Batman Standing Atop a Cathedral Beneath the Bat-Signal — Print & Oil Painting

In the bottom right corner, easily missed, a stone figure kneels with its head bowed and a hood drawn over its face. It is a mourner, carved for a church and left where it was put, and it is the only thing in the picture that is grieving. Everything above it is architecture and posture.

That architecture takes the whole right half of the frame: a cathedral front in dark stone with lancet windows, crocketed pinnacles, a great arch swallowing the shadow behind the figure, and a run of steps descending towards us. On the left, past the corner of it, three towers of a different century stand with their windows lit in small yellow rectangles.

The man is standing on those steps in the middle of the composition, feet apart, hands loose. His suit is plated and modern, dark grey with visible panel joins at the thigh and the forearm and a segmented brown belt; his cape is enormous, thrown out to the left in a single black sheet that fills a quarter of the canvas and blots out most of the skyline behind it.

High on the left, projected onto low cloud, the bat is drawn as a hard-edged shape with long swept wings, sitting inside a disc of pale light with the beam falling away below it. It is the brightest thing in the picture by a wide margin, and it has been placed diagonally opposite the kneeling statue so that the eye has to travel the full length of the image to get from one to the other.

The technique is inked and coloured comic work: clean contours, flat local colour, shadow indicated with a single darker value, an artist's signature scratched into the lower left corner. From our DC Universe collection, alongside the same lamp seen through rain and a splattered version of the signal at close range.