In 1993, Warner Bros. did something nobody expected. They took their acclaimed Saturday-morning Batman cartoon and put it on cinema screens, and the result, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, has outlived almost everything around it. Thirty years on it is routinely named the finest Batman film ever made, animated or otherwise, the one that understood the character as a tragedy rather than a spectacle. It gave Bruce Wayne a lost love in Andrea Beaumont, a past he could not outrun, and a villain who was his own dark mirror. Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, the definitive Batman and Joker of their generation, carried it. This is the film that proved the Dark Knight belonged to animation as much as to anyone.
This cel captures its signature image. The Phantasm rises out of the smoke, the right-hand gauntlet blade extended, the death's-head mask catching the light. It is the entrance the whole plot turns on: a spectral, Grim Reaper figure who hunts down Gotham's ageing mob bosses and disappears into smoke before any witness can look twice, leaving each of them certain they have seen the Batman. That single misread turns the city against its protector and sets the manhunt in motion. The horror of the moment, and the mistake at the heart of it, lives in this frame.
The cel is set over a hand-painted background, and the technique is the one that built the entire world of Batman: The Animated Series. The light-on-black painting method that gives this scene its depth, a figure forming out of pure darkness, was the house style of the show, and one of the men who created that style signed this very sheet. Production number 406-096, scene A70, with the Warner Bros. Animation seal at lower right.
What lifts this into a different category altogether is the signatures. Brought together at a gallery signing, six of the people who made this film and the series behind it put their names to this one sheet, and between them they are the creative spine of the modern animated Batman.
Eric Radomski, signing with his boxed "RADr" device, co-created Batman: The Animated Series and co-directed this film. The show's entire visual identity, the gothic Gotham, the noir light, the backgrounds painted on black, came from his hand; he went on to help shape the wider DC Animated Universe. Alan Burnett produced the series and co-wrote and co-produced the film from his own story, one of the most prolific architects of DC animation across the decades that followed. Tom Ruegger, chief creative executive at Warner Bros. Animation and executive producer here, was the force behind a golden age of the studio, the creator of Animaniacs, Tiny Toon Adventures and Pinky and the Brain. Kevin Altieri directed on the series and served as a sequence director on the film, his action staging among the most admired in the show's run. Frank Paur was the most prolific director on Batman: The Animated Series, more episodes than anyone, a sequence director on the film, and later the directorial hand behind Gargoyles.
And Bruce Timm. Co-creator of Batman: The Animated Series, the designer who drew the look of the characters themselves, co-director of this film, and the single most important figure in the last forty years of animated DC. Every animated Batman since carries his fingerprints. His name on this sheet is the one a collector reaches for first.
The accompanying studio certificate confirms the piece and carries the Warner Bros. identification number IFA 4389.
The film's signature moment, on original production art, signed by the people who made it what it is.