Before co-founding Image and publishing Spawn, Todd McFarlane indulged his love of preposterously oversized capes on Batman, the original caped crusader. Most notably, in Batman: Year Two, and on the cover of Batman #423, the Dark Knight sported a massive, billowing thing that looked like monster wings, especially when he stood in dramatic poses. McFarlane Toys has immortalized this look in both action figure and statue form, but now the statue’s back in a new black deco.
In Blackest Knight…
Batman wore blue and gray at the time of the Year Two comic, but since then, he tends to wear darker shades, either blue or black. For the #423 cover, Batman was shown in shadow in a way that made his costume look dark black, with the light blue remaining as the color of the cape’s interior lining. This repaint is more literal about the color scheme and it’s 1:8 scale, which makes it approximately 9 inches tall. On the actual cover, Batman is wrapping his cape around a female companion; the statue removes her from the pose.
The statue will come in two versions. A regular version will appear at select (as yet unspecified) retailers, while a Gold Label variant will include an art card signed by Todd McFarlane and sell exclusively online at the McFarlane store.
In Batman: Year Two, a now-established Batman faced off against a darker vigilante called the Reaper, who used scythes with embedded guns to execute criminals on the streets of Gotham City. The animated movie Batman: Mask of the Phantasm adapted parts of the story, changing the Reaper to the slightly modified Phantasm due to the character’s real identity being different from the comics. McFarlane Toys is long overdue to give us a figure of the skull-faced, red anatomy-armor-wearing Reaper, who seems like he’d be a Todd fave. Mattel made one towards the end of their DC figure license.
In the meantime, this statue should satisfy the need for a dark and scary crime fighter.
