The Blank

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
That's a hell of a poker face.

Renee Montoya: Bite me.
The Question: Can't. No mouth.

—52

The human brain is hardwired to recognize faces. Humans will even see faces where there are none, such as the man in the moon. So there is something very disturbing about a person without a face. Meet The Blank.

The Blank is a humanoid character with no face. Perhaps it is a disguise to unsettle opponents. Perhaps they were a victim of some entity that steals faces, a common form of Transformation Trauma. Or perhaps they're just that good at poker.

Not to be confused with The Faceless. Compare Faceless Eye and Eyeless Face. The Nondescript might as well not have a face, given how tough theirs is to recall. See also Malevolent Masked Men and its extra-blank subtrope White Mask of Doom.

Has nothing to do with Story of the Blanks.

A subtrope of this is The Noseless.

Examples of The Blank include:

Advertising

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • The Question from The DCU and the Diniverse as well as John Doe, the Generic Man, who can turn anything he touches featureless (but labeled).
  • The Global Peace Agents in OMAC by Jack Kirby also used masks to make themselves appear blank-faced. The Kirby series was retconned into the mainstream DCU by John Byrne as a closed time loop caused by OMAC going backward in time and preventing World War Two. (The end of the Byrne story has OMAC preventing himself from doing so.) It has since been retconned even more in Final Crisis, in which the new Question, Renee' Montoya, appears to become the first Global Peace Agent. The implication is that the blank-face masks worn by all Peace Agents in OMAC's future are based on the Question's mask (and probably use a "later generation" of the same technology).
  • Rorschach, the Captain Ersatz of the Question in Watchmen, a particularly weird example because of the shifting patterns of his mask. It seems like you should be able to project facial expressions onto it, but you can't.
    • Some find the temptation to try is appropriately irresistible.
  • A very early Batman story (Detective Comics #37, 1939) features a man whose face has been erased by the villain. Weirdly he could still speak and there is no indication in the story that the condition is reversible.
    • Hilariously, he hardly even seems to care. He scares the hell out of Bruce Wayne in the first few panels, but both men shrug it off like he just stepped on his foot or something.
  • Another one-shot Batman villain was Dr. No-Face. No prizes for guessing what his gimmick was.
    • I bet Two-Face STOLE it!
    • Particularly disturbing is another No-Face (no relation to the guy above) appearing in Battle for the Cowl: Arkham Asylum, where he tops off an already creepy comic BY PAINTING HIS FACE TO LOOK LIKE THE FREAKING JOKER. Why he has no face is even more disturbing; he glued a ceremonial mask on (long story) and his father tore it off when he saw him wearing it. (It later turns out, however, that he doesn't exist, and Jeremiah Arkham has been hallucinating all his "special" patients. Whether that makes him more or less disturbing is another question...)
  • The Chameleon has no face of his own in Spider-Man when not impersonating someone.
  • Johnny Sorrow from The DCU has no human face... but pull aside his mask and you die.
  • The Awesome Android from The Marvel Universe, is an artificial person with a blank metal cube for a head. He can't talk, and when he appears working in a law firm in the pages of She Hulk, he uses a chalkboard to communicate.
  • Dimensional Man, a minor villain in the Marvel Universe (created by Steve Ditko, who also created the Question).
    • Another one-shot Marvel villain was actually called "The Blank". It wasn't just his face, though - he had a force-field generator that made his entire body look like a greyed-out silhouette.
  • In the original series of Batman and the Outsiders, one storyline had Halo having a recurring nightmare where her face was pulled off like a mask, revealing her to be faceless underneath.
  • During Grant Morrison's run of Doom Patrol, Flex Mentallo describes a number of his former teammates in one issue. Among them was the Fact, whose appearance and name are a clear homage to/parody of the Question. The Fact went on to feature (sort of) in Flex's own miniseries.
  • In one of the early issues of the series W.I.T.C.H., Will dreams that she's woken and looked in the mirror to find that she has no face! Then she tries to draw one on with a black marker before being woken up.
  • The Doctor Who Magazine strip gives us Shayde, whose head is a featureless black sphere.
    • And the faceless children from "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night".
    • A Doctor Whoa strip speculated that the reason for the Tenth Doctor's regeneration would be having his face worn away from too much kissing.
  • The android Zero from New Mutants and other books in the Marvel Universe.
  • Megaman from the Nova series in the Marvel Universe.
  • The Faceless Fiend from the Marvel Comics The Tomb of Dracula series. The Faceless Fiend could transfer features or body parts from others onto his featureless form, leaving blank flesh on his victim in its place.
  • One alien scheme in Strikeforce: Morituri involved an alien "healer" plant, which killed people by making their skin overgrow their mouth and nostrils, leaving their corpses looking like this.
  • Yor, the Faceless Hunter from Saturn, an obscure DC space villain best known for his appearance on Batman the Brave And The Bold.
  • In Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Anti-Monitor briefly causes the Psycho-Pirate to lose his face in order to bring him to submission.
  • A Marvel-published issue of Scooby Doo dealt with a faceless phantom trying to scare an inventor into giving up his plans for a teleportation device. Turns out the phantom, when unmasked, was a schmuck who feared teleportation devices would render airlines obsolete and he wouldn't be able to see the stewardesses. And the clincher was the inventor's teleportation device was phony.
  • In Darkblade the "God-Child" of Othernesse has only mouth on its head, no other features. It talks and occasionally screams.

Fan Works

  • The Face is a comic book parody character used in short stories of comic book fan fiction by Ben del Mundo. He was created on November 20, 2004, and was inspired by the DC Comics character, the Question. His attire consists of a costume of gray, complete with trenchcoat, fedora, pants, and gloves. In addition he wears a faceless mask in order "to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies" and uses his journalistic investigative skills to solve crimes.
  • In the long Final Fantasy VII fic Sink to the Bottom With You, our heros face up against faceless soldiers, among other similar horrors cooked up by Hojo and hiding out in the Midgar Sewers.
  • One of the dominant villains of The Otherworld Anthology is The Hatter, an evil version of the Alice in Wonderland character with no face save for a pair of bulging eyes.

Film

  • Xayide in The Neverending Story II: The Next Chapter starts out this way. Then she literally puts her face on. Watch it here.
  • The faceless dancer from Legend.
  • Will Turner finds a faceless corpse in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The man literally had his face sucked off by the tentacles of the Kraken, an event Gibbs mentioned earlier in the film. (Just in case you needed reminding, this is from the same director as The Ring...)
  • In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, when Joel escapes with the memory of his ex-girlfriend into an already-erased memory, the characters he sees are distorted and have no faces. In another scene, he confronts the memory of his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend (who, coincidentally, is erasing his memories) he forcibly turns him around, but since he's only ever seen him from behind all he gets is the back of his head again.
  • The Toxic Avenger uses video erasing equipment to erase the face of a henchman in the third movie.
  • Blood and Black Lace
  • Toward the end of Dolores Claiborne, Selena sees the back of her own head while facing a mirror. When she tries to turn around, she has no face. This happens just before her bad memories come back.
  • A soldier in Saving Private Ryan gets his face blown off during Omaha Beach, though that's actually quite distinctive: people would readily be able to recognise that.
  • Pictures from the movie Surrogates (basically Second Life in Real Life via sexy androids) show the two leads inspecting android soldiers: their faces consist of two tiny camera lenses for eyes and vague brow/nose ridges.
  • Dick Tracy featured "The Blank", a faceless gangster super-villain alter-ego who acts as the Chessmaster of the film.
  • In The Brothers Grimm, one of the girls loses her face to a mud baby. You might forget it for time.
  • The trope was subverted in the film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun; makers of the film included extensive dream/fantasy sequences with actor Timothy Bottoms to get around the fact that his character spends the entire novel with a blank, box-shaped mask over his completely destroyed face.
  • Ugg and Lee's default forms in the Critters series are white faces that lack features.
  • The reflective robots guarding the bomb on the train in Sucker Punch.
  • A particularly fucked up instance in the slasher film Smiley.

Literature

  • In Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart (which would become Hellraiser), the Engineer (a fifth cenobite known by reputation by Frank at the story's beginning), doesn't show up until the end. This may be a questionable example if he was only given human shape by virtue of occupying Julia's wedding dress.
  • H.P. Lovecraft's nightgaunts.
  • The Terrible Trivium in The Phantom Tollbooth.
  • In The King of the Swords by Michael Moorcock, Corum, an incarnation of the Eternal Champion has to face god of Chaos "Mabelode the Faceless" (or perhaps "Mabelrode").
  • Simon R. Green's Nightside series has the Harrowing, unstoppable constructs with no faces, who are a constant source of terror to John Taylor throughout the series.
  • From The King in Yellow, the Stranger in Pallid Mask aka the Phantom of Truth, whose equivalent haunts the protagonists in one of the short stories. He is a living corpse whose face is white smooth like a mask. The Stranger might also be Hastur "the King in Yellow" of the Cthulhu Mythos.

"I wear no mask."

  • The titular character in Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, who seems to have inspired the Lovecraft example above. When his mask is removed, it is revealed he has neither face nor body, and his cloak falls to the floor.
  • Indirectly used in Terry Pratchett's Men at Arms, when Carrot offers to reveal the face of a killer to a clown. Surrounded by painted eggs which document the make-up worn by professional clowns, he shows the witness an unpainted egg. As the Fools' Guild indoctrinates clowns to think of their make-up as their real face, the clown retreats in horror from the "faceless" egg. In truth, Carrot has deduced that the murderer isn't a clown at all.
  • The protagonist of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man is haunted in his nightmares by The Man With No Face (Looming. Silent.) Diagnosed as his subconscious denial of his business rival as his father.
  • In Author Mary SanGiovanni's books Found You and The Hollower the big bad is a faceless creature in a fedora hat and trench coat who uses bogyman tactics to break you so he can feast on your fear and despair.
  • In one of the Indian in The Cupboard books, Omri's father is accidentally sent back in time to inhabit a faceless Iroquois Indian corn doll. He becomes a miniature of his human self, with a flesh-and-bone face, but no features. Doubles as And I Must Scream.
  • The recent SF novel Eudeamon by Erika Moak uses this trope. An earlier version of it can be found online at https://web.archive.org/web/20130630143131/http://www.evil-dolly.com/txt/Eudeamon.htm Suffice it to say, much of this story qualifies as horror, even though technically it is a love story.
  • Elli Quinn becomes this in The Warrior's Apprentice when she takes a plasma burn to the face. Fortunately, plastic surgery does wonders in the future.
  • The Stationery Voyagers have barely-there, almost non-existent faces. And when wearing their caps, their facial features aren't even depicted at all. Exceptions would be Liquidon and Erasaxo, who are FacelessEyes.
  • The E.F. Benson story The Step features this.
  • The Goosebumps short story Broken Dolls features a creepy old woman who crafts dolls, but doesn't include facial features on her creations. It is later revealed that she uses a type of magical gel (referred to as "dolly jelly" by the protagonist's younger brother) which not only robs the unfortunate victims of their faces, which then end up on the specific doll, but their souls apparently become trapped in the dolls, too.
    • In the Give Yourself Goosebumps book Welcome to the Wicked Wax Museum, one of the possible endings was that your face gets stolen, and the front of your head only has smooth, blank wax where it used to be.
  • Johnny Got His Gun could be said to be a pioneer of this trope going into full-blown horror territory, with the novel's main character (who lost his arms, legs, and face in an explosion during World War I) spending the entire novel with a featureless box-shaped mask covering up the face portion of his caved-in skull. It also gets points for coming up with a way for someone without a face to communicate in a realistic fashion (he uses Morse Code).
  • In the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Sandgorgons have no facial features.
  • In Those That Wake, the man in the suit is described as being hard to describe, with a lack of facial or clothing features but definite familiarity.

Live-Action TV

  • Doctor Who examples:
    • The Raston Warrior Robot from "The Five Doctors"
    • The Wire's victims from "The Idiot's Lantern"
    • "Forest of the Dead" - the faceless doll.
    • Further back, all the humans who have their faces stolen by aliens in the "The Faceless Ones".
    • The Handbots in "The Girl Who Waited".
  • Look Around You contains a couple examples of this:
    • In the pilot episode, it is explained that the "queen" of a calcium molecule escaping makes the entire molecule unstable and can lead to the dreaded "Helvetica Scenario." What exactly happens is unclear, but the end result is the victim losing their face. Clip
    • In the last episode of Series 2, Sir Prince Charles ends up looking faceless after Leonard Hatred sprays him with his "Psilence" liquid skin. (It's not explained how His Royal Highness is able to breathe after this happens, but he seems to manage.)
  • Sapphire and Steel encountered one of these in Assignment 4 (named Mr. Shape in the credits); aside from being faceless, most of the time he could use two actual faces (both of them pretty nondescript).
  • Tom has a vision of Maia sans face in The 4400. The combination of The Blank and a Creepy Child pushed this scene into fearsome overdrive. Also, he can't see her face is because she's just been the subject of a Ret-Gone via Time Travel, making the whole thing that much worse.
  • Pariodied somewhat on 30 Rock. On a show within a show episode, we see a manager whose face appeared to be blurred for the camera, but we learn he has "Blurry Face Syndrome."
  • Parodied in The Mighty Boosh - Vince describes Howard as "generic looking" and when he paints his portrait, paints his face as a big pink circle, like a balloon. Howard's uninterested Love Interest Mrs Gideon agrees that it looks just like him, and later on Dixon Bainbridge draws a sketch of Howard the same way.
  • The true forms of the aliens in the Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode "The Tale Of The Thirteenth Floor"; in fact, the protagonist turns out to be one too at the end.
    • The people who had their faces stolen in "The Tale Of Many Faces". She couldn't take away their personalities, though. Not true blankness, actually.
  • In Star Trek's "Charlie X", Charlie turns a laughing crewwoman into a faceless freak.
  • In Star Trek: Voyager's "The Fight", Chakotay fights a being from a region of chaotic space; the being is wearing a boxing hoodie that hides his face, when the alien is finally revealed, he has no face, only a starfield.
  • Blank-ness turns lethal on Fringe, when a string of victims' facial features start rapidly growing over, causing death by suffocation. Even a tracheotomy can't save them, as the growing tissue quickly seals any such airholes as fast as they are made.
  • Mighty Morphin Power Rangers had The Face Stealer in one episode, who could steal faces even through the Rangers helmets, leaving them mindless zombies.
  • The Green Man from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia wears a faceless spandex bodysuit.
  • The Bringers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer are sort of this, given that they seem basically expressionless, emotionless and have skin growing over where their eyeballs should be. The show's creators specifically commented that making them look like deformed humans was creepier than most of the other demons they used.
  • The New Twilight Zone: The labourers in "A Matter of Minutes"
  • The renegade aliens in The X-Files have no faces as a result of having sealed every orifice on their body to prevent infection by the black oil.
  • In Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights all the actors in the "Untitled Street" sketch are given blank faces so they can be as neutral as possible.
  • In Kamen Rider Double, the True Final Boss Utopia Dopant does this to all of Shotaro and Phillip's friends in the penultimate episode, since Phillip's emotional turmoil will accelerate his evil plan. Too bad for him all he really did was trigger one of Shotaro's finest Crowning Moments.
  • The Human Being mascot of Greendale on Community, consists of a faceless white nylon bodysuit.
  • The Batman parody Bat Thumb had the Villain No-Face, who had no face, and whose evil plot was to disperse the same chemical which caused him to lose his face throughout the city.

Music

  • The surreal music video for the Manic Street Preachers' 'If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next' features an entire faceless family - they have noses although no nostrils but their eyes and mouths are simply papered over with blank flesh. Combined with the song itself, it's very disturbing.
  • The interior art of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here depicted a faceless man in the desert dressed in business attire and hawking Pink Floyd records. He probably falls somewhere between The Blank and Invisibility due to the fact that while he definitely seems to have a head, his limbs are clearly invisible.
  • Probably one of the least strange things to appear in the Deranged Animation that is the music video for I Miss You by Bjork.
  • The cover of the Boards of Canada album Music Has the Right to Children shows a faceless family.
  • Stephen Jones' album cover Beautiful features Stephen Jones himself with women with no faces.
  • One of The Monkees' albums, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd., uses this trope in its cover art.

Oral Tradition, Folklore, Myths and Legends

  • The noppera-bō of Japanese myth like to do this as a way to scare people: They're shapeshifters, and once they've finished playing with their latest victim, they wipe away their current face before vanishing.
    • From the same mythos, mujina sometimes scare people by posing as noppera-bō (when mujina are their own sort of creature rather than another name for tanuki, anyways.) Westerners primarily know of both from Lafcadio Hearn's short story "Mujina", which has led to noppera-bō being identified as mujina in works such as Dungeons & Dragons.
  • It's unclear whether or not a mythological character with no facial features actually exists in Chinese Mythology, but one parable told by Daoist philosopher Chuang Zu tells the story of The Blank "Hun Dun": the other gods took pity on him and tried to give him regular facial features like everyone else, but the process ends up killing him.

New Media

Newspaper Comics

Tabletop Games

  • The Smothered Folk in Don't Rest Your Head
  • The Lying Darkness in the Legend of the Five Rings CCG and RPG setting can give incredible stealth and mimicry skills to ninja - the only cost is a literal and figurative loss of identity. Their faces become smooth as eggshells when they're not imitating someone - when they revert to their shadowy selves, they can cause their features to melt off, revealing this blank slate and seriously freaking out whoever sees the effect.
  • Dungeons & Dragons.
    • The Basic D&D Known World and Ad&D Mystara settings featured a monster called the mujina, which was based off of a misidentification of the Japanese noppera-bō. Angels are also faceless of the 4th edition. According to the Word of God, this is a change made specifically to evoke this trope.
    • Faceless Hate is a magical disease detailed in The Book of Vile Darkness, that makes the victim's face disappear. The victim can still see (but not talk) and does not need to eat or breathe, but is afflicted with maddening rage that causes them to lash out and attempt to kill anything that moves.
  • The Gamebook series Fabled Lands featured a country whose leader was the person out of every generation born without a face. He did wear a mask over it, but it was featureless too.
  • Swords and Sorcery Creature Collection - Face Stealers (best nonimaginative title ever!). In their natural form, face stealers look like tall, slightly distorted lanky humanoids covered in shaggy hair, with unnaturally long arms and a horned ferret-like head that seems too small for its body. However, it's seldom encountered in its natural form as it can magically peel away the faces of their victims, leaving the unfortunate souls with no facial features, just raw flesh covering their heads and two nostril holes where the nose should be.
  • Changeling: The Lost features a version of the Noppera-bo as inhabitants of the Hedge.
  • In Magic: The Gathering, overlaps with White Mask of Doom in the Phyrexian Machine Orthodoxy (the Porcelain Legion to be more precise) and their Grand Cenobite Elesh Norn. The "porcelain" plates they wear on their faces look like masks, but actually grow as a part of the body of native Phyrexians and are grafted organically into the bodies of new, usually involuntary converts. Note that Elesh Norn herself is only a partial example - contrarily to the majority of her legion, the lower part of her face is still visible under her extravagant plate.
  • Despite the similar name, Blanks from Warhammer 40,000 are not an example of this. They're people who are born without souls, and generate a feeling in other people that is similar to the described affect above, but aside from that, are utterly normal humans.
    • Eldar Harlequins provide a straight example from the same universe. Being Scary Clowns, they wear elaborate Harlequin costumes which can cause various hallucinations or delusions to afflict enemy troops. The models often often depict them with a mask that is half The Blank and half face.
  • In Mortasheen, Goza start out like this, but have a biologically programmed urge to make their own faces through self-mutilation.

Theme Parks

  • At Disney's Hollywood Studios, the walkaround characters include the green army men from the Toy Story films...who have green mesh over their face, probably not scaring any children at all.

Toys

  • Whatsherface dolls. Similar to Blanca, you can make them 'un-blank' but still... [1] [dead link]
  • Quite a few LEGO minifigs that have helmets covering their heads don't sport faces underneath. This is especially true for older figs.
    • Bionicle has the Toa Inika, who have this piece as their true head. In-story, it's explained that their faces give off an intense glow, so you couldn't see them anyway.
      • Poor Matoran Kazi has a multi-function socket piece (AKA "hand") for a head. Essentially, it's just a connector for supporting his mask, while the other Matoran all have regular head pieces.

Video Games

  • Hakumen in the BlazBlue series always has his face covered by a featureless white mask. His name basically means white face or blank face.
  • Ideal Mary of Persona becomes this way in the Lost Forest when she figures out she is not the real Mary.
    • In Persona 2: Innocent Sin, Shadow Maya still has a face in her character portrait, but her character sprite has no eyes (the only facial feature visible on the sprites) to make her effectively faceless when she shows up. It's the first of several (obvious) signs that something is very wrong with her, though it's surprisingly easy to miss at first but for a subtle feeling of wrongness about her appearance.
  • Blanca, the cat with no face from Animal Crossing. Because this is a game where An Interior Designer Is You, you get to give her a face! Using a magic marker!

Blanca: (with a male voice) DRAW ON ME!
Player: (aghast) OH MY GOD!!!

  • The "Nopperabu" effect in Yume Nikki, which is a reference to the noppera-bo, spirits from Japanese folklore that appear to be ordinary humans, but have no faces.
  • None of the characters in The Granstream Saga have any faces (observe), a stylistic choice which some people found disturbing. The only exception is that characters with moustaches still have them drawn on in the right place.
  • The bubble-head nurses from Silent Hill. A lot of the more humanoid monsters in the series tend to lack faces too, or have Eyeless Faces. Although, you're lucky if that's the only thing wrong with them.
  • Many characters are faceless during battle scenes in Fire Emblem games in the Game Boy Advance games, and more recently in the Nintendo DS game, although some just have certain features removed, such as their mouth and nose.
    • To be fair, that probably has more to do with the low resolution of the graphics.
  • The Tall Man from the Chzo Mythos and Trilby at the beginning of the first game and in The Art of Theft
  • Dark Link from the The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. In most games he doesn't even have eyes.
  • Apparently, Xion from Kingdom Hearts was like this at one point or another, or rather she has a face, but what people see in her depends on who they have connections to or what they expect to see in her.
  • The Cyborgs (the enemies with treads for legs, not the Mjolnir Mark IVs) in the Marathon series.
  • The Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows has the staff of the orphanage-turned-asylum, shadowy silhouettes created from the memory of the Cradle, representing the faceless adults keeping order between the children. They're really really scary.
  • Faceless Squall from Final Fantasy VIII. It's so creepy, it's even the game's Nightmare Fuel page image!
  • While he's not entirely faceless, Decoy Octopus from Metal Gear Solid cut off his nose and ears in order to make his disguises more convincing.
  • Ace Combat games do something like this with COFFIN-equipped planes that have no outwardly visible cockpit.
  • EverQuest has a faceless god in Cazic-Thule, the god of fear. It's worth noting that the rest of his body is heavily muscled and brutal-looking, and he has four arms. And no face. So how do you tell whom he's most likely to put those arms to use on?
  • The Flash game Gretel and Hansel 2 introduces creepy squiggly things that steal faces from other people. Their victims are turned into Blanks and lose all motivation and drive along with their faces - they can't even move. This even applies to their ghosts.
  • In another Flash game, But That Was Yesterday, all of the characters have no facial features except for a nose.
  • Generic nameless soldiers in Super Robot Wars tend to be this, both good and bad. It's not too noticeable if they're wearing space suits, but some of them look rather creepy.
  • Staryu and its evolution Starmie from Pokémon.
  • A boxing game based on the Rocky movies for the Colecovision features fighters without any facial details.
  • The shareware Mike's Cards does this with the default court cards as of version 1.8 (August 2001).

Web Comics

  • In Chapter 18 of Gunnerkrigg Court, Robot S1 fights a large, bull-like robot whose head is just a square slab of metal. Zimmy and Antimony run into "Nobodies" in Chapter 19, who have nothing but black smudges where their faces should be. Apparently, this is also how real people sometimes look to Zimmy.
  • The faceless villain from The Incredible and Awe Inspiring Serial Adventure of The Amazing Plasma-Man is named, appropriately enough, Blank. Though he does wear goggles.
  • A very major antagonist in Sam and Fuzzy is even CALLED 'Mr. Blank.' That's his name. He drinks tea through his mask. He belongs to a sect within the ninja mafia called the 'blankfaces'; elite operatives trained from childhood, who all use masks like this (different colours are apparently used to tell them apart; the only other blankface shown is called Mr. Black and wears the exact same outfit, only, you know, black.)
    • Mr. Blank's face is eventually revealed retroactively when it is revealed he had infiltrated the supporting cast before the start of the current arc in a clever disguise -- namely, by taking his mask off. Mr. Black's face is revealed in a Flash Back.
    • There's also a somewhat different sect that uses the stitching on their masks to make letters. There's a plot focusing around Mr. X and Mr. Y, though Mr. X seems to prefer leaving his mouth exposed.
  • A few characters in Cat Legend, notably Mindy, have had their faces erased after they told a secret they were to have never known.
  • In YU+ME: dream, Faceless Man is an example of this trope, though he does eventually grow a mouth of sharp teeth.
  • Three of the guardians in Homestuck (John's dad, Rose's mom, and Dave's bro) all only have one notable facial feature (Dad's nose, Mom's mouth, Bro's glasses). Bec, Jade's guardian (and pet dog) lacks any features whatsoever. The facelessness is either an art style or a representation of how the four kids see their guardians. Doc Scratch on the other hand, has no facial features whatsoever. His head is just a big, white circle.
  • The most beautiful fairy of them all whose "head was perfectly square like an apple box" from Oglaf. NSFW.
  • T.O.E. in Rice Boy and Order of Tales is a machine man with a small circular screen for a head.
  • Three from A Path to Greater Good has just a white, plain expanse for a face under that mop of black hair.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Koh the Face Stealer from Avatar: The Last Airbender can turn people into this.
  • There was an episode of Scooby Doo where the villain was a faceless robot zombie, "The No-Face Zombie Chase Case". Yes, that's the actual title.
  • Probably not the same thing, but in an episode of The Simpsons Homer goes on an impromptu vision quest, and at the end sees what appears to be his wife. When he goes around her to look at her face, it's just her backside all the way around.
    • In another episode, the family watches the Guinness World Records, and one record is "Man with the smallest amount of faces: zero!" [muffled cries of "help!"]
  • Many, many, many of the Transformers. The most notable of which, however, would be Shockwave, whose entire face is made up of one big, menacing eye, without even so much as a faceplate. The appearance is fitting, as he's the most "robot-like" of all the characters, having few, if no, emotions similar to humans.
  • An episode of the Super Mario Bros Super Show featured a parody of Indiana Jones named "Indiana Joe." Who had NO FACE for no explicable reason. He could talk just fine - if he hadn't been drawn with no face, it would be impossible to tell because the plot and the characters react to him as if he did have a face.
    • Apparently, the faces WERE drawn... just not photographed. The animation team produced the cells used for his face but they were left out when the layers were stacked. By the time anyone noticed, they decided to finish the episode rather than start over.
    • So basically, They Just Didn't Care.
  • Cobra Commander from G.I. Joe, and pretty much every Cobra Viper level henchman, who are always portrayed in faceless masks. Also the episode "Glamor Girls", which was one huge horror episode involving a face erasing machine.
  • Hexadecimal of ReBoot has a series of masks that she quickly swaps out behind her hand to change expressions. Her real face isn't shown until halfway through the second season, when Bob removes it and reveals that there's absolutely nothing beneath. After a few seasons she gets a serious character revamp, including a face.
    • Said face is still a mask, only animated. It later goes back to static, leading the viewer to assume there's still nothing behind it.
  • One of the ghosts in Danny Phantom is a shapeshifter whose default form is faceless.
  • Peter's "poker face" on Family Guy is this.
  • The heads of the Global Peace Agency in the Batman the Brave And The Bold episode "When OMAC Attacks!"
  • An episode of Martin Mystery involved a face-stealing doppelganger.
  • In an episode of South Park, during woodworking class, a student (notably Clyde) informs Mr. Adler that Tommy got his face stuck to a belt-sander, and Tommy shows up looking like this.
  • Tweety erases Sylvester's face n the Looney Tunes short "Trip for Tat" and he is forced to have a new one tattooed on the blank space.
  • Henrietta (Toby's passenger coach) from Thomas the Tank Engine is the only mechanical character in the show not to have a face. She did, however, gain a face in one of the storybooks.
    • One episode of Thomas the Tank Engine was actually about an actual locomotive known as the City of Truro visiting Sodor. However, unlike all the other locomotives in the show, the Truro actually does not have a face!
  • Radio from The Brave Little Toaster, who for some reason, unlike all of the other appliance characters in the film, actually lacked a face.
  • The Herculoids. The title opponents in the episode "Attack of the Faceless People".
  • Mastermind from the Josie and the Pussy Cats episode "Never Mind a Master Mind". (Mastermind may have been patterned after the Dick Tracy villain the Blank, as the Dick Tracy characters were appearing in Archie Comics at the time.)
  • The E.V.O. No-Face in several episodes of Generator Rex.
  • The Terrible Trivium in the Chuck Jones animated version of The Phantom Tollbooth fit this trope.
  • Downplayed with the centaur Luz meets in The Owl House. He does have a face, but it's on his chest. The part of his body where you'd expect a face to be is blank.
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