Whistle, the Jewish girl keeping Gotham safe - The Jewish Chronicle

The world of American comics has always had a very close connection with Jewish creators and Jewish culture. Without people like Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Bill Finger, Bob Kane, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster we wouldn’t have the likes of Fantastic Four, Avengers, Batman and Superman.

So Whistle, which debuted from DC in an original graphic novel published in September by writer E Lockhart and artist Manuel Preitano is just the latest in a long line of superheroes with a Jewish connection.

Whistle tells the story of 17-year-old Willow Zimmerman who lives in the Down City neighbourhood of Gotham City, home of Batman. She lives with her ill mother and helps out at an animal sanctuary. But her life changes forever when she gains strange powers from a stray Great Dane.

For writer E Lockhart, a Young Adult author with an impressive pedigree, Whistle was just something she couldn’t pass up.

“It’s not every day that you get invited to invent a superhero. For me it was the chance of a lifetime,” Lockhart tells me. When she was approached to write the project, she had to come up with a way of entering the world of Gotham that would play to her strengths.

“What could I bring to Gotham City? I had recently done a project where I had researched the Lower East Side. My father lived in East Greenwich Village when I was growing up and he was in that neighbourhood a lot in the 1980s so I invented a neighbourhood in Gotham City that is basically like New York’s lower East Side in the 1980s. For that project, I had done a whole bunch of research about the history of Jewish immigrants coming there. At one point it had more Jewish people per square acre than any other place on the planet.It used to have 500 synagogues. So I thought that this is fascinating and it would let me make a version of the Lower East Side and a local neighbourhood superhero. Batman’s got a lot of Gotham taken care of but there’s this little neighbourhood that he might not be paying that much attention to.”

The Jewish background here is something that is very close to her heart so it all started to fit neatly together.

“My dad is Jewish, my spouse is Jewish, and I come from mixed religion parents. So the history of my dad’s side of the family was tied up and is still tied up with that same history of Jewish people coming into America and living and working in the city.

“So I thought ‘OK my heroine will have a mother who is a professor of this stuff and will have a deep tie through her mother’s profession to the history of this neighbourhood and to the people who run their businesses there’, so it sprang out of that. She’s a secular Jewish person because that’s really what I am.”

Interestingly it wasn’t the world of comics which influenced the creation of Whistle and her neighbourhood but a series of children’s books that Lockhart read as a kid, the All-of-a-Kind series about a family of Jewish siblings.

“I think there’s really more here from Sydney Taylor’s work than from the world of comics. Taylor wrote a whole bunch of books set in the Lower East Side for children in the 1960s and they were the first Jewish children’s stories that reached a wide audience. They were very very popular and I remember reading those stories and they reflected my own family history back to me.”

“She paints a pretty sunny picture of the Lower East Side and my Lower East Side is in Gotham so there’s a lot of bad stuff happening in the corners of the city all the time. But I think it’s also about neighbourhood, community and your local place where people know you, like the shops and delis where people know you. I think there’s a slightly Pollyanna-ish element to my fictional Lower East Side which comes from Sydney Taylor.”

Lockhart uses three existing Batman villains as part of the story but she has adapted them so they fit a little better into her world.

“I used The Riddler, Poison Ivy and Killer Croc and part of the reason I picked those three who I think are all really lovely, juicy villains for other reasons but they all serve as dark mirrors for my heroine. Poison Ivy is a great role model for a young woman in a lot of ways if you take away the psychosis. She’s a glamorous botanist with a mission to help the world. That’s how she sees it.

“I changed The Riddler in some ways more from his canonical DC iterations in giving him a different back story. I just made him friends with Whistle’s mum and you get to see a little bit of him in college. He lost touch with her family and then she reencounters him later and he becomes a mentor figure. But he’s an art collector and he’s very erudite. He’s got money and a very generous spirit and a very playful spirit as he loves the riddles and puzzles and all. And you can see that if this is what your underworld looks like it could be extremely appealing so you can get pretty far drawn into that world.

“Whistle has dog related powers and so Killer Croc was a natural choice for me here too.”

The book sees the debut of the character but it is likely that this won’t be the last we see of Whistle.

“There are plans for Whistle elsewhere in the DCU and I have ideas for a sequel which I have not started to work on yet.”