Batman Standing on a Rooftop Under a Full Moon — Print & Oil Painting

Two discs hang in this sky and they are doing different jobs. On the right, a full moon sits clear of the cloud, small, hard-edged and cold. On the left and much larger, a bat is thrown onto a bank of vapour with a beam widening below it. One of them is astronomy and one of them is somebody's idea, and the artist has hung them at the same height so the comparison is unavoidable.

Between them the cloud has been worked into long horizontal streaks with a great deal of tonal variation, from near black at the top corners to a pale silver where the beam strikes. Bats cross it in ones and twos, perhaps thirty in total, small enough that several are only two pixels of wing.

Down on the parapet the figure stands almost centred, feet apart, cape hanging straight and heavy with no wind in it at all. The suit is dark plated armour with the emblem barely visible across the chest; the whole body is in shadow except for a thin cold edge along the left arm and the top of the cowl. To his right sits a cylindrical water tank with a conical cap, which is the one honest piece of urban furniture in the frame.

The finish is photographic. Real cloud, real metal, correct falloff of light along the roof edge, and a slight bloom around both bright objects, all of which suggests a composite rather than a brush. It is very good at what it is.

From our DC Universe collection, near an ink wash treatment of the same moon and a cathedral rooftop under the same lamp.