Remember Robin, you owe you life, and possible imminent demise, to good dental hygiene!
A little nightmare fuel for Halloween!
Perhaps best listened to with this by our own filkertom
There's a story behind these two pictures...
They're both by Andy Fish, very much an up and coming artist IMHO who I've commissioned before. I had an image of my head of the Joker as dentist... (I swear I'd forgotten that the Joker had dressed like this in "Mad Love", with Commissioner Gordon as his victim. The idea of the Joker using dental equipment to force Robin into smiling despite being horrified was suitably creepy.
He sent me this picture to show what it would look like, but he hadn't finished inking it.
The Joker is clearly worried that Robin has been eating too many sweets on Halloween and is eager to help....
Alas that's all I ever saw of it, because it got lost in the post between there and here. It's out there somewhere though :(
Andy though, professional to a fault, offered to re-do it for me at no extra charge if I didn't mind waiting a little as he had other work on. I readily agreed...
...and THIS was the end product. He change the tone a little, and restaged it, but the essential notion is still there, and full marks for some creative rope usage.
Remember, a frown's a smile turned upside down... or in the Joker's case, a laugh's a scream turned inside out! (Hmmm.... will have to remember that one!)
But there's more to the story. As he was getting ready to send it to me, Andy's agent, who was visiting him to finalise a gallery showing, saw it and thought it would be great to include in the show.
So if you happened to be in Boston in June or July this year, and happened past the gallery called SPACE 242 and saw the Atomic Hearts displat, you might have seen this piece!
I have many fine pieces of artwork in my collection, including more than a few published pages, but I think this is the first that I can actually say has been hung in an art gallery!
And sometimes I just take the plunge. David Quiles is an artist with a very idiosyncratic style, and I was interested to seeing what he might do with Scarecrow and a captive Robin.
This is the end product. It's weird, unsettling with an almost Edvard Munch like and Robin looks REALLY freaky around the face, but it certainly has a certain monstrous atmosphere to it. (I'm sure Batman will be along to save him... sooner or later...
And for legality, Dick meets a foe who has seen one or two too many horror films... Ze Lumberjack!