Advocate.com wrote today about the diversity of Fox’s newest superhero show, Gotham. It looked at three of the show’s female characters: women of colour, one of whom is a lesbian. Zabryna Guevara plays Sarah Essen who is the captain of the GCPD Homicide Squad — which also means she’ll be James Gordon’s boss. The character is white in the comics, so the casting is a race reversal: a great step by the show’s creators since it adds diversity to the line up. We have a new character in the form of Jada Pinkett-Smith’s mob boss, Fish Mooney, created for the show. (I wouldn’t be surprised if she made her way into the comics, like Diggle of CW’s Arrow and Harley Quinn of Batman: The Animated Series did.)

Most importantly, Victoria Cartagena is playing Rene Montoya, a Latina lesbian in the Batman comics. One of the better known Gotham coppers, she was introduced in Batman #475 and was outed as a lesbian to her friends, co-workers and family during a beautifully written story arc in DC’s Gotham Central series. With recent controversies and instances over whitewashing and straight washing characters (Ra’s Al Ghul in Arrow & John Constantine in Constantine), it’s nice for a viewer like myself, who is a fan of superhero stories, to have people of colour as well as LGBT individuals represented on screen.