As you know, Mark Waid got this Batman ’66-inspired painting for his birthday. Then I heard from the painter herself … NOW IT CAN BE TOLD!
Quick recap: A couple months ago, we had BATMAN ’66 WEEK here at 13th Dimension and we ran a survey of comics creators’ favorite moments from the show.
Mark Waid had two of them, with his second “from Season 3′s Siren episode, in which we learn the secret location of Bruce Wayne’s hidden wall safe. Cleverly enough, it’s concealed behind a painting.” And he mentioned that he wanted Santa to bring him one. So his partner Christy Blanch got him one for his birthday last week.
The painter was Alys Caviness-Gober — and now you can buy the print!
HOLY PICASSO, BATMAN!
Turns out Alys has painted a number of commissioned comics-related pieces, so I’ll let her tell you about how it all came together:
“I met Christy Blanch through my daughter and son, Aly Caviness and John Caviness — they were both in her online course, “Gender in Comics.” Aly now helps Christy with the SuperMOOC and also helps out at Christy’s store, Alter Ego Comics (when Aly’s grad school schedule allows!) in Muncie, Ind.
“Christy and (one of her co-owners) Jason both liked my “Joker” prints, and asked to have them for sale at the store. Christy contacted me about the Batman ’66 TV show wall safe painting project for Mark, explaining that she wanted to surprise him with it for his birthday. I jumped on board quickly because I thought it was such a cool idea.
“Christy scoured the Internet and contacted all her comic book and Batman ‘aficionados’ in an attempt to find better photos than the two images you have in your ‘Greatest Birthday Present’ article, but those two photos are the only ones that anyone could find.”
Alys continued: “The challenge for me was to try to imagine a dead-on perspective of the wall-safe painting, and I also wanted the painting to look more like a painting than a photograph, so I used my own style and painted a textured version of the photo. The project included finding a suitable frame, and luckily I found one very similar to the one in the TV show’s photo. I painted the frame to match the photo as closely as possible. … The round safe door, the handle, and the hinges are all separately painted pieces of canvas that I then applied to the painting, (giving that) textured look.
“I was THRILLED that Christy was happy with my ‘impression’ of the painting, and of course even more thrilled that Mark liked it, too!”
We were thrilled too, Alys!
Anyway, you can get the print here, with a wide range of prices, depending on framed, unframed, etc.
Also check out www.CreativeExpressionsArts.com and squareup.com. You can contact Alys by email at alys@creativeexpressionsarts.com and check out her Facebook page. On Twitter, she’s @CEAalys.
And here are some of Alys’ other comics-related creations, including one in a series of Joker images. Says Alys: “All the Joker images I ‘created’ using my original photograph of my son, John, in Joker makeup one Halloween. There are prints available at Alter Ego.”
These were commissioned as Christmas gifts — Batwoman, Loki, Professor Pyg:
Personally, I want to know who’d commission a Professor Pyg.
Or maybe not.
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BATBOOK OF THE WEEK: Not much this week. I’ll make it easy: Catwoman #29 because that is a rockin’ Terry Dodson/Rachel Dodson cover!
