Batman in Grayscale Amid a Stream of Bats — Print & Oil Painting

Colour has been removed almost entirely. The picture runs on black ink, grey wash and bare white paper, with one exception: a faint brown stain across the lower jaw, warm enough to register only after you have been looking for a while.

The head and shoulders sit slightly left of centre and tipped forward, so the cowl reads mainly as a mass of black with two ears and one hard cheekbone. There is no eye to meet. The upper face has gone into shadow and the drawing offers a jawline, a mouth and nothing else to negotiate with.

To the right the figure stops being a figure. Cape and shoulder break into hundreds of small bat shapes that rise in a column toward the top right corner, dense and overlapping at the source, single and scattered by the time they clear the frame. The transition is never marked, so you cannot say where the man ends.

The ground is left as bare stained paper, flecked with ink at the corners, which gives the whole sheet the feel of a study made quickly and wet. From our DC Universe collection. The face dissolving into a swarm runs the same idea in full colour, and the smoky charcoal figure keeps the greys but reassembles the body.