...to here...

...is almost 200 issues. Yet that looks like the same guy, doesn't it?

The "New Look" Batman is a great example of how to do this sort of thing right, isn't it?

And, what changes came out of it?

* Artists were now credited, instead of ghosting for "Bob Kane", and were allowed to express their own styles. But Batman and his world essentially remained on-model.

* New hairstyle for Robin.

* The yellow oval was added to the bat-symbol on Batman's costume, for trademark purposes, and his belt's equipment cylinders were elongated.

* A new Batmoblie.

That's pretty much it. No radical redesigns. No artists coming in and putting their "stamp" all over the characters. Even Neal Adams played along and kept things on-model, and only gradually made some (also very minor) tweaks in the form of the longer ears, the more stylized bat-symbol, etc.

Breaking loose from the long-running "Bob Kane"-ghost-style merely allowed for artists to be themselves, as it were, and they certainly did not go hog-wild and reinvent the wheel.

Jumping ahead another 100 issues or so...

...and another...

...and another...

...and we see that virtually nothing had changed over the 30 years since the "New Look".

That's the great thing 'Batman the Animated Series' did (for the most part, anyway - lest we forget 'Big Bad Harv'...) - aside from streamlining some of the comicbook visuals to fit the stylised look of the show, and likewise ironing out much of the comicbook history to keep the stories accessible and the series self-contained, it was still very much an 'on-model' translation of the Batman comics to TV. Indeed, it's almost a 'distilled' version of the comicbooks, since none of the modifications change the core of the character

++++++++++++

Yeah, TAS is just a brilliant distillation of the then-50-plus years of the character's history.

Heck, even the whole Big Bad Harv thing works somewhat for me, thanks to Richard Moll's brilliant voice acting. Red Claw and some other stuff, not so much.

TAS is full of what I consider to be all-time-great Batman moments. And Batman's characterization is spot-on. He's grim, obsessive, a brilliant detective, and yet he still has a sly sense of humor, and is not crazy.

The Nolan films get all the accolades, but I think MASK OF THE PHANTASM is still the greatest Batman movie ever made.

Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill ARE Batman and the Joker, for me.

+++++++++++

And of course, even in the early 'Post-Crisis' era*, a couple more cosmetic changes happen (the reversion back to the oval-less Bat-emblem, for one), and different styles from different artists, and it's STILL clearly the same character.

+++++++++++

It should be noted that those changes set up the idea that stories without the oval took place earlier in Batman's career, while the oval-symbol stories were set in the present (or recent past).

I thought that was a rather neat idea, since it paid tribute to the character's real-world visual evolution, and also allowed artists to draw both versions during the same era of comics. TAS even followed this idea, since a Kane/Mazzucchelli-style model sheet was created for TAS' flashback sequences.

The four major DC Animated Batman designs (TAS, Kane/"Year One" TAS, NEW BATMAN/SUPERMAN ADVENTURES, and JUSTICE LEAGUE) combine influences from a variety of artists, and all are interesting and valid in their own ways.

You can see echoes of Kane, Sprang, Adams, Miller, Mazzucchelli, etc. And yet they all still look like BATMAN.

Adams, Sprang, Aparo et al

.................

Neal Adams is a master and I'm glad to see Jim Aparo starting to be mentioned in the same sentences.  It seemed to me thru the years, he hasn't gotten the due he deserves.  He should be named at or near the top of any Batman artist list...IMO.

"On-model" is key, too, to what happened when what Neal was doing caught on, and other artists started drawing Batman the same way he did. Batman's look changed, but it changed CONSISTENTLY across all the books he appeared in. There might be occasional stylistic differences, but you had the sense all the artists were looking at the same "live model".

As noted in another thread recently, the Nu52 has been around about eight minutes, and already artists are drifting off the new "models". It's about the singer, not the song.

–––––

* Tho not really. The elongated ears didn't angle out to the sides, and except for the occasional "stylized" shots, the "blue" did not become black again

••

That's the Batman I first "met", so of course he has a special place in my heart. The "open" (in black and white) cape and cowl will probably always look more "right" to me than one with heavier blacks.

"My" Batman. . .