Title Pages: The Batman Strikes #18
It’s time for another installment of Title Pages, featuring another title page from my run on The Batman Strikes! which was a tie-in comic for The Batman animated TV series. A Title Page is the page which features the story title and credits for the issue, and is often (but not always) a Splash Page, which is a full-page image, rather than a page broken up into multiple panels.
In The Batman Strikes! #17, Chief Angel Rojas was still the top cop in Gotham City. By issue #18, Police Commissioner James Gordon has arrived on the scene, and with him his daughter Barbara Gordon, aka Batgirl!
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Again the title page was page 2, so here’s the set up on page 1, where Commissioner Gordon is working late an checking on the whereabouts of his daughter, who happens to be dealing out justice (with the help of a handy push broom) to some low-level street thugs trying to rip off a 24-hour laundromat. I’ve always seen Gordon as very blue-color and overworked, so I enjoyed drawing him illuminated only by his desk lamp in a darkened office. Seeing his name reversed and backlit in the window of his office door was another fun touch. The Gotham City Map seen on the finished page was not rendered by me, but was an existing map of Gotham I found online, and I sized and angled it to fit into the artwork and provided it separately to inker Terry Beatty for him to paste into place once the original art was inked. Note that we’re showing Batgirl on her cell phone here, but saving a good look at her for the big reveal on the next page.
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So here’s the title page and our reveal of Batgirl as she doesn’t let being outnumbered intimidate her in the slightest, even in these early days of her crime-fighting career. If you compare the pencils to the finished page, you can see that she disappears into her cape a little bit. This was again due to the dark, saturated colors in combination with the cheaper paper used on this series as I’ve lamented about before. Consider it part of my ongoing crusade for DC to make digital editions of all the issues of this series available. So far they’ve only released the first three issues digitally!
While not appearing in this scene, the villain of the issue was Poison Ivy, and given the title of the story, I tried to give the title logo a decorative, floral approach. I like how it turned out.
I’ll have more installments of Title Pages soon, but until then you can check out previous installments! As always, questions and comments are welcome!
Tags: Batgirl, Batman, Batman Strikes, Commissioner Gordon, Poison Ivy, The Batman Strikes, Title Pages
The Batman Strikes! | Christopher Jones | 
March 9, 2013 12:00 pm | 
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