Batman Returns might have been the first superhero movie in the modern era to suffer from too many villains syndrome, but it’s hard to deny that it had style in spades. Coming off the success of 1989’s Batman, director Tim Burton took the franchise from Gothic fantasia to full-on Gothic nightmare, grotesque, raw-fish-eating Penguin and all. Key to realizing that vision was production designer Bo Welch, who took Anton Furst’s inspired designs from the first film and turned them up a notch, creating a Gotham that was somehow both grimier and more baroque than its predecessor. Now, thanks to the the Internet Archive’s compendium of Starlog back issues, a crop of Welch’s old production designs have resurfaced. A few are included below; see the rest over at Comics Alliance.
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