Batman Perched on a Gargoyle with Superman Nearby — Print & Oil Painting

The best-drawn thing here is not a person. It is the gargoyle filling the bottom third of the frame: a broad stone snout, two carved eyes picked out in acid yellow, a row of blunt fangs along the lower jaw, and two horns rising at the far corners like the arms of a chair. Batman is simply sitting on its head.

The drawing is pure comic ink. Flat greys, hard black shadow shapes, no rendered gradients anywhere except on the moon, and a heavy contour line that thickens on the underside of every limb. He crouches with both fists planted, knees wide, the cape hanging in two straight columns, and his eyes are two white slits with nothing behind them.

Superman stands on a ledge above and behind him at the upper left, small in the frame, arms loose, cape blown flat to the right as a single red plane. Placing him back there and at that size is a decision about attention: present, unhurried, waiting to be needed.

All of it is staged against a full moon rendered with real craters, the one soft object in an otherwise hard-edged picture, with a cathedral spire pushing in from the right. Part of our DC Universe collection, alongside the gargoyle crouch over Gotham and the back-to-back portrait of the same two men.