Batman Hunched in Silence Above Gotham's Skyline — Print & Oil Painting

The arms are folded. Not braced, not clenched, not reaching for anything: crossed over the chest with each hand tucked under the opposite elbow, the way a person stands when they are waiting for somebody else to speak. In a collection full of fists and grapnels, that is the single most unusual gesture on offer.

We are looking up at him from below and to the left, so the shoulders read enormous and the head is small and tipped forward on top of them. The eyes are two narrow slits of pale light under the brow of the cowl and there is no other feature in the face at all.

The suit is worth slowing down for. It is built from separate plates with visible seams and fasteners: a segmented forearm, a ribbed gorget, hard panels across the abdomen with a raised strip down the centre, and utility pouches at the hip. The cape hangs from a heavy clasp and falls behind the right shoulder as a flat dark mass with no folds drawn in it whatsoever.

Colour is confined to a single blue-green with a sickly yellow-green horizon at the lower left, where a skyline the size of a fingernail stands in the haze. Rain crosses the frame as thin pale strokes and the rooftop below him is a smooth dark curve with no texture on it.

Almost nothing in the picture moves, and the composition is built so that the crossed arms are the exact centre of it. It sits in our DC Universe collection, near the same rooftop with the figure seated and looking down and a painted perch beside a stone gargoyle.