The Art Of The Batman by James Field (book review).

I’m a sucker for film books showing how the designers put together the requirements for films. Books such as ‘The Art Of The Batman’ shows some of the things that needed to be thought about for the second year of the Dark Knight on the streets when he had to construct everything himself, although you do have to wonder if Alfred lent a hand.

There’s enough blueprints here to keep cosplayers and car builders happy to build their own replicas. I think the biggest surprise was seeing a page of all the designs for the bat on his chest from the comicbooks and then decide to turn it into a hidden weapon. As this Batman is wearing body armour, some of that certainly makes sense.

Oddly, although the film is supposed to be concentrating of the Batman’s detective skills, we don’t see any of his forensic equipment here.

Looking at Gotham City, some of which is based off Liverpool, is all about making it look gothic.

The look at the Riddler draws some comparison to the Batman in that his disguise is also make-do. It’ll be interesting to see how it comes out on the screen but it should covey that a lot of it is make-do and on a learning curve to becoming refined and more sophisticated later. There is also a sharp reminder that this is not another origin story for the Batman. It isn’t as though the general public can’t recite it from memory by now.

The look at the nascent Catwoman shows the early evolution of her cat ears again, this time from a balaclava. Her mask is the reverse, though, with her eyes unmasked. Someone really needs to give some serious thought in the development of superhero masks and the problems of creating them in the real world. Batman, in this film, still wears a bit of black make-up around his eyes when masked although not found the right vanishing cream to wipe it off afterwards.

There’s also a look at some scenes from the film and how their presentation was made although I will have to wait until seeing it before seeing if it works or not.

  From the way samples of comicbook artist David Mazzucchelli are used, it does look like he was the biggest influence on the work here. There’s a lot of applied detail here that might only get a few minutes screentime but I bet that if they got it wrong we would all know.

I like books like this simply because they show how much work is done behind the scenes and this one is no exception, regardless of what you might think of the film. Perhaps, for me, the bigger question is that as this is the Batman’s second year on the streets, why did he give up having a throwing bat on his chest?

GF Willmetts

April 2022

(pub: Abrams, 2022. 222 page illustrated large hardback. Price: £35.00 (UK), $15.00 (US), $57.00 (CAN). ISBN: 978-1-4197-6210-9)

check out website: www.abramsbooks.com