Who's the Bronze Age Clayface?

Who's This? Goop Midas.

The facts: The third Clayface, Preston Payne, first appeared at the end of Detective Comics #477, but his first full appearance in the next issue (late 1978). Suffering from hyperpituitarism, he gets some of Matt Hagen's blood and injects himself with it. The consequences fall in the realm of body horror. His flesh becomes all melty and to survive, he needs to turn other people into protoplasm (not that he can help it when he touches someone). He goes mad, naturally, and is sometimes seen in Arkham Asylum (indeed, he's featured in the Morrison/McKean graphic novel). He later becomes a member of Mud Pack, like the other Clayfaces, has a child with the fourth Clayface (Cassius "Clay" Payne - groan - becomes yet another Clayface), but isn't used much until Justice League: Cry for Justice, where he is turned into a proper shape-shifting Clayface by Prometheus, and is seemingly killed.
How you could have heard of him: People still buy and read the Arkham Asylum GN today, right?
Example story: Detective Comics #479 (October 1978) "If a Man Be Made of Clay...!" by Len Wein, Marshall Rogers and Dick Giordano

We catch up with this new Clayface in the middle of his first story, as he's about to put his fingerless glove o the lower half of Batman's face, leading the Dark Knight to consider (one imagines) a full-face mask and, like, a taser.

Whether because his body has the consistency of hard silly putty or because of that exoskeleton of his, Clayface manages to stay on his feet after that electrical discharge, so Batman retreats, allowing Payne to steal the thing he was stealing (some kind of lab equipment). And left Batman in a bit of a lurch, vehicle-wise:

I can't believe more villains don't think of doing something like this. Clayface doesn't keep his own ride for long because blinded by pain, he crashes his car and barely escapes before it goes up in a ball of fire. He really needs to "feed", and maybe getting a drunk driver off the road wouldn't be SO bad...

"Lester" then gets Clayface's fill touch off-panel and the girl in his car looks on aghast (she's a smart cookie too, because "there's something about that man that... frightens" her - is it the metly face, the dark cloak or the fact he just stopped a car with his bare hands, dear?). I don't know if the Comics Code dead against seeing people get turned into protoplasm, but they're not withholding the money shot for later. Let's keep going.

So the girl in the car runs off into the woods while Clayface shouts about how everyone recoils at his touch (well, yeah) even when he means it to be kind (like when, dude?). He steals the car, gasses and dashes, and bails out before the car rams into a police barricade. His rap sheet is getting longer by the minute. Batman finally catches up to him on top of Gotham Harrows Bridge, but the villain jumps into the river below lest he be caught. So what abandoned business is Payne using as his HQ? How about Father Knickerbocker's Wax Museum (condemned)?

It makes sense because 1) this Clayface is kind of a take on House of Wax and 2) after accidentally killing his girlfriend with his touch, Payne has replaced her with a mannequin (which we'll usually see with him at Arkham after he's sent to the Big Mad House). Of course, Batman's tracked him to his love nest. And rather than let Clayface pull the switch and make himself normal - which you'd think would be a good result given his deadly touch - the Bat unplugs the device and starts a fight. Dumb? At least he's smart enough to judo-throw Payne into his Achilles' heel.

The distraction allows Batman to destroy Clayface's machinery and rip his cape off, giving him access to his power (back)pack.

The wax museum goes up in flames as Clayface screams despondently about his Helena, snaps his bonds and races into the fire!

Batman just stands there "for an interminable moment", "struggling to decide whether or not he dare risk going inside", and then the building collapses, so that's that. Given dialog that suggests Batman never really understood what was up with Clayface, and stopped him from curing himself of his protoplasmic vampirism because he just didn't have enough information... I really don't like this portrayal of the Batman. He deserves Clayface somehow surviving to try and give him a deep-tissue massage another day.

Though Who's Who only covers the first three Clayfaces, several more would follow. How does Preston Payne make out compared to the others? As the lesser of the three, surely. His power makes him difficult to use and reuse, even if his particular pathology (loving a wax figure) makes him interesting as an Arkhamite. To my surprise, he was closer to the original model than I expected, but that makes him less iconic, not more.

Who's Next? A well-timed loser.