Ever since the term "kill line" came up, a lot of people had been posting in the reader community, asking what I thought about it.
All I could say was that I had finally been vindicated. How many times had I said it? Major cities on the American East Coast really were this damn way! But nobody believed me!!!
Thinking back to when this book depicted Gotham's miserable state, I had no idea how many people argued against it in the comments. They thought Gotham was, at the very least, a major city on New York's level, so how could it possibly be like this?
Others thought that someone as smart and capable as Bruce shouldn't have been able to get stumped the moment he entered the Slums. They thought I was deliberately smearing Batman. Even the absurd things that happened later, when Superman went undercover in Gotham, were dismissed by some as jokes. How could anything that bizarre possibly be real?
That brought me to the fact that most of the inspiration for this book's Gotham came from my own real experiences in Chicago, United States.
I believed everyone remembered the plot point about the old man in the Slums whose supposedly curative medicine was actually drugs. That had been adapted from the real experience that left the deepest impression on me.
When I was little, my family had to stay there for a while because of work. I was young when I first went abroad, and the neighborhood where I lived with my family had pretty good security. I remembered police patrolling the area. Police cars would often be parked at both ends of the street outside my house, blocking it off so no other cars could enter.
Then, about three hundred meters from that neighborhood, there was