Stanley Kitch
39 years ago - Stanley Kitch is born in Gotham, the son of an FBI agent.
26 years ago - 13-year-old Stanley Kitch's father is killed in the line of duty.
21 years ago - 18-year-old Stanley Kitch goes to college to study pre-law.
17 years ago - 22-year-old Stanley Kitch goes to law school.
14 years ago - 25-year-old Stanley Kitch becomes a junior law associate in a major gotham law firm.
13 years ago - 26-year-old Stanley Kitch proposes to his long-time girlfriend, Vera Sweet.
12 years ago - 27-year-old Stanley Kitch finds evidence in his casework that his firm is working for Oswald Cobblepot, hiding his properties in shell companies. He quits, leading his fiance Vera Sweet to end their relationship. He decides to follow his father's footsteps and enrolls in the FBI training academy, becoming an FBI
9 years ago - 30-year-old Stanley Kitch learns that his ex-fiance Vera Sweet's body was found in an abandoned building in Gotham Harbor. He recognizes the building as one previously owned by one of Oswald Cobblepot's shell companies, but cannot prove it. He quits the FBI, enrolls in the police academy and joins the GCPD as a rookie.
8 years ago - 31-year-old Stanley Kitch helps disable Garfield Lynn's firebombs while Batman captures him. He finishes his probationary period and is promoted to Detective. He partners with Mackenzie Bock in the GCPD Major Crimes Division.
There are a lot of named Gotham PD characters over the years of Batman comics, so when it came time for us to put together the characters that would represent the GCPD in our project, we had quite a few to choose from. The goal was really the same one we use when adding characters in general; to find characters that just seemed to have a little bit of story behind them, someone who just brings more to the world. In the case of Stanley Kitch, what we really like was his backstory, and how much fun it was to turn that into a timeline.
Stanley Kitch's Comic StoryKitch's first appearance was in 1989 in Detective Comics #596, where he was the cop helping Batman and Commissioner Gordon track the incredibly 80s villain Film Freak. As he would continue to appear for the next few years, there were occasional references to the fact that he had come to the GCPD from the FBI, but later on, as he appeared in the mid to late 90s he was instead referred to as a former lawyer. Both ideas suggest some sort of really fascinating backstory which would be fun for us to dig into, but... maybe we could do BOTH?
This was actually a really fun backstory to build. We had some tight parameters, because we wanted him to actually become a detective eight years ago, and wanted him to be a few years younger than his partner, which meant we had to get him through law school, give him a career as a lawyer, a reason to quit and go to the FBI academy and become an agent... and then have another reason why he'd quit the FBI and go become a rookie cop in Gotham. We gave him ties to the Penguin specifically, and I really enjoy the backstory that came together here. He then gets to be partners with fellow recurring-cop character from the 90s, Mackenzie Bock. |
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