Batman Crouching Pensively on a Rainy Rooftop — Print & Oil Painting

The pose is the argument. He is down on the rooftop with his knees drawn up, both forearms resting across them, hands hanging loose, head tipped forward and the chin nearly on the chest. It is the shape a person makes when they are waiting for something that has not decided to happen yet, and the artist has drawn it in strict profile so that nothing about the body distracts from it.

The suit is plated and technical, mapped out in overlapping segments across the shin, the thigh, the forearm and the abdomen, with a pale line running along the top edge of each plate where the wet catches. The cowl is short-eared and shows only a slot of white where the eyes are. The cape falls behind in a single dark curtain and disappears into the rock he is sitting on.

Everything is teal. The sky, the rain, the armour, the rooftop, the haze, all of it inside one narrow band of blue-green, with a single warmer note where the horizon turns pale yellow-green at the lower left and a skyline the height of a thumbnail sits inside it.

Rain is drawn as short white strokes crossing the whole surface at one angle. The artist has kept them sparse rather than dense, so the picture reads as damp rather than as a downpour, which is the right weight for a figure that is not moving.

Part of our DC Universe collection, next to a version of the same rooftop with the arms folded and the chimney perch under a clear starlit sky.