Batman, Joker and Vale in a 1989 Movie Tribute — Print & Oil Painting

Start in the bottom left corner, where a black car sits on a wet street with its headlamps lit and exhaust trailing behind it. It occupies barely two inches of canvas, painted in near-darkness, and it is the detail that dates the entire picture: long finned body, low canopy, unmistakably the Batmobile of the 1989 film.

Above it the composition opens into a poster montage. Vicki Vale holds the left, blonde hair lifted, face turned up and lit from below. The centre belongs to Batman in the black moulded suit with its yellow oval emblem, chin down, eyes lost inside the cowl. The Joker fills the upper right at a larger scale than either of them, white face, green hair, teeth bared in a fixed grin.

The medium looks like soft pastel or airbrushed acrylic. Everything is blended, nothing carries a hard edge, and the figures fade into one another where they overlap rather than being cut apart. It is the visual language of that era of film poster, reproduced with real affection.

In the upper left corner the bat-signal is thrown onto cloud in pale blue, small and unemphatic, balancing the Joker's bulk on the opposite side. Part of our DC Universe collection. The neon portrait in the black hat paints the same Joker alone, and the interrogation canvas moves the pairing forward two decades.