Batman Standing Triumphant Above a Gargoyle — Print & Oil Painting

Start with the base. The figure is standing on a circular plinth with a moulded rim and a band of scrollwork cut into its side, the kind of thing that exists to be screwed to a shelf. This is not a drawing of a man on a building. It is a sculpture, rendered and lit, and the whole picture behaves accordingly.

On top of that plinth sits a stone beast with its head down and its horns forward, and one boot is planted on the crown of it. The pose above is a museum pose: chest out, chin lifted, one leg straight and one bent, the cape thrown back off both shoulders and falling into two long scalloped tails that reach the base on either side.

In the hands is a coiled line. It loops out from the right fist in three or four wide oval turns and hangs slack, and a second cord drops from the belt with a batarang swinging at the end of it. Those two curves are the only relaxed shapes in an otherwise rigid composition, and they stop the figure from looking like a trophy.

Colour has been removed entirely. The whole image is silver-grey from top to bottom, the modelling worked with a single cool light from the upper left, and the sky behind is a smooth bank of grey cloud with a strip of black city silhouette along the bottom. Every surface has the same faint sheen, which is the giveaway: paint does not behave like that, but a rendered material does.

Part of our DC Universe collection, near the painted version of the same perch above Gotham and another gargoyle with Superman standing nearby.