Polite Dissent

Batman: Jekyll & Hyde #6
Paul Jenkins, writer
Sean Phillips, penciler

Two-Face has gone crazy — crazier than normal, that is. He is blaming his misdeeds on his dead brother Murray. To remedy the situation, he takes a pistol and tries to shoot off the evil half of his face.

Unsurprisingly, he ends up in the hospital:

Commissioner Gordon: He blew half his face off — the “Murray” side…The bullet clipped the occipital lobe area of his brain and lodged under his skull.

Looking at the image of Two-Face shooting himself , it does appear that he is trying to shoot the left half of his face off (or at least give himself a Bruce Campbell chin). How then did he injure his occipital lobe, which is the very back part of the brain? To hit the occipital lobe directly, he would need to be aiming the pistol differently than he was. Artistic or writer error is always a possibility. Another possibility is that he was using a fairly low velocity weapon. In that case, the bullet would have enough power to enter the skull, but not enough power to break through a second time and exit. The bullet would then ricochet around inside the skull until it finally runs out of velocity, injuring the occipital lobe in the process. Commissioner Gordon’s words seem to suggest this, and there is no obvious exit wound in the art, so I suspect that this is the mechanism of injury.

Take a close look at the hospital scene reproduced in the upper right. How many errors can you spot? I count four.