Batgirl Emerging from Darkness and Flame — Print & Oil Painting

More than half of this wide canvas has nothing in it. The left side is pure unbroken black, no gradient and no incident, and it has been left that way so that the eye is pushed hard to the right where everything happens at once.

What happens is a body walking out of shadow into fire. The suit is black and reflective, cut by two long pale highlights across the abdomen; the left sleeve is a segmented silver-grey; and dead centre on the chest sits a bat in deep scarlet with its wings drawn out long and swept back to points. On the right edge of the frame a column of fire burns yellow-white with sparks lifting off it, and it lights the whole figure from that side.

The hair is the transition between the two halves. It starts dark maroon at the parting, warms through red, and ends in the same orange as the flames, so the head effectively dissolves into the fire without a hard edge anywhere. Only the mouth and the chin are lit clearly: a red lip, a jaw, and the underside of a black mask above.

One honest note on the costume. That long red bat reads as the emblem Batwoman wears rather than the yellow oval Barbara Gordon is usually drawn in, and the rest follows the same source: a black suit, red hair, red and silver accents, and no gold anywhere. The title names one character and the suit belongs to another.

Part of our DC Universe collection, next to the grey and gold suit under the Bat-Signal and Batman standing at Oracle's gravestone, which is where the same family of stories eventually goes.