MystiCon and B & D Comic Shop Present

The Batmobile

The Batmobile is hands-down the most famous vehicle on planet Earth. Come see this amazing replica of Batman’s car displayed during MystiCon weekend! The car will be at B&D Comic Shop on Thursday afternoon and Friday before the start of the convention. The Batmobile will then be displayed at the Holiday Inn Tanglewood throughout the weekend for MystiCon. It will make superhero fans think they’ve slipped into the Batcave.

Fans can even channel their inner superhero and have their photo taken with the car. Free pictures are offered to all, outside the taped barrier.  Pictures can be taken by the patron or by the owner of the Batmobile for a $10 fee.  The pictures taken by the owner will be available on his website. Purchase a print for only $15!

History of the Batmobile:

Batman’s first appearance in “Detective Comics” no. 27 in May 1939 makes no mention of a crime-fighting car. It wasn’t until issue no. 48 in February 1941 that the Dark Knight drove a powerful red convertible the narrator refers to as the “Batmobile.” Over the next 71 years, comic book readers saw more than 100 different versions of Gotham City’s rolling arsenal, each representing cutting-edge technology and styling for the period. Comic artists were not always designing from scratch. That first Batmobile looked exactly like a six-year-old Cord 810, and later cars resembled a Studebaker, a few Jaguars, two or three Porsches, several Corvettes, a Mustang Mach 1 and even a Lamborghini.

Its first depiction on the silver screen was not memorable, owing to extremely low budgets of the 1943 and 1949 Columbia movie serials. In the first installment, Alfred the butler ferried Bruce Wayne around Gotham in a factory-stock 1939 Cadillac Series 75 convertible with the top down. When danger threatened, Robin chauffeured Batman around in the same car, but with the top up. The second movie featured the same Batman/Bruce Wayne, top-up/top-down carpool act but with a 1949 Mercury convertible.

The Batmobile spectacularly came to life with the debut of the 1966-’68 television program starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader. “Batman” producers hired California car customizer George Barris to build a fully functional vehicle on a near-impossible deadline. To meet their request, he transformed a retired Lincoln concept car from the 1950s into the Batmobile. This was the beautiful 1955 Futura. So popular was the TV series (and 1966 feature-length movie) that Barris made three Batmobile replicas to tour the country while the original stayed on the set.

When Michael Keaton wore the cowl in 1989’s “Batman” and 1992’s “Batman Returns” films, his Batmobile looked like a combination battering ram and land-speed-record challenger. Like the TV version from two decades earlier, it was powered by a jet turbine; unlike its predecessor, it could jettison its fenders and travel in a narrow “Batmissile” mode. Director Tim Burton wanted the car to represent strength, mystery and the kind of technological prowess a billionaire like Bruce Wayne could muster.

When director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale restarted the entire Batman history in 2005 with “Batman Begins,” production designers imagined a new Batmobile free of any previous influence. To complement the gritty urban conditions of Gotham City in the 21st century, Nolan suggested the Batmobile combine the durability and weaponry of a military tank with the agility and silhouette of an exotic sports car. Special effects trickery would give the bat-black car a pair of autocannons, a rocket launcher, downforce flaps and jet propulsion, but Nolan wanted a real vehicle able to race through streets and perform stunts for the cameras. Once the computer-aided engineering plans were approved, a 30-person crew built six functional cars at a cost of a quarter-million dollars apiece. Batman drove the “Tumbler,” as it was nicknamed, in “Batman Begins” and 2008’s “The Dark Knight,” but the bad guys managed to steal several of the military-grade Tumblers for their own misdeeds in the 2012 blockbuster “The Dark Knight Rises.”