Rhapsodies

Today’s sketch, Hugo Strange may have been the harder sketches I have in this challenge. First there’s not much to do with Hugo Strange. Since he first appeared in the 1940s, he’s gone back and forth between generic mad scientist and evil psychiatrist.

When I first came across him, in the eighties, the writers were doing him as one of those cartoon knee-jerk psychiatrists who would show up on talk shows saying how criminals, like the Joker, were just victims of the Bat, while in secret obsessing about Batman and doing lots of evil plots, usually involved brainwashing his patients, as weapons for his cause.

Later on, most notably in Matt Wagner’s wonderful Batman and the Monster Men, he’s brought back to being a standard mad scientist and the one responsible for the aforementioned Monster Men.

So for this, I went more for the mad experimentalist, (a psychiatrists office doesn’t really say evil without another context.) Here he’s doing his very own version of the Ludovico Technique.

Incidentally, in case anybody was wondering if I forgot, second this composition was a mess because I was having trouble fitting both Strange and the “patient” he was administering the eyedrops to into the panel.