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Some things go together like peanut butter and jelly: obvious in their pairings. Other things, though, well... you don't know how much you love it until you see it smushed together.

That is my reaction upon seeing Jamie Hewlett's variant cover for May 2024's Batman: Gargoyle of Gotham #3. This wraparound image (also to be sold in a non-wraparound version) is more than some mathmatecal equation of 'Artist I love + Character I love = Good art.' While transcendent might be an overstatement, this cover is more than the sum of its parts.

Here you go,so you can make this your new phone wallpaper:

And here is the potrait version, which'll also be a cover.

And after I finish this article, I'm emailing DC to petition for this to be a print I can hang on my wall.

This illustration is actually Hewlett's first ever official Batman piece. While Gorillaz co-creator Hewlett has done comics work for various publishers in the past - and of course originally came to prominence as the co-creator of Tank Girl in the early 1990s - the only work he's done for DC is work on early proto-Vertigo titles Shade The Changing Man, and Doom Patrol. There's time to fix that though, innit?

Batman: Gargoyle of Gotham #3 (of #4) goes on sale May 28, 2024 - and I would wager Hewlett's two variant covers will sell out sooner than you think, so call a comic shop you trust to reserve yours now.

Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin's Tank Girl is a celebration of going too far, destined to shock the easily upset.