On the bench is a cold cast prepainted Batman who seems to have fallen off a high shelf before coming into the possession of a local comic shop. As I hate seeing a nice sculpt go to waste, let’s see what we can do to repair him. Tons of pics after the break.

First thing is to salvage any broken pieces we can. Fortunately the former owner glued one of the ears back on with superglue, so after removing the residue we had a reference piece to work with.  The other ear was broken off at the tip and a previous repair was attempted, but the whole thing requires a rebuild.

After getting the left “ear” reattached, puttied and cleaned up we have something to work with.  Apoxie sculpt makes up the right ear after removing the repaired mess. Batman doesn’t look too pleased to have his cowl mismatched. Let’s fix that.

Mid-way through reshaping. I think we’re at about 3 putty applications by this time.

Batman still looks pretty unhappy with the ear match, or maybe he’s just grumpy about all the dust.  Cheer up Batman, we’re almost done.

That’s better! We have a proper pointy cowl and are ready to paint. Or are we? There’s more broken you say? Good thing we have the apoxie out!

Man Batman, you got into some fight with that floor. Looks like the spike has gone missing and there are no more broken pieces to work with. Oh well, let’s sculpt a new one! I’m sure Alfred does this all the time.

Well, the basic shape is right but how will it look when we attach it? That’s a pretty thin area..

Ready to paint. As a result of the fall, the boots were cracked clean through causing the statue to feel pretty unstable. As the material and paint could not hold up to a complete strip and rebuild, we had to layer on some surface putty and paint and hope for the best. It won’t hold up to a lot of jostling, but it will look better without the ugly white cracks in the end.

Oh, wait there’s still more to repair? Jeez Batman, you’re pretty high maintenance!

Didn’t get a pic before putty time, but the cape was broken off pretty much where you see the white begin in the pic. It’s mostly hidden behind the gargoyle but I’ll know it’s there, so we’ll do what we can to fix it up without adding too much extra work. The customer didn’t want this to turn into a huge expensive repair job.

Cleaning, shaping, sanding, tight areas, sweat, dust. Let’s just skip to an hour later, shall we?

After a bit more cleaning up and a lot of dusting, this Dark Knight will be ready for final paint!

Can’t wait? Check out the final product!