The customized 1955 Lincoln Futura that served Adam West and Burt Ward in the crooked world of the 1966-68 'Batman' television series is going on sale for the first time ever.

Well-heeled Batman fans have a shot at owning their very own signature piece of the comic book franchisethe original Batmobile from the Caped Crusader's campy 1960s television series has been put up for sale for the very first time.

As noted by io9.com, The distinctively customized 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car by the Ford Motor Company is being auctioned in January by Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Barret-Jackson. The winning bidder can expect to pony up quite a bit more than the $1 auto customizer George Barris reportedly paid for it in the late 1950s. Years later, he transformed it into the Batmobile just a few weeks before the 1966 pilot episode of the Batman TV series started filming.

"There are only a few items in life that are able to capture the soul of an era. Not many people can say they own a pinnacle point in history that revolutionized a particular genre and an entire industry that followed in its footsteps," reads the Barrett-Jackson lot listing for the car.

The one-off 1955 Lincoln Futura was designed by Ford's lead stylists Bill Schmidt and John Najjar for the automaker's Lincoln division, and hand built in Italy for $250,000 by Carrozzeria Ghia. The car appeared in the 1959 film It Started With a Kiss then disappeared from the spotlight, languishing in Barris's garage until he turned it into the vehicle charged with speeding Adam West's Batman and Burt Ward's Robin to various crime scenes.

The Batmobile sports an all black interior and a glossy black paint job with red striping and, of course, Batman's bat logo on the driver's and passenger-side doors. The distinctive bubble windshields and muscular exhaust pipes emerging from the base of the rear windshield complete the iconic look. Under the hood of the three-speed automatic is an 8-cylinder, 390cc engine.

Barris himself retained ownership of the original Batmobile for decades after the 1966-1968 TV series concluded. He kept it on display at his own auto museum in California for many years before it moved to the Cayman Motor Museum on Grand Cayman Island. In all that time, the car was never made available for sale, though Barris and others created replicas of the Batmobile that were soldsome fashioned for the run of the TV series and others built for the show circuit.

Since the DC Comics character's debut in Detective Comics #27 way back in May 1939, Batman has gone through several transitions at the hands of successive generations of writers, artists, and filmmakers. The costumed superhero began as a gritty, vulnerable, and morally nebulous alternative to Superman. By the so-called Silver Age of comics in the 1960s, Batman had become far lighter, his depiction veering towards the deliberately cartoonish and his rogue's gallery stocked with gimmicky buffoons in place of the frightening psychopaths he battled in his early years.

The Batmobile as depicted in television and film has also evolved over the years, a reflection of the superhero's own changing characterization - from the original Lincoln Futura to the curvy supercar driven in Tim Burton's 1989 reboot of the franchise to the most recent Batman's all-terrain war machine seen in Christopher Nolan's just-concluded Dark Knight trilogy (see pictures, above right).

Adam West's Batman appeared in Batman's extreme saccharine period, of course. The show itself played up the cartoonishness of that era in comics, creating a running meta commentary on the silliness of men in tights battling equally garish foes via repeated plot devices and the "Blams!" and "Pows!" that punctuated fight scenes.

There are those in the fandom who despise that snarky depiction of Gotham's caped knight as an aberration, if not an overt insult to the character and to comics in general. Others celebrate the TV series as a campy revelation. Like the different Batmobiles down the ages, your mileage may vary.