#1920s gotham

[vintagecandy]

Would love to see your 20s mad hatter in 30 or 32!

Also, happy new year! Thank you for sharing your art with us <3

One underrated benefit of top hats: they're fantastic for headstands!

Happy slightly belated new years, friend, thanks for being here !! 🖤

[vintagecandy]

If I may ask, any chance you have an idea what the Ventriloquist and Scarface would be like in your AU? Genuinely curious (and I personally love Arnold)

I’d ask if you could draw them but I only found you today and I felt it would be a bit much you know?

I'm always saying I'll draw a response to one of these asks and I never do it-- luckily!! you have caught me in an art mood with a character I happen to already have a design in mind, so at long last here is my take on Arnold if you can forgive just a small portrait and not a full profile page lol :>

MEETING ARNOLD WESKER & SCARFACE:

Meek, unambitious, and used to being so unimportant he's second fiddle to even his own handmade props, Wesker refuses to believe he's capable of much of anything in spite of his talent. But, in an absurd accident of fate, Mr. Wesker, a small-time children's puppet entertainer for stage and radio, bumbles into killing a notorious bootlegger mobster in self defense after overhearing him discussing plans in a little too much detail. He escapes without telling anyone out of fear of retaliation from the criminal world. Just as the Bat finds it easy to dismiss the senseless death as simple mob warfare, there's suddenly reports of speakeasies swearing to receive phone calls from a man with that mobster's exact voice making business demands as if he never left, with mobsters swearing to just be following orders from the top, same as always.

Refusing to accept the existence of ghosts, Batman investigates to find that Mr. Wesker is clearly involved, but swears he's only acting under threat of his life from the mobster. Overhearing what sounds like an argument between the two as Wesker begs to be let out of this arrangement, Batman rushes in to reveal he has transformed a puppet once used for children's entertainment into a mini replica of the man he killed, arguing with himself. A master of impressions and throwing his voice, Wesker insists its not him but a ghost of the former mobster, a delusion presumably spurred on by the traumatic incident.

Captured alongside his mooks and separated from his prop, Wesker is dragged away to the asylum swearing the puppet has a mind of its own, and just as he's out of view, Batman suddenly feels a bullet shoot upwards from his arms and graze his shoulder. It was the gun rigged to be held by the limp puppet in his hands, somehow misfiring. Bats can't help but disarm the puppet as if it was alive as the mobster's voice cackles from somewhere far away.

[vintagecandy]

Now for the 1920s reimagining of Jonathan Crane ! sorry this explanation is even longer lmao

As everyone's been saying, I should do the rest of the Dork Squad to match 1920s Jervis, and so here is my Jonathan! Easily the hardest to draw out of the three-- but I must say! Despite being outside my expertise, I'm a little surprised how much it looks exactly like I was imagining! Even if it took me ages but that's just procrastination lmao.

Anyways! What is his deal? Well, for one, design wise I did go a more drastically different direction from his usual look by doing a literal scareCROW. He's much more bird like, with a plague doctor mask being common imagery in steampunk, but he's still very southern themed with his messy broken overall strap and patchwork coat. Even his wings are rustic. ( he can't fly just glide btw lol ) Also! I leaned hard into the color orange instead of his usual green gas because it..... bugs me that both Crane and Nygma have a bright green in their color palette. I just want them to have distinct colors if they're going to be a trio. And look how vintage halloweeny he looks !!

So why is he so well dressed out of costume? Well! This Jonathan Crane is not a psychologist at all, here he is the very successful grandfather of horror movies in the silent film era. ( An illustrious origin, i hope canon Crane would be proud lmao ). This is referenced in how his face looks, he's wearing white powder and black makeup that's usually meant to emphasize key features on blurry film like his upper lip and around his eyes. And yes, he just keeps his makeup on during most events, and people just accept he's a little on the... eccentric side.

To me, the archetype of the mad artist fits Jonathan's vibe perfectly. When it comes to striking fear, he's a perfectionist, a trait that drove him to learn every single skill necessary himself, from costume design to props to making his own cameras to mechanical engineering, to.... a "fear gas" that was supposed to gently encourage immersion in the audience but ended up becoming a dangerous chemical weapon.

For his origin crime I am thinking !! Full blown Scooby Doo style monster mystery!! With some nuance! Crane, as a first impression, gives off an immediate air of pompous, aggressively impatient, pretentious director type. His presence is big and dramatic, but its distinctly not southern-- in fact, he seems to play up something between a hollywood accent and a thespian one. But this is all to cover for his farm hick background that he was once very ashamed of.

As a child of a failing farmhand during an infamously dry and dusty era, Jonathan developed an extreme resentment for his country existence from both the bullying of other children for all his strange quirks and the severe verbal and physical abuse of his father, driven to alcoholism by the stress of poverty and the loss of his wife. Originally offering his artistic ideas as a means to help them, he grows sick of their closed mindedness and berating and runs away to learn about the emerging potential of film in Gotham City.

Its been many years, Jonathan now in his early 30s, he finds himself surrounded by the shallow, champagne aristocrats that reflect his childhood bullies. Feeling wrong in his own skin, he develops a sightly unhealthy obsession with the escapism he finds in performing as the monsters in his movies.

But upon discovering that the corrupt rich of Gotham plan to push legislation that would negatively effect farmers like his own history, and that they expected him to be amongst those who support it, his irritation with the shallowness of society reaches its limits. In day, he would feign support for their behavior to cover his tracks, but at night he would don the mask of the Scarecrow, rumored to be the vengeful spirit of a farmer who was hanged, and who he believes to be a more freeing expression of himself than his true face, targeting not just the rich but striking fear in their laborers to scare them off land. And it works. So, he tries bending the will of society more.

Is he doing this out of any moral conviction or just spite and a love for the role? It's... hard to say.

As the Scarecrow, his methods are so effective he's near uncatchable, even by Batman. Its only by solving the mystery of who is under the mask are they able to catch him. They surprise him during one of his screenings, jump him in the dark, and prove his subtle use of fear gas in the theater to the police once he's cornered. Instead of being angry, he goes to the mad house applauding Batman's performance.

What an interesting character they play. He's very inspired.

[vintagecandy]

maybe BTAS mad hatter meeting your sona? :3

God forbid a Tetch be happy.

I'm assuming by sona you mean my 1920s Jervis btw, hopefully i didn't misunderstand you lol

[vintagecandy]

You'll have to forgive me if I ever take a plot idea from the comics on accident, I don't actually remember much of his canon-- if anything I guess I'll take that as a good sign I'm getting the character right lmao

but in context of the 1920s, Wesker basically escapes and goes on to run bootlegging for Penguin's iceberg lounges, just dragged along by Scarface per usual.

[vintagecandy]

pls use this anon ask as a free excuse to ramble/draw something abt jervis tetch in any form!! i love ur take and interpretation of the characters so so much and hearing abt them is a delight!!

Have !! this aimless doodle I've been doing of 1920s Jerv and Jon lmao

I love to think that these two meeting went funny, because, ofc, my Jervis has two settings in a way. Jervis with and without the hat. And meeting in the asylum, he met hatless Jervis first.

And I'm picturing grumpy, half-lucid jervis desperately trying to explain its not just a hat its a weapon! If you can help me steal my hat from the lockers we will be out of here in seconds, but I can't do a thing with this damned headache.

And Jonathan's thinking like, ok, its probably got a false top, he stored a gun or something in there.

Not quite lmao.

God knows what Jervis is saying in this pic but I know Jon is saying "I liked you better before the hat." Which-- might be true at first, but I feel The Mad Hatter grows on him after a while lol.

[vintagecandy]

Extremely dumb idea I just had for your 1920’s au.

A trio of henchmen….who are literally just the Three Stooges. (They began as a vaudeville act in 1925)

Haha! No, I think that's cute! Especially because truthfully my 1920s au has just a bunch of old movie references in general throughout, from 1900s to 1950, so the three stooges would not at all seem out of place.

I can picture exactly what they'd be in my mind-- just these silly reoccurring background mooks that add a bit of levity but are really having a whole arc to the side of the screen if you notice they're the same 3 guys every time lmao. Maybe, finally, they get a whole dedicated side episode where they're just bouncing from rogue to rogue trying to be good evil mooks to do something nebulous like pay their rent that week, changing outfits, remarking how insane everything is, but comically screwing it up and accidentally saving the day. The rogue has no idea they're to blame for messing up the plan and they get out scott free, the whole episode is just a slapstick three stooges episode homage.

At some point they're doing a whole Whose On First style gag with Jervis because his Wonderland brain would accidentally play along with the word play and get locked in a word play loop lmao...

Because their names are Who, What, and When or something impossible to not misunderstand like that sdhgkdskhgsds

[vintagecandy]

My personal reimagining of Jervis Tetch, AKA: The Mad Hatter.

So I noticed that it is really common for Gotham rogues-- but almost especially Jervis Tetch-- to get redrawn and redesigned! Which I just thought was such a fun exercise, so because I'm me and predictable my brain immediately leaped at the chance to imagine my own Jervis.... set in the 1920s. Now, the drastically different time period causes a lot of interesting dynamics. For one, I'm fairly certain Jervis Tetch's character originates from a time period of comics where people wore a lot more hats, so setting him in the past is very fitting for him. It makes a lot more sense for him to literally be an artisan hat manufacturer, as in a real hatter. BUT what's interesting is that hand made "hatter" style hats were actually beginning to fade out of favor, and one of the reasons is actually partially because there was a growing moralizing around the hatting industry's overhunting of birds for their decorative feathers, and so Jervis ( as you can see ) having this big, real peacock bird feather on his hat is sort of a defiance, a subtle expression of his bad intent. And I imagine his introduction to crime will be marked with the sudden unprompted rise of vintage style hats "regaining popularity". He's very much still a hypnotist, a master illusionist, and a scientific genius, and I was thinking- to shake things up- the hat is actually what drove him insane. Originally the hat band was created to counteract nerve damage he developed from mercury poisoning some years ago, but ended up also giving him heightened focus and an incurable bout of severe insanity. Then he later repurposed it for mind control. What insanity? Ok, look at the face I drew for him. This was on accident, but I've been looking at his face...... and I cannot shake the feeling he's a dad. Like, he has peak "wacky inventor father" energy in his face, but more sickly and evil. So I was thinking.... what if for this Jervis instead of his usual romantic Alice fixation... Alice was instead his daughter. And he loved having pretend tea parties with her, acting as the hatter. Some point after he put on the hat, his behavior was a little off but not worrying yet, but he lets his daughter wander off too far in this dangerous city and he just... never sees her again. He calls the police, they're kinda apathetic- probably corrupt tbh, he puts up posters-- nothing, she's just gone. Probably dead the more time passes. A senseless tragedy in a nonsense world. This breaks his brain! And so he decides he's going to take over all of Gotham and turn it into a game of Wonderland, part out of spite, and mostly out of total denial that his daughter is gone no matter how many years pass, in hopes that the little lost girl will find her way back to him or even that more puppets means more help finding her. But with time his insanity becomes so severe he doesn't even remember Alice was his daughter and not literally the book Alice, but he is slightly more lucid when without the hat. However, he feels sick and anxious when without it.

But as it goes in Gotham, by the time they consider you Arkham levels of insane, incurably so-- a 1920s insane asylum mind you! Which practically makes him more ill-- you sort of have no choice but to stay in the crime life forever. Which is where the tommy guns come in.