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That gent in the gaudy lipstick lounging on the suspicious-looking sand is Jack Nicholson's Joker, whose peeling mask of paint is a jolly facade for a low-slung, jackal mind. In Tim Burton's Batman, the Joker beams terrorist broadcasts into the airwaves of Gotham City to blow wind up our hero's cape. (This surfside tableau is from one of his outlaw transmissions.) The Caped Crusader is played by Michael Keaton, who starred as the demon jiver from the dead zone in Burton's Beetlejuice, which also featured bizarre, antic commercials. Batman is being awaited by some batfans with folded arms, however. Comic-book buffs have bitched about Keaton's puny physique, the redesigned Batmobile, and the project's rumored irreverence. Have these batheads been hanging upside down too long in the belfry? Every indication is that far from betraying the comics, Burton has drawn the blood of his inspiration from the black ink in such agonistic Batman sagas as Frank Millers Dark Knight series and Alan Moore's Killing Joke. Conceptually, Burton has left behind the candymint camp of the TV series to scale the Deco spires of Metropolis monumentalism. Gotham City is not a cardboard playhouse, as it was on TV, but a nocturnal beast of black metal. And as adversaries, what better dynamic duo than Jack Nicholson and Michael Keaton, senior and junior hipsters who manage to grow hair on their cheesy vowels and still remain sexy? Let's hope they and the movie don't disappear up some overexcited dark hole of set design.

We now return to our regularly scheduled issue of Vanity Fair, already in progress.

JACK NICHOLSON His peeling mask of paint is a jolly façade for a low-slung, jackal mind.