Joker Holding a Card with a City Skyline Behind — Print & Oil Painting

Two drawing languages share this frame and neither gives way. The figure is animation flat: hard black outlines of even weight, colour filled in without gradients, hair drawn as a dozen separate spikes. The city behind him is the opposite, an airbrushed depth of ruined towers, drifting smoke and orange embers with no outline anywhere in it.

He fills most of the canvas, cropped at the elbows, leaning in from the left. A purple gloved hand holds a Joker card upright against his cheek, its jester drawn small and neat in red and blue, and that white rectangle is the brightest value in the picture.

The face is pure caricature: one visible eye reduced to a white sliver under a heavy lid, a nose bent into a hook, a grin that runs past the far cheekbone with every tooth outlined separately. Green hair, a lime bow at the throat, a mustard waistcoat with brass buttons and a violet coat complete a costume that has never needed updating.

In the lower right corner an orange and blue flower has been pinned to the lapel and painted at a size that makes it impossible to ignore. Anyone who follows the character knows what those lapel flowers are for. Part of our DC Universe collection. The painted single-card portrait performs the same gesture in near-darkness, and the Joker with a dripping cowl keeps the grin and changes the prop.