he's well...kind of a mess to be honest. It's not clear at this time whether he's good, evil, or even functional.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Ares flips betwixt Card-Carrying Villain, Anti-Villain, impartial bystander and occasional Anti-Hero. While he has had at least one turn attempting to be an actual proper hero in Wonder Woman (Rebirth) his very nature means he can't meaningfully operate as such and his attempt warps him into a vicious Knight Templar, meaning he's at his best when he's snarky, occasionally cruel and keeping his true intentions well hidden as something closer to an Anti-Hero.
  • Hercules does try to be heroic most of the time, but often by the standards of Ancient Greek mythology, making him come off as an outright villain to modern sensibilities. While he does occasionally get it right it never seems to last.

Live-Action TV

Live-Action TV

• Krypton: The Cythonnites have fairly heroic goals but sometimes ruthless methods and go back and forth from helping Seg and his allies to threatening or double crossing them multiple times, depending on whether they share a common goal at the time.
• Smallville:
  • Lionel Luthor starts off moderately evil, becomes/is retconned to be completely evil, goes to prison, temporarily switches bodies with Clark and thereby absorbs some of his strong moral fibre (making him into a good guy), is convinced to readopt his villainous ways by an Evil Twin of Lex Luthor, and then spends several seasons stumbling drunkenly along the line between good and evil out of lust for Martha, before temporary possession by Jor-El converts him to the side of good until Lex throws him off of a building and he dies.
  • Tess Mercer wasn't much better in Seasons 8 and 9, going back and forth between hero worshipper, Well-Intentioned Extremist, and The Baroness. She finally settles on Face and ultimately dies protecting Clark's secret from Lex, just like her father.

Western Animation

Western Animation

• Terra, from the animated version of Teen Titans (2003). She started off good, but after a Hannibal Lecture from Slade in her first outing with the team, mingled with her own paranoia, she mistakenly believed Beast Boy had gone behind her back and told Robin about her Power Incontinence, so she ran away from the Titans. Off-screen, she hooked up with Slade, agreeing to become his agent in exchange for his help in honing and controlling her powers, going so far as to become a spy inside the Titans after he was done training her. During her time as The Mole, she fell for Beast Boy and tried to manipulate events so he wouldn't be captured/killed by Slade when she finally betrayed the team, but Slade appeared before them when they were on their date and revealed to Beast Boy that Terra was his double agent. Beast Boy angrily telling Terra that she didn't have or deserve any friends made Terra push aside any guilt and throw herself wholeheartedly into being Slade's minion. As a result, she fought and seemingly killed the Titans, but they escaped, rallied and attacked her. The combination of nearly losing to them, Slade's abusive treatment for failing, and a Kirk Summation from Beast Boy all pushed her to make a final Heel–Face Turn and resulted in a Heroic Sacrifice.

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