What ever happened to the project about the caped crusader?

So, as the horribly stolen Neil Gaiman title reads, this is a little bit of an update on my thoughts surrounding bringing back my Batman Live project. To be fair, I had never really liked the outcome of the project. With the final details of the show being released when my project was nearly under wraps it was too late to do anything about it. So there is that horrible feeling of awkwardness when you have two things that aren't going to work with each other.

There was also the feeling that what I had done was never going to feel like a proper project. So, today I sat down, shoot the sleep from my eyes and began re-exploring the artwork of Batman. An hurrah! I struck gold.

When I was looking for an era of Batman I wanted something that could be colourful, but not campy. The campy era...well I don't hate it, but I can't enjoy it as much as I enjoy Batman being the detective rather than attending a stamp collection fair. I needed something that struck a balance.

And lo, it happened - please enter the artwork of Marshall Rogers. Probably one of the most creative artists to have draw Batman he did something that - on paper - sounds almost impossible. The costume was blue. 

And I really don't have a clue why he did it, but honestly it has always looked fantastic. Perhaps it was coming from the camp era of Batman that the costume still retained the colours much like Miller did in The Dark knight. But that's not really important right now. What it is is perhaps the starting point for my new Batman live designs. 


It's odd actually that the costume would be so colourful. In this portion of Batman's life, well things where a little grim and dark, the Second Robin died, the series became far more dark borrowing from Miller's notes. So really it is the perfect blend of the redesign. It contains the weight of the darker elements of the series, but with a costume that is always larger than life. Hell it even manages to have the yellow and black Bat-symbol, something personally has varied in success throughout the series. Rogers also had a thing for making the cape billow out and flow behind him, giving him an other worldly and perhaps a little bit of a operatic appearance.


The best example being here -

This image on it's own his now a new starting point for the posters. It's far more theatrical than my original designs and focuses both on the dark imagery of the character, but it's not shying away from the flare. Something I think I missed completely when working on it originally. 

And then there was the poses. Because of Batman's style and history there have been a number of look's he's been given, the icon shadow of the cowl. The problem is, well they have become stock images. The same soft of composition and visual motif being repeated over and over again felt tired. Hence why in the original posters the text was vertical against the left side, and in the yellow of the Bat-symbol's oval. It was unconventional, something that wasn't normally done on comic covers, admittedly I was taking cue's from Dave Gibbon's cover of the Watchmen, with the massive smiley and blood stain, the iconic image for the cover, while the text bold and powerful runs up the side. I was intending it to be a bit of a homage to the original idea. Though looking bat the way the text was placed and the eventual lay out ment that there wasn't much of a resemblance to it. 

Before I ramble on about how DC are running out of interesting poses for the Dark Knight - I will instead talk about the kinds that have potential for a poster. 

At this point, this style is a hot contender. It's actually a rather nicely done image, again theatrical and rather bold with a stark colour contrast. I will need to track down the artist who did this because I really do enjoy it. What sells it to me is the way the cape moves around him, being far more free and less stiff and confined, it makes him feel as if he is on up high watching over the world. 

This one - more in line with the my original idea. This one more action orientated. Posed for a fight, it's a tense picture, with minimal focus on Batman, instead giving us a shot that focuses on his foes as much as it does him. But reducing him only to a cape and shadow, because really, that's how he fights. You don't see his face, you see a blur, a whirlwind of shape and colour. He's also hunched, like a monster or perhaps more appropriately a trained fighter ready to give it his all. 

Another by Rogers, and this one is a cracker, we see Batman, his face like the Joker's grinning, standing over the bodies of three people with the same face, and swept into the cape is the title. All the while with rain and lightening filling the air. It's tense, and the intrigue of the cover baffles me as to how we get here with this situation. Again though there is that flare making it more like a film poster than a comic cover. It's these elements that I'm attempting to capture in the hopes of making something big and entertaining for my revised Batman live project. 


So thats some of the working as to how I got here. Hopefully, I will be able to share of my of working/reasoning, and perhaps even the sketches that take me to the final idea. Until then, be seeing you.