Batman #194, page 3 -- Details

I am just about to take all my Batman pages to Seth's brother Asa who will curate and keep them in a much better way than I could do here.  I am glad for Asa to be in charge, but I will miss being able to thumb through them from time to time. However, others of Seth's family pass through Asa's studio more often than they do here, so it's better for everyone.

But as I was getting pages out to pack them up, I happened upon this one.  Not an exciting page, one that in opera would be called a "recitativo"--a passageway from one incident to another. But in Seth's oeuvre there are no throwaway images.

As an artist I have to confess that I hate perspective.  That is, I admire it, but I heartily dislike making all the little measurements that would make perspective true enough to make the picture come alive.  I don't mess with it if I can avoid it. Seth refused such squeamishness.  When he had a room to draw, he put all the objects in the room in correct size and from the correct angle. And the ceilings!  Sometime I would like to do a study of ceilings in Seth's work.  They are endlessly interesting, as they elaborate upon the kind of room where the action is taking place.  The ceiling in this room is parquet--as befits a dining room in Bruce Wayne's mansion--and we see it from two different vantage points (and almost a third one in the top left panel).  We see this room from one side, and then from the other.  Everything has been imagined: the kitchen from which Albert emerges with food, the breakfast table with much left uneaten, the two windows with their drapes, the buffet with its plate racks, lovely floors, and--because Seth is the artist--framed portraits on the walls of people with funny egg-like heads.   And a bunny that follows Albert wherever he goes in Seth's Batman world--the bunny got edited out from the official ones.

In any case it's a lovely page where not much is happening, but the ambience is the star.