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Especially if we are making a comic like Gotham Academy, which is probably going to be some young child’s first comic. Comics is going through some really big changes right now, with the growing readership. Everybody is talking about it, not just gender representation but ethnicity and sexuality. Maps and Kyle Mizoguchiīecky: It seems that this is the zeitgeist right now. There’s more than one way to do a DC comic book. Even if our book doesn’t have a big readership, we need to do what we can to point the way and show how it can be done differently. Is this true?īrenden: When given the opportunity to make change we have to do our best. And it feels like it is making a statement about the industry and the type of books that should be out. It’s amazing.īecky once said that Gotham Academy felt a little subversive. And it’s always so gratifying to see people who say they’re really into Pommeline or those who want more Olive. But it was clear when the images started showing up that people were gravitating towards Maps. As writers, you fall in love with all your characters and you see them in an equal footing. When you write a collection of characters, it’s really difficult to pull one out and say ‘that’s the one everyone is going to like’. Were you expecting all the affection towards Maps? Maps Mizoguchiīrenden: We were just focused on building the best book and the best characters we could. Just aesthetically, the way it frames her face. With Olive, it made sense, partly because of my taste, but also because of the colour of her hair. Something that you can’t quite put your finger on.

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For many years I have tended to depict characters with slightly darker, or ambiguous skin tones.

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Olive Silverlockīrenden: With Olive in particular, we didn’t want her to be lily-white, and then Karl messed around with the colour pallet and how to best balance it. Just because Pomeline has a potentially Anglo-Saxon surname does not mean her complexion should be lily-white. And these characters feel more real and alive, with richer histories, when their surnames don’t match what the popular opinion on the visual should be. That’s so cookie-cutter and uninteresting. We never felt that we needed to follow a formula where ‘oh, you’re name is this, clearly your background is 100% ethnically this, so therefore you will look a specific way’. How deliberate was that? Pomeline Fritchīrenden: The three of us always really liked this notion of there not being a simple direct story about any character. Most of the characters are indeed ethnically ambiguous. We try to imply this through the visuals. Olive went through a lot of back-and-forth trying to arrive at a look for her.īrenden: Becky and I spoke about it with Karl, outside of the Mizoguchis, the ethnicities of the characters are left a bit more ambiguous. Maps I had a pretty solid idea of what she was going to look like. I felt she was an easier visual for you to arrive at in terms of who she was. The first character that you drew was Maps, right? Brenden, outside Maps’s name, we never really talked about it, did we?īrenden: No. My wife’s mother is from Japan so I’ve been immersed in Japanese culture for so many years, it was so nice to be able to represent a piece of that. And Maps just came through so easily, mostly because of her personality. He’ll write something and I will get this idea of the character, not just visually, but as a whole person. But Brenden and I have a really intuitive process. It’s the first time I’ve ever worked with Becky. This is the first time we all worked as a group together. Even if she wasn’t going to visually look like that, her family had Japanese ancestry with a last name like Mizoguchi. Right from the beginning, Maps was Japanese-American. When in the process did you start talking about what the characters would look like?īrenden Fletcher: We are talking about more than what they look like. Not just the beautiful art, but what they look like. One of the main reasons I love Gotham Academy is the cast. It is published by DC Comics and written by Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher, with art by Karl Kerschl Gotham Academy and its diverse cast are beloved by fans and critics alike, showcasing that comic books need not look a certain way. It features a young cast headed by Olive Silverlock and Mia ‘Maps’ Mizoguchi.

Gotham Academy is a comic book set in a prestigious boarding school in the City of Gotham. Karl Kerschl, Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher Photo Courtesy Robert Tutton, Paste Magazine

You can find her on Twitter as here for the introduction to the Comics, Human Rights and Representation Week. Maria Werdine Norris is a final year PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is on the British Counterterrorism strategy and legislation, with a focus on nationalism, security and human rights.