fredricwertham

[fredricwertham]

Catwoman (2018) #6

[fredricwertham]

get your pussy up get your money up

[fredricwertham]

“The term [Gotham] has gone in and out of popular favor, having great currency in one decade, falling into desuetude the next. It owes its most recent revival to the 1989 movie Batman and its sequels, themselves a reincarnation of the late 1930s comic books. When New Yorkers Bob Kane and Bill Finger first created the caped crusader, they were going to call Batman’s hometown “Civic City.” That seemed a bit dull, however, and Finger “tried Capital City, then Coast City. Then, I flipped through the phone book and spotted the name Gotham Jewelers and said, ‘That’s it,’ Gotham City. We didn’t call it New York because we wanted anybody in any city to identify with it. Of course, Gotham is another name for New York.” Actually, as a later Batman editor perspicaciously noted, Gotham is New York’s noirish side—“Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at 3 A.M., November 28 in a cold year”—whereas Superman’s Metropolis presents New York’s cheerier face, “Manhattan between Fourteenth and One Hundred and Tenth Streets on the brightest, sunniest July day of the year.” —Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

[fredricwertham]

“[Washington] Irving had begun his efforts at coining a lineage for New York in the Salmagundi papers (1807), a set of sardonic essays, penned with two equally irreverent and youthful colleagues, in which he affixed the name Gotham to his city. Repeatedly Salmagundi referred to Manhattan as the “antient city of Gotham,” or “the wonder loving city of Gotham.” In the context of the pieces—mocking commentaries on the mores of fashionable New Yorkers—the well-known name of Gotham served to underscore their depiction of Manhattan as a city of self-important and foolish people. Gotham—which in old Anglo-Saxon means “Goats’ Town”—was (and still is) a real village in the English county of Nottinghamshire, not far from Sherwood Forest. But Gotham was also a place of fable, its inhabitants proverbial for their folly. Every era singles out some location as a spawning ground of blockheads—Phrygians were accounted the dimwits of Asia, Thracians the dullards of ancient Greece—and in the “Middle Ages Gotham was the butt of jokes about its simpleminded citizens, perhaps because the goat was considered a foolish animal. The Gothamite canon, which had circulated orally since the twelfth century, was eventually printed up in jest books, the first being Merie Tales of the mad men of Gotam (c. 1565). It included such thigh-slappers as the one about the man who rode to market on horseback carrying two heavy bushels of wheat—upon his own shoulders, in order not to burden his mount. Another tells of the man of Gotham who, late with a rent payment to his landlord, tied his purse to a quick-footed hare, which ran away. Manhattanites would not likely have taken up a nickname so laden with pejorative connotations—even one bestowed by New York’s most famous writer—unless it had redeeming qualities, and indeed some of the tales cast Gothamites in a far more flattering light. In the early 1200s—went the most famous such story—King John traveled regularly throughout England with a retinue of knights and ladies, and wherever the royal foot touched earth became forever after a public highway (i.e., the King’s). One day, John was heading to Nottingham by way of Gotham, and he dispatched a herald to announce his arrival. The herald reported back that the townspeople had refused the king entry, fearing the loss of their best lands. The enraged monarch sent an armed party to wreak vengeance, but the townsfolk had prepared a scheme to turn aside John’s wrath. When the knights arrived, they found the inhabitants engaged in various forms of idiotic behavior: pouring water into a bottomless tub; painting green apples red; trying to drown an eel in a pool of water; dragging carts atop barns to shade the wood from the sun; and fencing in a cuckoo. The chortling knights reported back to the monarch that the townsfolk were clearly mad, and John accordingly spared them. This rival variant—that Gothamites merely acted silly to gain their ends—was reflected in the old English saying “More fools pass through Gotham than remain in it” (and echoed in Shakespeare’s depiction of Edgar in Lear, “this fellow’s wise enough to play the fool”). It was doubtless this more beguiling—if tricksterish—sense of Gotham that Manhattanites assumed as an acceptable nickname.” —Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

[fredricwertham]

Some dick Grayson as robin drawings I made a bit ago😭🫶🏻 did these ones as a study to practice this style

[fredricwertham]

[fredricwertham]

love dick's rapid progression from "who the hell is this nosy kid" to "if you touch a hair on his head, i'll make sure you're breathing through a tube for the rest of your life"

also twiggy 14 year old timbobbin and jacked 20 something nightwing is very important to me

[fredricwertham]

38, 28, 6, and 7 for the ask game?

Hi!

6. Favorite cannon ship?

My og DC ship was Helena Bartinelli and Vic Sage, for your value of canon. I also really like both of Dick’s main New Earth relationships. Dickbabs has a bad rap on here but I don’t think their relationship is the problem—it’s that neither of them have been especially interesting characters since the reboot, either together or apart.

7. Favorite non-cannon ship?

Um. I dunno. 👉🏻👈🏻

28. Favorite comic run?

I guess Prodigal is more of an event than a run and iirc WW: Hiketeia wasn’t published in Rucka’s run on her ongoing (y’know, the first one), so maybe the Snyder Dickbats run from the tail end of pre-flashpoint? I’ll always have a soft spot for the Wolfman/Perez Titans comics, too, since they were my first and I still think they have some of the nicest looking pages ever published.

Oh, or maybe the Cavalieri Huntress series. Or the Denny O’Neil Question.

I’m not too good at choosing favorites, as it turns out.

38. Who do you think is the most overlooked or underused character?

I’ll pour one out for biblically accurate Raven. She should have been moved to Vertigo but she’s a purple goth teen instead. Sad!

Ask game

[fredricwertham]

Batman: The Animated Series 1x14 - "Heart of Ice"

[fredricwertham]

[fredricwertham]

"jason was suffering from pit madness 😥" well cass went in a lazarus pit too and she was perfectly fine so i think it's just a skill issue

[fredricwertham]

The gods giveth (put Greg Rucka on Wonder Woman) and the gods taketh away (move Greg Rucka off Wonder Woman)

[fredricwertham]

In the 2010s if comic book writers didn’t know what to do with a character they tried to make them into a secret agent.

[fredricwertham]

THEY’R E SO CUTE IM CALLING THE POLICE

[fredricwertham]

betty troy or donna boop

[fredricwertham]