In recent years, DC Comics has released a number of young adult graphic novels, often reimagining popular characters like Harley Quinn, Cassandra Cain and Raven in stories outside of the main canon. While many of these titles have focused on well-established characters, the latest young adult graphic novel, Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero, introduces a new face to the DC Universe.
This graphic novel, created by writer E. Lockhart and artist Manuel Preitano, is now on sale. In celebration of its release, Lockhart sat with CBR for an exclusive interview about this new hero: Willow Zimmerman, a Jewish activist trying to do the right thing for her community while also taking care of her ill mother. There is a lot about Willow to unpack, and this interview scratches the surface of why she is such a welcome hero to DC's iconic stable of characters.
CBR: With DC having so many longstanding heroes, what was it like to bring an all-new vigilante into this world with Whistle?
E. Lockhart: I decided to make Whistle a local neighborhood superhero, and it's a time -- in the past couple years -- when we've realized how super important local issues are, and how much they affect people's lives, and how much they can even affect national politics and things like that. That also allowed me to create a neighborhood of Gotham City that we hadn't seen before, that could be kind of Whistle's domain, which is not to say that other Gotham City heroes might not venture in there someday.
I made up this neighborhood of Down River, which is a traditionally, historically Jewish neighborhood that is now populated by all different kinds of people. It's a lot like New York City's Lower East Side, and I made Whistle a young activist who is trying to save this neighborhood from destruction, basically by Poison Ivy.
Since you brought up how this was traditionally a Jewish community, one thing that resonated with me a lot was Willow's relationship to her Jewish culture, and I would love to know more about how her Judaism helped influence the hero she eventually becomes.
Well, she is the first Jewish hero to launch, originating as Jewish since 1977 from DC -- specifically DC, and my father is Jewish. My spouse is Jewish. I grew up with a very strong connection to my Jewish heritage and to the Jewish neighborhoods of New York City, and I wanted to write a hero who would reflect not only my own identity to a certain extent, but also the identities and experiences of a lot of kids that I know living in New York, and I also wanted to write a hero.
There's a long Jewish tradition of interrogating stuff. The Jewish intellectual heritage is to question, to have dialogues, to not let a moral conversation be over, but instead to keep thinking about it, pondering it, having dialogues about it. So I tried to create a hero for whom that was also true. So not to give away any spoilers, but at the end of the story, it is not so much that she is 100% secure in the rightness of every decision that she makes as a vigilante hero, but instead, she's in a morally challenging position that is going to kind of keep needing to be interrogated and thought about ongoing. To me, that was something that was fundamentally Jewish about the way I imagined this hero, even if it was not particularly religious.
Another key part of her character are the relationships she has with her community, her family, her friends, as well as the villains. With all these relationships, which was your favorite one to explore between Willow and these different characters?
Oh, gosh! I had a really good time with all of this, but Poison Ivy. I was looking for villains in the Gotham rogues gallery that I could use as dark mirrors for my heroine, and Poison Ivy, as any comic book reader knows, is a PhD botanist who thinks of a lot of her villainy as activism, right? She's an activist for plants; she doesn't care about people, right? So she's an eco-terrorist, and so to me, that made for a really excellent dark mirror for an activist heroine, who is also an intellectual, who has big dreams. And so, Poison Ivy becomes both an enemy and a mentor figure.
Speaking about Whistle before she officially becomes Whistle, she is an activist, as you mentioned. What about her personality and her actions as Willow make her such a great superhero?
I mean, like a lot of the teenagers that I know, and that I meet as a young adult novelist as well out on the road -- when I used to get to go on the road -- are really looking for ways to make a difference, to engage in some kind of effort of world repair, to heal their communities and energize their peers for good causes. When I was a teenager, I was just trying to make out with boys and see if I could get some beer, so I have been really moved to see the way that young people of this generation are so incredibly attuned to and searching for what they can do now to make a difference, and sometimes I see them feeling powerless or disempowered and frustrated, even as they are trying to make change.
So, what if somebody who felt like that got superpowers. What would they do as a member of this generation, and how would it feel to suddenly have powers that other people didn't have? What would you do to make a difference with those powers?
Right, and speaking about Willow's powers, I would love to hear about what was the process of figuring out what powers and abilities should she have given the crime she is specifically going up against?
The powers came first, and the story came later, but I love writing about dogs, and I love the superhero power of talking to animals or communing with animals. I actually hadn't read Runaways until after I wrote Whistle, but Gertrude Yorkes, aka Arsenic, and her dinosaur -- also Jewish, by the way -- I really, really groove on that superhero team, and I did a little research and realized that there had not... if there are any superheroes who have dog-related/canine-related superpowers, I could not find one.
So there's lots of cats. Lots and lots of cats, and no dogs, and dogs can be.... when you think about dog powers, they can be a little gross, a little embarrassing. Smelling, drooling, wanting people to pat your belly, fetching. They're not maybe as sexy as cats, so I thought this is a really great metaphor for adolescence. When you get superpowers, your body is changing, and it's kind of amazing, and it's kind of great, and then maybe kind of also icky or weird or overwhelming.
The Spider-Man movies, especially that older one with Tobey Maguire, have done a really great job capturing that element of the superhero origin story. Your body becomes something different, and you have complicated feelings about it, and so in giving Willow canine related powers that gave me a chance to explore some of the maybe less than immediately awesome elements of having a rapidly transforming body. Then I wanted her to have a dog sidekick that she could talk to just because that is what I would want. So Lebowitz is the first ever female superhero dog.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
That makes me so happy because I wanted to talk about Lebowitz, because I love Leibowitz.
Oh, thank you.
I wanted to know what makes Lebowitz the perfect partner in stopping crime?
Well, she's a really, really big dog with big jaws. She has some violent impulses. She likes to bite her enemies, and Willow has to talk her out of it a bit, but I think the biggest thing that makes Lebowitz a good partner-in-crime is the thing that makes -- not in crime; in crime-fighting -- is the thing that makes any dog a wonderful partner, which is Lebowitz believes in Willow and believes in herself because dogs are not that self conscious and not that full of self-doubt, most of the time. The dog's confident in her body, in her existence, in her worthiness to be loved, that's something humans can all learn from, and Lebowitz brings that to the superhero team.
Another relationship I would love to touch on is Willow's relationship with her mom. It really got me. I would love to know a little bit more about when it came to that relationship, how was that influencing the very complicated decisions Willow has to make throughout the book?
Willow's family is just her and her mother, and her mother is a professor of Jewish history and culture, but who works part time, has no health insurance, as so many college professors do, including me when I was a teacher. I was raised in a single parent family with my mom, so I brought a lot of my own personal experience to that character and that relationship, but because the mom is chronically ill, even possibly terminally ill, and because she's also a Jewish intellectual, specializing in Jewish history, Willow has to take care of her mom. Physically find health insurance, make money for the family, basic fundamental things that she's doing at quite a young age without any other support system, but the mother provides in turn a support system of having a clear moral code and a clear understanding of right and wrong, and at a number of points, demonstrates to Willow... functions as a North Star maybe for how to be a good person. It's very thought out, so they have some conversations about it.
What were you most excited to see in Manuel's artwork?
Oh, man. Manuel Preitano was such a joy to work with. I really loved what he did in Oracle Code. I think he brings so much relatability and heart to superhero stories, and I think that is one reason I was really lucky to work with him.
We had the most fun designing the the superhero costume. I was just putting together a PowerPoint about it that I will be giving when I go out on the road, and we have a million sketches, and I sent him all these Pinterest pictures of everybody from like speed skaters and Simone Biles to Rihanna and Gigi Hadid in really awesome looking tracksuits. We kind of combined all of these influences through a back and forth, and he drew a million different sketches, and it was just so fun to try to create a superhero costume that was powerful and cool and believably teenager, but also maybe not so scanty as some superhero costumes are for women and men. She's a teenager; maybe she's not showing so much skin. It's a little more practical. We want to be practical and believable, at the same time as being all those other cool things.
E. Lockhart and Manuel Preitano's Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero is now on sale.