Batman Facing Superman in a Ruined City — Print & Oil Painting

We are behind the wrong shoulder. The nearer figure is turned fully away, so all we get of him is a back: an armoured cowl with short blunt ears, a heavy grey plate across the shoulders, gauntlets with a row of blades, and a long cape that falls in one unbroken piece from the neck to the ground. Not one facial expression is available to us on this side of the picture.

Facing him, twenty paces off and considerably smaller in the frame, stands a man in blue with a red cape hanging dead straight and a red and yellow shield on his chest. He is lit from the front, his face is completely legible, and he is not doing anything. The whole composition is that imbalance: the one we can read is the one with the least to say.

The ground between them is ruined and grey. Broken slabs, ash, a dark waterlogged crater on the left, and behind it a bank of pale fog with the outlines of two towers still standing. Debris hangs in the air throughout the frame, dozens of small pale chips caught in mid-fall, and it is the only thing in the picture that is moving.

A thin blue-white line crosses the armoured back at shoulder height, the reflection of a light source we are not shown. It is the single saturated colour in an image otherwise built entirely from slate, ash and the two flags of red.

Nothing in this image behaves like paint: real cloth, real weathering on the plate, depth of field falling off correctly with distance. Read it as a still rather than as a drawing. Part of our DC Universe collection, next to the two of them standing back to back and the three founders over the city.