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David Finch's BATMAN Step-by-Step

The method behind the madness...

Straight from the Source, we’ve got a little “compare and contrast” today, like we did with Jim Lee’s ICONS cover a few weeks back.  This time it’s A-List artist David Finch doing his take on the Caped Crusader for the cover of the 700 issue of BATMAN.  

So speaks Mr. Finch…

“Batman is such an iconic character and I’ve been a huge fan for so long that it was a surreal and amazing experience to draw him officially for the first time. I really have to thank Mike Marts for letting me be a part of such an important mile stone in the history of this book.”

Below we have the straight pencils for the cover, followed by the fully-rendered, inked and colored version.

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Some things I notice...
 
Finch took the harder route for rendering shadows for this cover by opting out of "spotting the blacks."  For those unfamiliar in the term, if you ever see penciled work that has a lot of X's floating around, that means the artist is spotting the blacks. Those X's signify where the inker is supposed to drop down some solid black - - on Batman's lower face on this cover, for example. The thinking is that it's redundant to fill in those areas with pencil that's just going to get covered up by ink, anyway.  So the pencil will save some effort on his part by putting X's there instead. 
 
I also can't help but speculate as to what case Batman is on at this moment. I'm going to guess that it's vandalism since, between Finch's signature and all the others etched into the granite there, that gargoyle is just LITTERED with graffiti. We'll give 'em a pass, today, though, since the whole team's done a really done a great job here. I especially like what the inker's contributed in terms of texture throughout - - especially to the underside of the gargoyle. The intricate hatching definitely gives it a rough quality and the subtle impression of support bars poking out of the granite.
 
Lastly, the Source mentions that this 700th issue of BATMAN will be hitting in June, the same month Superman and Wonder Woman hit their respective 700th and 600th issues. So I put this question out to you, oh tally-taking Comic Vine community, because I can't recall myself. What title has the highest issue amount, right now? I'd assume it's DETECTIVE COMICS, since that's been running almost continuously since the 30s. What number is it up to, now? And how far behind is ACTION COMICS?
 

-- Tom Pinchuk is the writer of UNIMAGINABLE for Arcana Comics and HYBRID BASTARDS! for Archaia Comics.   Watch out for the HYBRID BASTARDS! hardcover collection this March - - available for pre-order now on Amazon.com.