Photo By Gail

Batman has gone through countless incarnations over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Caped Crusader looking quite this pink. This very cool Bubble Gum Batman is a special color variant of the DC Artists Alley Batman designed by artist and toy designer Joe Ledbetter. The figure was created by DC Collectibles in collaboration with Toy Tokyo as an exclusive for New York Comic Con 2019 (though I photographed this at NYCC in 2023, so there must have been at least one leftover). Ledbetter himself announced the release on his website, noting that only 500 pieces were produced and that the figure stands approximately 6.5 inches tall.

The figure is classic Ledbetter: Batman is transformed into an expressive, slightly mischievous anthropomorphic creature, with enormous bat wings, exaggerated ears, sharp little fangs and a wonderfully cartoonish attitude. For the Bubble Gum variant, that normally dark Batman palette gets replaced with a gloriously sugary combination of pinks, making this Gotham vigilante look more like he belongs in a candy shop than a dark alley.

The design comes from Ledbetter’s broader DC Artists Alley collaboration. DC describes Artists Alley as a designer-vinyl line intended to put individual artists’ distinctive styles front and center rather than simply reproducing traditional comic-book imagery. Ledbetter’s Batman, along with his versions of Robin, Catwoman and the Penguin, was part of the line’s 2019 launch.

And that pink color isn’t just a random repaint: “Bubble Gum Variant” is the official designation. The NYCC version was sold exclusively through Toy Tokyo’s convention booth, where Ledbetter also appeared for signings during the convention.

If you picked this up at Comic Con  (in whatever year) you now own  a pretty cool piece of designer-toy history!