Joyce Pensato’s East Williamsburg studio is a toy collector’s nightmare. Her Homer Simpson dolls, Batman masks, South Park figurines, and vintage Mickey Mouse ephemera (along with other found and eBay-procured tchotchkes) are not carefully preserved in their original packaging or lined up for display. They are dirty, broken, spattered with paint, stuck to stools and cans of enamel, and gnawed on by Charlie, her dog (he especially goes for Elmo). But even in their strange and tattered states, these tokens are no less loved. Many more are in storage — Pensato just can’t bring herself to throw them away. “These guys have to speak to you,” she says, clutching a three-inch model of South Park’s Kyle Broflovski that is covered with black charcoal smudges and daubs of white paint.

It all started, she says, with a life-size cardboard cutout of Batman. It was the mid-'70s, and the Brooklyn-born artist was a third-year student at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. “I was resisting working with the traditional still life — apples and pears and all that crap,” she says. Something clicked when she first sketched the caped crusader. “I just fell in love with Batman. I think it was the ears.” Since then, Homer, Cartman, Batman, and company have been at the center of her big, bold, expressive paintings and drawings, most recently in the new work that is on view through February 25 at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in Chelsea.

Even after Batman came into her life, she gave traditional subject matter another whirl. In the '80s and early '90s, Pensato tried to exhibit the atmospheric abstract paintings she was making. Meanwhile, on the side, she kept drawing charcoal renderings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The landscapes hardly left the studio; the Disney drawings — with their buggy eyes, wide grins, and punctured and sandblasted surfaces — earned Pensato her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1994, at the age of 53. She soon found a way to make her drawings on a more monumental scale, trading charcoal for enamel, paper for ten-foot canvases, and sketched lines for big gestural brushstrokes.

Painted mostly in black with white and silver highlights (and, lately, wisps of color breaking through), her characters take on a psychological bent. With Pensato’s Abstract Expressionistic touch, Homer Simpson looks dead, Donald looks shellshocked, and Felix the Cat turns messy and menacing. They are ominous, stunned, and spooky — zombie pop icons in a post-apocalyptic world; or a Clinton-era toy chest possessed by Chucky the Doll.

Pensato’s new show is called “Batman Returns,” and includes several recent paintings based on the Dark Knight’s pointy-eared mask (other subjects include a punkish Homer Simpson, minimalist takes on the South Park kids, and a haunting rendering of a Groucho Marx mask with no face behind it). The exhibition is also reminiscent of the fabulously cluttered studio Pensato had to vacate last May after more than 30 years. Sizable fragments of its paint-splattered wooden floor are on display, hanging on walls and sprawled out into the gallery space, as are several vignette-like installations of the toys themselves, showing how her dark depictions are born. It’s a remarkable sight — one that manages to be alternately scary and sweet. It’s also somewhat rare for an artist to be quite so forthright about her process and her tattered, workaday sources. “I like the idea of people seeing the whole me,” she says. “The whole me is a big mess, not just paintings in a white space — I feel like I am more than that.”

Pensato is not your average fangirl type either. As it turns out, she prowls flea markets and eBay strictly to find objects with interesting shapes and facial expressions. She doesn’t much care for the animated movies and TV shows from which all those action figures spring. “I have a hard time watching them,” she admits. “But I love the way they’re drawn.” And what happens to them once they enter her studio. She looks down at her grubby little Kyle. “You own them, and you make them your own.”