During my convalescence (I had an eye problem that's too complicated and dull to talk about right now - it seems to be on the mend, though) I bought and watched A LOT of the Batman Animated Series. At the risk of sounding redundant - cos everyone knows this, don' t they - it really was
bloody good. Weirdly, the Joker episodes are the weakest of the series - as though the presence of Batman's arch-nemesis forces the show into a shape that doesn't quite suit it. The best episodes are the smaller, quieter ones, the morality plays, the detective stories, where Batman is almost a peripheral figure. The Joker of the Animated Series is an abstract, immutable figure, as fundamentally unchanging as Batman himself, so Joker plots mostly amount to: Joker does something evil/mischievous; Batman gets angry; Batman finds Joker and a) captures him or b) doesn't capture him (the honourable exception to this rule is Joker's Favor, which uses the big J as a plot element, and focuses instead on the woes of a perfectly ordinary Joe Bloggs).
Anyway, it's great. Also, Robin rules. His first "big" story - Robin's Reckoning - is an absolute cracker.
So, all this Bat-thinking got me digging through my sketchbooks for Bat-stuff. And here (some of) it is! I did these a couple of months back, with PITT pens and graphite pencil.
