I’ve already mentioned how much I love Norm Breyfogle’s work this week, and his Scarecrow is a good example of why I love his art so much. He takes an absolute standard design, with no real deviation, and really makes it sing.
Breyfogle drew The Scarecrow during a three-part story arc by Alan Grant than ran through Batman #455-#457. This is actually a pretty significant story in Bat-history, as it’s the one where Tim Drake, the young man who was just kinda hanging out in the Batcave since “A Lonely Place of Dying,” was officially handed the mantle of Robin.
It’s winter in Gotham City, and someone’s been outfitting random people with these weird cloth skull masks that, once they put them on, turns them into crazy axe murders. Batman’s running around town trying to figure out what’s causing this and who could be behind it, and finds out on the last page of part two, when our mystery villain makes the scene.
Well, it was a mystery to me, and whoever else might have been reading Batman in 1990, but since this is part of Scarecrow week here at EDILW, you can probably guess who’s behind it.
So, Batman has fallen into the Scarecrow’s clutches, and Crane hangs him upside down and opens, one at a time, a series of vial containing particular fear compounds. Unlike his normal fear gas, each of these is attuned to evoke a particular fear. So he opens up eau de arachnapobia, for example, and suddenly Batman’s freaking out thinking he’s covered in spiders.
Meanwhile, Tim Drake has figured out who the culprit is and where he’s at, but is faced with a conundrum. Does he disobey Batman’s orders, thus risking his chance to ever become Robin (plus his own life…and Batman plunging back into pre-“Lonely Place of Dying” madness again if Drake dies on his watch) in order to save Batman’s?
He decides to go into action, not as Robin, but as Drake. Putting on a ski mask and lifting a pole, he storms Scarecrows hidout, fights through his worst fears, and straight knocks a shelf of toxins on The Scarecrow, who freaks out, thinking he’s strung up in a field being pecked and bitten by bats and robins.
Awesome.
Here’s what Breyfogle’s Scarecrow looked like:
As you can see, it's pretty much just the generic Scarecrow costume—aside from the lack of eye holes or a mouth hole, it seems pretty clear that it's just a guy in tattered rags with a bag over his head, as you can see when there's a close up profile of him. Breyfogle does a great job on the hands though, striking a nice balance between making them look sharp and claw-like and making them look like regular old work gloves.
I also like how the face is essentially expresionless, which is always kind of unnerving, except when Breyfogle wants it to have an expression, and then a very simple, minamalist type of expression shows through, of the sort you might be able to carve into a jack o' lantern. This fluctuation between realism and theatrical expressionism are pretty typical of Breyfogle's work, and you see it all the time in his Batman, who will one moment look totally real, and the next seem to be generating shadows, his eyes and gritted teeth glowing.
Note also how exagerrated all the Scarecrow's movements are. He's literally reeling aroud the scene, like a drunken silent movie actor. You can really see him kind of manic with glee at having captured Batman and Vicki Vale and finally winning his feud with Batman.
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