This is a pretty striking BATMAN cover, especially for the era. It’s a good use of graphic design combined with a limited palette to achieve an effect. It’s subtle, but you really can’t miss that white-held portrait of Batman superimposed over the night’s activities.the strong red-orange backgrounds giving the whole cover a bit of punch. The piece was done by Paris Cullins, whom I don’t tend to think of as a particularly noteworthy cover artist, nor an artist associated with Batman, so this piece represents a strong hit from an unexpected quarter. Inker Dick Giordano, who was also the boss while simultaneously having a long relationship with the Caped Crusader, keeps everything on-model in his finish. As the Direct Sales marketplace opened up in the early 1980s, DC upped their cover game throughout their line, with some very interesting results.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
Isn’t this when Ed Hannigan was designing a lot of DC’s covers ie. he’d come up with a rough that would be approved by the editor and then farmed out to others. There’s something about this that makes me think of Hannigan’s work and he designed a lot of the Batman covers.
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Same thought from me. This looks like an Ed Hannigan design sketch, drawn by Paris and Dick.
I would also guess, with no concrete foundation, that it was designed with the thought that it’d be in blues, not oranges, but Tony Tollin, who colored it, thought this would be better, and he was right.
kdb
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This all tracks for me. I thought it was Ed Hannibal when I first saw it.
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Tom’s respectful tribute to this cover seems to be another contradiction to a point he made in his otherwise brilliant & excellent “Perfect Game” article on Frank Miller’s “DKR”. “It’s somewhat amazing to go back and to read the concurrent issues of those titles that were on sale when this book came out–while it had been years since Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams had brought mysterioso back to the character, his adventures were still remarkably bright and cheery in 1986.”
I replied that Doug Moench, Gene Colan, & Tom Mandrake were working on the Bat-books then. Not what I’d call “bright & cheery”. This “Batman” # 383 was almost 2 years earlier. But it’s not “bright & cheery”, either.
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