Fan-fave artist Dustin Nguyen and DC Collectibles honcho Jim Fletcher take you into the Gotham City Garage for this week’s GOTHAM TRIBUNE.
When I was at Toy Fair over the winter, I saw a lot of awesome stuff, but as soon as I saw this statue, I stopped dead in my tracks:
MOTORCYCLE CATWOMAN! A rival to my beloved Chainsaw Wonder Woman! I was so thunderstruck, I declared her the Winner of Toy Fair 2014!
And so I was eager as all heck to get the story behind this epically cool collectible, which comes out in October at the if-you’ve-got-the-means-I-highly-recommend-picking-one-up price of $350. Time pressures being what they are, I was unable to actually conduct the interview with Jim Fletcher, DC Collectibles’ design director, and Dustin Nguyen, one of the artists on Batman Eternal, but our ol’ pal Clay N. Ferno pinch hit for me for this week’s regular GOTHAM TRIBUNEcolumn! (Below you’ll still find my pick for the Batbook of the Week!)
Oh, and check out the fancy concept art by none other than Mr. Nguyen himself!
Clay N. Ferno: Where did the idea for ‘Motorcycle Catwoman’ (Gotham City Garage Catwoman) come from? We’ve seen sketches going back to 2009 with the design. How is this coming to statue form?
Dustin Nguyen: I’ve always had an obsession with a character and their vehicle. You have Batman and the Batmobile … Luke and his Landspeeder. It’s cool to have a weapon or vehicle that always leads back to them, kind of like their companion. Even in SilverHawks they had birds that turned into their cars. I always thought that would be cool to have a bird that could turn into a bike and ride it through space, but I was 10, so that was cool back then for me.
Jim Fletcher: Now you’re 11! (Laughs)
DN: I just always thought it would be cool if each character can have a vehicle I could identify with them. This is also just fun to draw, I love machines, motors, things with big tires.
JF: Dustin gave me a poster of this before we moved out to California, maybe 6 years or so ago. I thought at the time these were really cool and we should do something with these. We just kept waiting for a space where we could actually do them and get them out. We pitched them in a yearly meeting of cool things we wanted to do and this finally got greenlit. I presented these a number of times and Geoff Johns saw them and said, “Oh my God, these are really cool.” Luckily, Dustin had done a lot of preliminary work on it. We were able to jump right in.
DN: Once you guys moved out there, it seemed easier to get things going.
JF: I know we had changed the designs a lot too, this is slightly different than what Dustin first presented. We have a couple of other designs in the wings we can’t discuss yet, but a lot of DC women have been associated with bikes which is another thing that’s really cool about this program. Huntress has a bike, Batgirl’s been on a bike, Harley … a lot of them have been riding motorcycles.
DN: Originally they were bicycles! Just kidding, that would have been cool though.
JF: Tricycles! (Laughs)
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