Talking With DC Collectibles' Jim Fletcher About Gotham City Garage at SDCC 2017

07/20/2017 05:19 pm EDT

Last night, DC Collectibles unveiled a batch of new statues and action figures, including a DC Essentials line (pulled from the pages of the comics), an Artist's Alley line (featuring the work of unique talents interpreting DC characters through their own lens) and new statues in the Gotham City Garage line, which brings a leather-clad biker aesthetic to DC superheroines.

"What I really like here is when we get to reinterpret things ourselves, like Gotham City Garage or DC Bombshells," Jim Fletcher, the Executive Creative Director for DC Collectibles, told ComicBook.com. "They're really fun because the design team all get to collaborate and we come up with stuff that's cool, and that's a great experience and a great opportunity to put such a unique and distinct touch on these amazing characters."

DC's publishing side recently announced that Gotham City Garage will follow in the steps of DC Bombshells and become a comic book series set in an alternate Earth within the DC multiverse and featuring the writing of Jackson Lanzing and Colin Kelly. The introduction of a comic, as Fletcher well knows, introduces both new challenges and new opportunities for the collectibles line.

"Gotham City Garage started as a statue line, the same way we've done with Bombshells and a few other properties since we've started Collectibles, where we just took the characters and we ran with it," Fletcher said. "We didn't know there was going to be any kind of narrative; we just came up with a look that we thought would resonate with people and that was pretty cool. We have to make sure when we're taking something like this to DC that the looks are different enough but recognizable as the characters."

It wasn't long before DC Comics took notice, though; only three of the statues were available before the comic was announced.

"We were only three statues in when we had the editorial team come down and they said 'So we've seen this statue, what is this thing?," Fletcher explained. "We explained it and they were like 'That's kind of cool,' and they sent people back down and started talking like a book. Going forward, we will be designing stuff, moving the characters forward and seeing who's going to be in the book. The reason [the Supergirl statue] is by herself with no bike is that we wanted to get the statue prices down. They're expensive statues, they only come out once a year, and we wanted to get that down, especially once we found out there was a book coming out. Going forward, we're working with editorial on more looks and stuff."

Supergirl being on her own (lifting an engine over her head) is particularly notable because previous Gotham City Garage statues featured characters on or around motorcycles -- something that was a different design challenge than many of DC Collectibles' other projects.

Even the pinup art-inspired Bombshells line, which often featured war-inspired imagery that included airplanes, rarely featured enough of the technology that something entirely new had to be created.

"Gotham City Garage is a little trickier because when it was being designed, there is a lot of motorcycle research that gets involved," Fletcher said. "You can't just take an existing motorcycle and put them on it. You have to take everything and kit-bash it and mix it back up. There was a lot of iterations; Dustin Nguyen actually designed the first two, and he sent all these motorcycles, trying to see which worked for the characters better. A chunky bike might be better with somebody than a skinny bike; no one's on a Vespa yet, and I don't know that we're going to go there, but the trick is, when you get to people like Ivy, what do you do? Do you put her on a gas-electric bike? Do you put her on no bike, or is it some kind of organic thing? It's a really interesting challenge. What kind of spokes go in the wheels? What kind of tire treads? It's a lot of design work."

While there don't seem to be any current plans for one, we had to ask what kind of Kirby-inspired madness might accompany a Big Barda statue in the line.

"If it's Barda, it's going to be a Super-Cycle," Fletcher said, admititng he had already considered the idea because of how much fun it could be. "I don't know how many other characters we might do from the New Gods, and she's never really been on the Super Cycle, but we can pretend between us, right?"

You can pre-order upcoming DC Collectibles items from the Comic Con 2017 collection here.

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