To that end, Diggle gave her “a slightly more refined manner of speaking, which then contrasts very strongly with Holly, who is like very working class. I haven’t put this in the actual comic yet, but in my mind, Selina’s British, or at least half British. She comes in with that very genteel way of speaking.” That non-American approach makes for a natural part of the Gotham by Gaslight world, says Diggle. “There’s a huge wave of immigration into America in the 1800s and that’s part of the fabric of the backstory.”
The other key part of the Gotham by Gaslight world is the design 19th century Gotham and other key DC Universe locals. Mignola an Russell’s moody art made the original book a classic, and Argentine artist Leandro Fernández is a natural to carry on their work.
“I always was very influenced by Mike Mignola’s artwork,” Fernández says. “My style is based in a big use of black and white, mostly because when I started to develop my first comic books, I used to think about them printed in black and white.” So while he didn’t intentionally build off of Mignola’s work on the first Gotham by Gaslight, Fernández naturally feels like a continuation of that perspective. Instead of worrying about mimicking Mignolia, Fernández expended more energy giving Gotham a distinctive 19th century look. As demonstrated by his art on The Old Guard and American Carnage, Fernández excels at creating interesting locales from world history.
“Our goal was to try to make an exaggeration of it, of how a city like Gotham looks in that special moment in time, with the Industrial Revolution at its peak. We wanted to make it really oppressive and something really vertical and dangerous, sad and dark,” Fernández reveals, focusing on “the outskirts of the factories, the corridors, and that will be places you wouldn’t like to walk by.”
Justice by Gaslight
As its title suggests, The Kryptonian Age won’t spend all of its time with Batman, Catwoman, and the other denizens of Gotham City. Superman only gets hinted at with the Ma and Pa Kent scene that opens issue #1, but Diggle and Fernández want to prepare readers for the thematic contrasts between the two characters.
“There will be a lot of contrast in this book, because this is not only about Gotham,” teases Fernández. “It will be about the world in that moment in time. So we want to show that in the landscape.”