Batman Standing in a Neon-Green Dystopian City — Print & Oil Painting

The building behind him is the reason this image works. An immense dark tower rises on the centre line, tapering to a set of blades at the top, its lower storeys spread wide like buttresses, and its silhouette rhymes deliberately with the cowl standing in front of it. Architecture and costume have been designed to answer each other.

He stands at the base of it, small enough to be dwarfed and central enough to dominate anyway, arms at his sides, cape reaching the ground. Thin lines of lime green run over the chest plate, shoulders and forearms in a circuit pattern, and a short green blade is held low in his right hand. That green is generated rather than reflected: it is the only light source touching the figure.

Around him a city sprawls in teal and black, towers stacked at every distance, windows lit in narrow rows, two helicopters crossing the upper sky and cranes leaning over the skyline at the right. Lightning shows once behind the cloud, pale and unrepeated.

The palette holds to a narrow band of blue-green throughout, which is what makes those poison highlights read as technology rather than as moonlight. Part of our DC Universe collection. The green-lit skyline in heavy ink arrives at a similar colour by an entirely different route, and the swing through the city moves through the same kind of streets.