Enter the Batcave, with Dick Sprang!
Crazy time at work has wound down, but I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather the last few days. So once again, I can only present you with pretty pictures for your enjoyment. Or, to be precise, just one pretty picture. But this one’s kinda special, I think: a full layout of the Batcave, done as a lithograph in the 1990s by Dick Sprang, the finest Bat-artist of the Golden Age (and the man with the funniest name in comics history). Sprang defined the look of Batman in the character’s first decade, and is still one of the best artists to ever work on the character, as I think this insanely-detailed piece of artwork shows:
click to REALLY embiggen
It’s pretty stunning work, and absolutely jam-packed with trophies taken from Sprang’s many years working on Batman comics. There’s a nice run-down of all that here: Comics Alliance Secrets of the Batcave, but for now I’ll just urge you to notice the incredible, Basil-Wolverton-esque cave walls (especially the strange detail of the trap door for the bats to fly through), the weird head with the axes coming off it, and the little nod in the lower right portion of the picture to Bill Finger (the other guy whose uncredited work Bob Kane made a fortune off of back in the 1940s).
Oh, and if anyone can tell me what it says on the door underneath the giant 8-ball, I’d be much-obliged. It’s too blurry for my tired eyes to make out, and I’ve always wondered…
Dork Forty! 
Mark… I’m enough of a dork, that I wanted to know what it said on the door underneath the 8-ball. So, I went looking. If you look here
You’ll see it says Photo Darkroom… just so you’ll know.
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BOOM! Randy with the even-more-hi-res picture! Thanks, my friend. I will sleep easier knowing where the Batcave’s Phto Darkroom is.
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Well of course Bats has his own darkroom… it’s not like he can take his crime scene photos to CVS or Walgreens. Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
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