Eldritch Tentacle Enthusiast

The backgrounds for the entire series were done on black paper, a first for any animated show. It's Batman, which means everything is at night and incredibly dark. So, the majority of the backgrounds were going to be black anyways and using black paper would cut down on the time it took to create all of the backgrounds. Adding color over the black paper instead of the traditional method gave it a much more stylized look that helped make it iconic.

It also forced some other creative choices, such as using an airbrush to do all of the background art. During the early testing, they found that using an airbrush was easier to apply paint with than a paintbrush and that it looked better. Airbrushing let them be more experimental with painting techniques, such as the spattery fades you can see in the "Bane" and "Deep Freeze" title cards above or the soft, deeply shadowed face on "the Last Laugh." The overall effect of airbrushing on a black background is a much darker, moodier vibe than could be achieved with a traditional approach.

The whole point of the show is that you wouldn't. Like a major theme of the show is about how the various shames and stigmas and habitual dishonesties that plague our societies both metaphorically and literally kill us. "Everybody lies" isn't just a cynical catchphrase, it's the shows thesis. Because of how we operate as a society, everyone feels compelled to suppress and hide things and that inevitably leads to suffering.

And there are plenty of episodes where this is obvious, ie "I cheated on my partner and gave them an STD." But there's also much more of "This little girl went through early puberty and because of the way our society stigmatizes women's bodies her single father never discussed puberty with her and she was so afraid and ashamed of her new pubic hair that she tried to shave it without telling anyone and mutilated herself, leading everyone to think she'd been abused and throwing off the whole case until House figured out her hormones were going crazy because she'd been exposed to her father's low T medicine, which he hid because of how our society regards masculinity, which he started taking because he began dating a younger woman (because of shame stemming from our society's unrealistic expectations wrt sex in relationships) which he was hiding from his kids, because of shame regarding our societies toxic views on monogamy."

A particular episode stands out as a really good example. S06E15 "Private Lives," which aired in 2010 but was fairly prescient about where social media was heading. The patient was a blogger who documented literally every moment of every day for her followers. She made it very clear she left *nothing* out, from her and her boyfriend's sex life to, eventually, asking for feedback from her followers on whether to get her heart valve replaced with one from a pig or a "vegan" plastic one. She handed the whole blog over to House as soon as he took the case and the team poured through the whole thing. Surely this is proof you're wrong about everybody lying, the team says to House. She's give us her whole life and you still can't find out what's wrong! Spoiler, it turned out the crucial symptom that allowed House to put it all together? Was the one thing she *didn't* include in the blog- Her bowel movements. Shame and stigma around talking about *poop* nearly killed this woman. It was also a detail that should have been picked up immediately by a normal doctor, who would have asked about her bowel movements as part of the standard checklist of diagnostic questions. But this woman was so confident that she'd laid out every relevant detail of her life in her blog, she wouldn't answer those questions, obfuscating what she was actually ashamed of underneath a pile of curated, rationalized, narritivized junk she could pretend was proof of a lack of shame and not simply a skill at creative writing.

I really enjoyed this request! I would have liked to draw a small storyboard for this idea, but I only had enough energy for this sketch.

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