okay so, back in probably late 2012, i was attending physics courses at the university of toledo. there was a desk toward the back of one of the classrooms that i sat in pretty regularly, and one day i came in to find an exquisitely muscular and beautifully detailed torso/bust of batman drawn on my desk in pencil.
i was stunned. who put this masterpiece here? how did they do it in a meager one-hour class time? where was batman’s lower half?
and, most intensely, would they mind if i added to the drawing?
throwing caution (and attention to class) to the wind, i gave batman a lower half.
it may not have been the lower half they were expecting. nevertheless, batmantaur was born.
i don’t remember what the artist’s response was, but the next class day he had written the beginnings of a chat on the desk. i don’t even remember his name, but we had something special for the rest of that semester. an understanding, an appreciation, a kinship perhaps.
so what became of batmantaur? it remained in that room throughout most of the semester, though i think i remember the desk getting moved around a few times. eventually, i came in one day to find the desk half-dismantled, as though someone had tried to remove the desktop. about a week later, whoever it was actually did succeed in stealing it. i never saw batmantaur again.
and thus, he became a legend. if i didn’t have photos of him, i myself probably wouldn’t even believe that he had existed.
his spirit lived on in the future collaborative works of flashtaur and captain americataur.
gummygunk
blakekathryn
germansingergirl
