Batgirl Glancing Back with a Batarang in Hand — Print & Oil Painting

The object in the hands is the reason the pose works. It is a flat steel crescent with two swept points and a scalloped inner edge, held out in front of the body in both gold gauntlets, fingers laced over the middle of it, catching a hard specular highlight along its top edge. Everything else in the picture is soft, and that one edge is not.

She stands with her back mostly to us and the head turned sharply over the left shoulder, so the composition is a single long S from the boot at the bottom edge to the face at the top. The suit is black and lacquered, drawn with the reflections of a wet street laid over the thighs and the spine; the cape falls black on the outside and a deep gold-olive within, and a gold belt sits at the waist with a matching gold band at the elbows.

Red hair blows out to the right in a broad, heavy mass. It is the only warm colour in the frame besides the gold, and the artist has used it as a counterweight: without it, the whole figure would lean off the left side of the canvas.

Behind, the city has been reduced to nothing. Pale grey verticals, one darker diagonal, a wash of light at the shoulder height, all of it thrown out of focus by several stops so that not one window or edge can be located. It is a studio backdrop rather than a city.

The finish is airbrushed to the point of being polished, which suits a design whose whole idea is a suit that does not catch on anything. It sits in our DC Universe collection, near the same character painted beneath the Bat-Signal and the black-haired version laid out across printed lettering.