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Stephen King’s novel “IT” was published in 1986, so the story’s “present day” was the 1980s and the 27-years-ago past was the late 1950s (i.e. when King himself was the age of the Losers’ Club). The “IT” films, directed by Andy Muschietti, moved the two eras decades up; now the past timeline took place in 1988-89, while the modern day was the contemporary 2010s.<\/p>\n
Since Pennywise (Bill Skarsg\u00e5rd) only awakens every 27 years,\u00a0the new prequel TV series “It: Welcome to Derry”<\/a> is set in 1962. To add some period flavor, the pilot episode shows that Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim-Fidler) owns two DC comics of the era. (HBO and DC have the same parent company: Warner Bros. Discovery.)<\/p>\n One is 1961’s “Detective Comics” #298, the first appearance of Matt Hagen, the second Clayface. Next year, the villain will be the focus of director James Watkins’ “Clayface” movie<\/a>, as played by Tom Rhys Harries, but he was really a film star before that.<\/p>\n The original Clayface, real name Basil Karlo, debuted in 1940’s “Detective Comics” #40. He was a murderous actor who adopted the costume and name of a character he’d played in a horror film. (Note how Karlo’s name is meant to sound like Boris Karloff<\/em><\/a>, who was most famous for playing Frankenstein’s Monster.)<\/p>\n Hagen’s creators, Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff, revived the “Clayface” moniker with a more intuitive meaning: he was a man transformed into amorphous, shapeshifting clay. “Batman: The Animated Series,” and reportedly 2026’s “Clayface,” used the Hagen Clayface but with Karlo’s actor backstory.<\/p>\n Is this Clayface cameo just to tease the movie? Though the Batman villain who Pennywise most obviously resembles is the Joker<\/a>, remember that the Dancing Clown is also a shapeshifter like Clayface. Thus, Teddy gets a taste of the horror ahead of him.<\/p>\n