(In a parallel universe, I’m now running a website dedicated to listing every time Batman disappears on someone while they’re mid-sentence, aren’t I?)

Batman is telling Superman that Captain Marvel is on his way to blow his supervillain jail wide open – Superman is gone withn a blink of an eye, prompting batman to turn around, realise he’s alone and say pretty much that exact sentance.

Martyn :
For example, I have a clear memory that at some point, another character disappears on Batman while he’s mid-sentence, and he says something along the lines of “Huh. So that’s how it feels.” But I have no idea where and when this occurred…

It was Huntress, in the issue of Justice League America where an implanted hypnotic suggestion makes Blue Beetle try to kill Maxwell Lord (yes, really). I only happen to know this by lucky coincidence since I read it pretty recently, though – a few more months and I wouldn’t remember either.

It’s a side-effect of writing about comics, I think – you often absorb these examples without being able to pinpoint specific examples from the decades of texts. For example, I have a clear memory that at some point, another character disappears on Batman while he’s mid-sentence, and he says something along the lines of “Huh. So that’s how it feels.” But I have no idea where and when this occurred…

I haven’t kept up with my comics reading over the years — the print Batman and I grew apart after Bolland and Moore’s Killing Joke and Mazzuchelli and Miller’s masterful Year One — but I definitely recognize the mid-sentence disappearing act from the movies, where it’s always accomplished through a trick of editing and dialogue: a rhythmic misdirection that never fails to catch me by surprise, even though by now you think I’d be ready for it. Instead it’s a “D’oh!” moment — Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon still framing his response to some gutteral growl of Bale’s Batman as the camera cuts to … empty frame. He done did it agin!

So, a quirkily apt mapping of panel-play onto the cinematic signifier. I only associate it with Nolan’s films, though; are there similar moments in Burton’s and Schumacher’s versions, or (perish the thought) Adam West’s work?