On Batman #50

1.) THE MARKETING

If you've been reading Batman since it was relaunched with a new #1 as part of DC Comics' "Rebirth" initiative in 2016, then you know the comic book's writer Tom King has rekindled Batman and Catwoman's on-again, off-again decades-long romance, starting as early as his second story arc, "I Am Suicide." After reuniting the estranged pair, King had them referring to one another by pet names--"Bat" and "Cat," respectively--and having an ongoing argument over where and how they first met, whether it was on a boat (as in her very first appearance, 1940's Batman #1), or on the street (as in her post-Crisis first appearance, in the pages of the "Batman: Year One" story arc).

In 2017's Batman #24, King had Batman propose to Catwoman. In #32, he had him re-propose, and this time she says yes. So the marriage of the two characters has been on the minds of the characters and readers for quite some time now, about a year and some 500 pages worth of Batman comics.

DC Comics only magnified that promise of a wedding. While King slowly but surely plodded toward it in the pages of his comic, with stories about the pair telling Batman's other on-again, off-again criminal love interest Talia al Ghul the news and going on a double-date with Superman and Lois Lane and Catwoman's shopping for a wedding dress, DC promised a wedding in the pages of DC Universe #0, they published a suite of five one-shot comics under the umbrella title Batman: Prelude to The Wedding (which were advertised to comic shops and readers via a "save the date"-style flier), and, of course, the cover of the fiftieth issue not only featured a Batman kissing Catwoman wearing a wedding dress, but it had the words "The Wedding" emblazoned across the top of the cover, above the logo.

And then there were some odd, out-of-the-box sorts of promotion for the Batman/Catwoman wedding, like DC apparently encouraged comic shops to host wedding-themed celebrations (that would actually be kind of awesome), and Tom King went on an actual late night TV show to talk about it, the way actors show up on such programs to talk about their new movies and suchlike.

If you read the book, which shipped Wednesday July 4th, or if you read The New York Times story from a few days before that (or even just the Internet in the seconds after the NYT piece went up), then you know that there was not a wedding after all.

This made a lot of folks mad, for a variety of reasons. Many of these reasons are very good reasons, like DC going out of their way to promote Batman #50 as a book about the wedding of Batman and Catwoman, and encouraging retailers--who, remember, have to order and pay for these comics well in advance and then sell them to their customers at a later date--to sell the book as the wedding of Batman and Catwoman. Which, again, it was not.

Sure, it does revolve around their impending nuptials, and there are a few scenes involving the characters dressing up and then securing a judge and witnesses, but a wedding ceremony never takes place. Or even starts. It's...pretty shitty, actually. It's as pure a bait-and-switch as one could imagine, made particularly galling because of how much extra effort went into the baiting, and the fact that the publisher tried to enlist their retailers to engage in the baiting, making them complicit in something that could only serve to annoy fans.

Now, I read King's Batman #1-#49, and while I didn't like #50, it wasn't just because I showed up to see a wedding and got a not-a-wedding. I don't know how many readers, if any, saw the news on late night TV or read about it on the Internet or heard their friends talking about it and went to a comics shop specifically to buy the wedding issue, paid $5 and...go something different than what they were promised. But I suppose that would be pretty discouraging.

The thing about reading the book all along is that, while the characters have talked an awful lot about the wedding, it always seemed like something far off. In fact, King's handling of it was suspiciously light on detail. There was never a date set. There was never any talk of how billionaire Bruce Wayne was going to marry former mobster, super-villain and thief Selina Kyle, and how that might affect his reputation or endanger his secret identity. There was precious little discussion of how other characters in their orbit felt about the huge life change. And there was none of the fun stuff one might expect from a comic book superhero wedding, including who was in the bridal party, the bachelor's and bachelorette's party, and so on. Some of that stuff was covered, but not in King's Batman, but rather in the tie-ins written by Tim Seeley, and, amusingly enough, much of what was in that contradicted what was in Batman pretty directly (For example, in Nightwing Vs. Hush, Nightwing says Batman and Catwoman are getting married, rather than Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle which...well, how would that work, exactly...?).

So it would be pretty easy to apportion the blame for the disconnect in the marketing and the actual comic to DC, and excuse King himself, were it not for that interview he gave on TV, I guess. I didn't watch it, though, so I don't know if he was more equivocal in it than, say, the cover of Batman #50 or the existence of the Prelude To The Wedding comics were.

Now that it's over, the one thing I wonder about is why DC bothered with the extra promotion. It is not like Batman needs it. The book is the publisher's reigning grand champion, and that didn't change any when Scott Snyder left as writer and King took over; Batman by King continued to out-sell Snyder's All-Star Batman, proving that it wasn't just Snyder or Snyder-on-Batman, but the comic book Batman itself that sold so dang well. Batman #50 was always going to do gangbusters, by virtue of being another issue of Batman, in addition to being an anniversary issue...and having a huge array of guest-artists drawing splash pages throught out it...and resolving the long-running marriage plot line.

Perhaps all the PR work did boost sales a couple thousand units, but is that really worth it if it will cost you a couple thousand units in the extremely near future, as all the folks who showed up for the wedding don't pick up the next issue and some of the folks who read the first fifty issues feel burned and drop it, and perhaps some of the more vocally hurt (or just irritated) retailers decide not to invest as heavily in future issues of Batman....?


1a) THE TIE-INS

Despite my kvetching about these, I ended up buying and reading all of them...and reviewing almost all of them on the site, I think. What was weird about the books, all of which were written by Tim Seeley and formed a loose, continuing narrative that was really more of a prelude to Batman #48 and #49 than the wedding (or the "wedding"), is that all of the little, interesting bits about the possibility of Batman and Catwoman marrying here handled in these, not the pages of Batman.

From Batman: Prelude To The Wedding: Robin Vs. Ra's al Ghul #1 by Tim Seeley, Brad Walker, Andrew Hennessy, et al. 

In the first, Selina Kyle takes Damian to the tailor to get his wedding outfit**, Damian once again battles his grandfather Ra's al Ghul (whose whole deal for the longest time was that he wanted Batman to marry his daughter Talia), Selina goes to her bachelorette party, and then Damian and Selina have a serious discussion about whether or not she plans to have kids with Bruce Wayne.

From Batman: Prelude To The Wedding: Nightwing Vs. Hush #1 by Tim Seeley, Travis Moore, Tamra Bonvillain, et al.

In the second, Nightwing and Superman take Batman out for his very, very boring bachelor's party, but it gets interrupted by a villain attack, and Bruce Wayne rather reluctantly tells Dick Grayson that he's going to have Superman be his best man. This is also the issue where Nightwing explains that Batman and Catwoman are getting married, not Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle (at which point I kinda wondered why they were getting married at all; can't they just keep living together? What's the point of their marriage if its a secret one between their secret identities, that aren't even real people? Surely that's not legally binding...)

In the fourth, we see Selina Kyle's bachelorette party.

Throughout the five of them, the fact that Batman and Catwoman are marrying is treated as common knowledge about Batman's allies (Robin, Nightwing, Batgirl and Red Hood) and villains (Ra's,Hush, The Riddler, Anarky, Harley Quinn and The Joker). And it is suggested that a wedding has been planned, with a particular date set that all of Batman's family seems to know about and think they might be attending. In the pages of Batman, though, that's clearly not true at all, as we'll get to.

I ended up liking these an awful lot--even if Batgirl Vs. The Riddler is a bit icky, and I loathe The Red Hood--and I imagine they will all be collected in Batman: Prelude To The Wedding, but they are so at odds with Batman that it's pretty unclear whether or not Seeley had any idea what King was up to.


2.) THE FORMAT

There are 38-pages in this special $4.99 issue, but only 20 pages of them are really comics. These are all drawn by Mikel Janin. The remaining 18 pages are...well, here's the thing about this book. Often times in anniversary issues, a publisher will have a bunch of big-name artists contribute pin-ups, which generally run as a gallery at the back of the book. This is a way of demonstrating that the issues is special, that the publisher considers it a big enough deal that they got Todd McFarlane to draw The Sandman or whatever.

Here though, the pin-ups are incorporated into the story itself. There is sparing text over those pin-ups, so at first glance of flip-through,, they seem to act like splash pages, but when you read them, you see the images generally have nothing at all to do with the content. They are just drawings of Batman and Catwoman together, the participating artists apparently just drawing whatever the hell they want, so long as it includes those two characters.

It's extremely awkward, and frustrating.

Oh, and those words? They are the text of Bat's letter to Cat and Cat's letter to Bat, mirroring the climax of "I Am Suicide," where an entire issue is devoted to excerpts from letters running in narration boxes over 20 or so pages of Mikel Janin drawing an unrelated action scene. The letters are...also frustrating. You could lose every single one of those pages, pictures and words, and lose nothing at all from the story. The two characters write to one another in parallel ways to demonstrate to the reader how much they think alike, and they talk about one another's eyes and how they first met and what they think of one another.

The pin-up/splash pages are from everyone who has drawn part of Finch's run (David Finch, Joelle Jnes, Lee Weeks, Clay Mann, Mitch Gerards) and artists who had previously drawn the character in previous volumes of the series (Becky Cloonan, Jason Fabok, Neal Adams, Tony S. Daniel, Andy Kubert, Jim Lee, Greg Capullo) and artists who have drawn Batman elsewhere, and/or are just people that it is nice to see drawing Batman and Catwoman (Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Frank Miller, Lee Bermejo, Amanda Conner, Rafael Albuquerque, Ty Templeton).

Splitting the difference between the guest-drawn pin-up pages and the story pages drawn by Janin is a spread of two, multi-panel pages drawn by guest-artists: A four-panel page drawn by Tim Sale, immediately followed by a three-panel page drawn by Paul Pope (and both colored by Jose Villarrubia).

I would have liked to see Kelley Jones (I'd always like to see Kelley Jones!), Guillem March, Riley Rossmo and Sean Murphy, but they didn't ask me. (They never ask me!)

Most of the artists--eleven of them--draw some version of the Darwyn Cooke-designed Catwoman costume, with only minor variations here and there, which is what Catwoman has been wearing since 2002. It was one of the few costumes to survive the New 52 redesign process unscathed. Garcia-Lopez and Kubert both draw the one with the purple dress and green cape. Fabok opts for the Jim Balent-designed purple costume with thigh-high boots. And then there are a couple more idiosyncratic ones. Miller draws what looks a lot like her "Batman: Year One" costume, but it is colored purple instead of gray; Sale and Pope follow suit, although their version has a tail. Jones draws the desert costume Catwoman wore in the first Jones-drawn arc of Batman, Templeton's costume is a unique one, combining elements of her two Batman: The Animated Series costumes with a new mask, and, finally, Weeks costume looks like it could be some version of her "Year One" costume or perhaps her new costume, but the coloring is so spare it's difficult to tell.

Batman, meanwhile, is drawn in a variety of costumes, and these generally match the ones he would have been wearing when Catwoman was wearing the one she's pictured in. This would, of course, be weird, given that fact that a lot of those costumes supposedly never existed in the current, post-Flashpoint continuity, but King's Batman has been operating as if Flashpoint changed nothing but the color of Jim Gordon's hair, so it's not like this is the first time the book seems to contradict the extremely malleable and fluid history of the DC Universe.

The pictures are, of course, nice, although the paragraphs of text filling them kind of make them difficult to enjoy. Because they are almost always completely disconnected from one another, the pages don't flow the way they might normally when one reads a comic, and has to read words and pictures subconsciously simultaneously; rather here one has to look at--not read, just look at--a picture, while reading a story unrelated to it.

So, for example, the text on this page is Batman describing the events of 1940's Batman #1 to Catwoman, but rather than drawing a pin-up reflecting that story or that era to align with the text on the page, artist Jason Fabok's image depicts the two characters as they would have been dressed in the early 1990s (In current continuity, that's Catwoman's Year One costume and Batman never wore that costume, by the way). 

It got to the point that while I was reading it I began to question to what degree this comic book was really a comic book, and if the pin-ups with words part of it counted as comics as not. Ultimately I realized that if one thinks of the splashes as implied panels, then it's still technically comics, it just doesn't work like comics should.

This is a long, roundabout way of saying that this is an extremely bizarre, hard-to-read and ultimately bad comic book, which is weird given how many talented people are involved in it.

(And this is a common complaint of mine about King's writing. He's a good writer who writes bad comics, generally by focusing too much on formal tricks that rarely serve the story.)


3.) THE STORY

Batman and Catwoman are fighting Kite-Man--something they apparently do about once a month now*--and they decide, spur of the moment, to just do it tonight. Batman says he can get a judge, and they will each need two witnesses; he suggest they each bring one. It's to be at dawn, atop the very building--Finger Tower, a caption reveals, making it the first of many, many place names in captions that refer to Batman creators--that they just beat up Kite-Man on.

Their letters to one another begin on the next page, and these are interspersed throughout the rest of the book, with every page or two worth of comics story interrupted by two pages of the letters over art.

Batman goes to Porky's (remember Batman/Elmer Fudd Special #1? That place) and approaches Judge Wolfman. Later, Batman tells Alfred "Judge Wolfman will preside. To avoid risking the Wayne identity, the marriage has to be secret from the public. By Dawn, Wolfman'll be too drunk to remember what he said or signed." (Again, I wonder what the point of the marriage is, exactly, in-story.)

Catwoman springs Holly Robinson from Arkham Asylum so she can be her witness, and she sneaks her into Wayne Manor, where Holly helps her put on the wedding dress she had previously stolen. Holly Robinson's continuity is...complicated, and I've completely lost track of it after the Flashpoint/New 52 reboot. She was present when Selina Kyle first met Batman in "Batman: Year One," and has appeared off and on in the following decades; she was even briefly Catwoman for a while when Selina took time off from Catwoman-ing to have a baby. She's played a role in King's Batman run previously, particularly in "I Am Suicide" and "The Rules of Engagement."

While the two talk in "The Englehart Bedroom," Holly mentions in passing that Batman's never been happy before and, further, "He always seemed to need his misery, y'know...Like it was how he did what he did." To this, Catwoman replies, "What?"

Mikel Janin

In "The Conway Bedroom," Bruce asks Alfred to be his witness (Superman, Dick, Hush, Joker, you're all out of the running).

On the ride to the rooftop, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle tell Alfred and HOlly about the letters they are writing one another. At one point, Bruce asks Alfred, "Can I be...happy?" And Alfred, responds, "Don't you have to be?"

Selina sits alone atop a rooftop in Kane Plaza, crying and thinking about the letter she left on Batman's computer. She tosses her veil aside and jumps off the rooftop. Meanwhile, on the roof of Finger Tower, Alfred, Judge Wolfman and Bruce Wayne all stand around, waiting. Bruce is thinking about his letter, which he left on the bed for Catwoman. Bruce takes off his tight, and then jumps off the roof top in his tuxedo.

Back in Arkham Asylum, Holly walks to a lower level, kneels before Bane, sho sits atop a pile of skulls, and reports back to him, telling him how Selina is, and that she doesn't know how Batman is.

"Do not...worry," Bane says. "I know. He is...what I have made him. The bat is...broken."

Janin.

To Bane's right we see The Psycho Pirate ("I Am Suicide"), The Joker*** ("The War of Jokes and Riddles," "The Best Man"), and The Riddler ("The War of Jokes and Riddles"). TO Bane's left we see Gotham Girl ("I Am Gotham," "Night of The Monster Men"), Scarface and The Ventriloquist ("I Am Suicide"), The Flashpoint Batman, Dr. Thomas Wayne ("The Button") and Dr. Hugo Strange ("The Night of The Monster Men). Oh, and Skeets ("The Gift") is on the floor, but it's unclear if he's just bet set there, or if Janin drew him on the floor rather than flying because he ran out of room while drawing the panel; I would assume he's deactivated and not there of his own free will, but who can say).

In other words, the primary villains and/or some characters who may feel used by and or aggrieved against Batman from throughout the previous 49 issues are all standing around like the court to king Bane.

The end.


4.) THE DECISION

And so, Batman Bruce Wayne and Catwoman Selina Kyle did not, in fact, get married. Instead, Selina decided to write him a Dear Bat letter apparently breaking up with him and then ghosting The World's Greatest Detective.

That DC Comics would decide not to make such a big, life change in the status quo of their most prominent character and reliable cash chow might seem obvious to a lot of readers, but then, they also decided to kill off Robin Jason Todd, break Batman's spine and confine him to a wheelchair, resurrect the long-dead Jason Todd, introduce Batman's biological son and even kill Batman off. Repeatedly.

As far as changes to Batman's status quo go, marrying Catwoman would have been kind of small potatoes, and extremely easily reversed at any point, with a lot less effort and/or cosmic shenanigans than any of the above, some of which were reversed and some of which weren't.

What is most disappointing about Catwoman's decision to not marry Batman--and to apparently not just not marry him, but to leave him altogether--is that King has her arriving at it for the extremely dubious and most all-around laziest, generic reasoning possible.

After Holly plants the idea in Selina's head that Batman needs to feel bad constantly in order to effectively be Batman, her letter changes directions.

I'm going to quote it at some length now:

You are still a child, Bruce. A hurt child... But what you do with that hurt-- I saw teh hero it mad eyou. And then...as if to prove what I saw... Booster. A world in horror because you're content. Joker. Knowing if you were settled you couldn't stop him. You are an engine that turns pain into hope. If we're happy...If I help that lonely boy, with the lonely eyes. I kill that engine. I kill Batman. I kill the person who saves everyone. And how can I do that?

I have honestly lost count of how often this story has played out throughout Batman history--or even superhero history in general, in comics and film.

It was, in part, why supeheroes were, for the first twenty years or so of their existence, always, always single, keeping their secret identities from their love interests, who they might date, but could never marry. Even throughout the Silver Age and into the late eighties and early nineties, married superheroes like Mr. Fantastic and The Invisible Woman or The Elongated Man and Sue Dibny, were exceptions to the rule.

This has almost always been the case with Batman, who has never really had a significant other the way Superman has--er, unless you want to count his first Robin Dick Grayson, which a lot of people do--but a string of one-time love interests over the years. Sometimes, something terrible happens to them shortly after they learn his secret identity, which takes care of the problem of having a new character know his secret while also reaffirming his status as a bachelor and providing an additional source of pain to make him a better Batman by fridging a love interest (In fact, it happens so often, chances are you might have forgotten some of those love interests, like the lady who was introduced in specifically to be killed off within that very arc!).

In the 1940s and 1950s, Batman's bachelorhood was sold as a virtue of his dedication to crime-fighting; the only woman for him was Lady Justice and all that. Sometimes some version of that story still appears, with Batman finding himself having to choose between being happy with a lady as Bruce Wayne or continuing to devote himself to his war on crime with the laser focus of a celibate monk. But in the 1980s, when the idea of Batman as a broken crazy-person began to take, the idea was that the core tragedy of his origin story is what drove him to be Batman, and the pain of that single childhood trauma kept him an effective crime-fighter.

It's basically bullshit.

So let me say that firstly, the thing that annoyed me about this decision was that it is the same basic read on the dilemma of Batman and romance I have seen over and over and over again, as recently as Scott Snyder's run on Batman--that is, the one that immediately preceded King's--when the temporarily amnesiac Bruce Wayne rekindled his relationship with Julie Madison, grew a beard, and left the problem of fighting crime while dressed as a bat to new Batman James Gordon.

Secondly, there's the view that one always has to choose between one's vocation and one's happiness, that Batman has to be in a state of constant hurt in order to fight crime. I know this is an argument that Batman creators have had over the years, and I can see both sides of it--whether Batman is basically a broken, crazy-person whose transformed his own problems into making him the world's greatest non-super superhero or whether he's actually the sanest person in the world and that's what makes him so good at being a superhero.

Personally, I think I currently lean towards the Batman is obviously super-sane, and even if his reaction to a childhood trauma was a childish one--that is, to become a superhero or, in-story to become his own version of Zorro--he's still a pretty damn healthy and well-adjusted person capable of smiling, laughing, having friends and kissing ladies. That seems to have been the most prominent mode of Batman's mental state since Grant Morrison's run on the character; certainly it was Snyder's (so much so that "Death of The Family" was about trying to cut Batman off from his huge support system, and that only worked briefly).

Call me crazy, but, as a grown-up, I like to think that one can be married and be pretty good at a very demanding job. If just about every single one of the presidents of the United States have been able to do that job and be married at the same time without sucking so bad that they destroyed the country--so far! The current one still has two more years to fuck up badly enough to destroy America--then I'm pretty sure Batman can continue to dress up as a Bat and punch out the criminally insane on a regular basis.

Thirdly, if any character can handle being a superhero protecting a particular city from crime and super-villains and being married, it's Batman. In the DC Universe at the moment, Superman and Aquaman are the only currently-married superheroes, but there have been married couples in the DCU for decades. Most of the in-story arguments against married superheroes are inherently chauvinist and/or dumb--the spouse will be in danger, the hero won't be able to do their hero-job and be a successful spouse simultaneously--are pretty easily demonstrated to be silly by the success of most of those other marriages.

But Batman is a literal billionaire.

He has an army of fellow crime-fighters he works closely with. I'm behind on Detective Comics, so I may not be 100% up-to-date on who Batman is currently on the outs with or who is temporarily operating out of town or in semi-retirement, but Batman's got Nightwing, Batgirl, Batwoman, Robin, Red Robin, Red Hood, The Signal, Batwing, Azrael, Orphan, Spoiler, Bluebird, The Huntress and Black Canary and maybe a few others. Oh, and Catwoman. And the out-of-town members of Batman, Inc/The Club of Heroes. Plus he's in The Justice League.

Batman could probably just suit up to fight The Joker exclusively and Gotham City would still have the most costumed crime-fighters-to-population ratio in the whole dang DC Universe.

If anyone could pull off being married and being a superhero, it's Batman.

Oh, and then there's the fact that this isn't a normal, "civilian" wife we're talking about, as if he had married Julie Madison or Silver St. Cloud or Vicki Vale or Vesper Midnight or Shondra Kinsolving or whoever. This is Catwoman, a highly-trained fellow vigilante who Batman has regularly been fighting crime side-by-side with on a regular basis for months. And, off-and-on, for years. In that respect, Catwoman is his perfect partner, because Batman would never have to choose between her and being Batman, as she is already thoroughly ingrained in all parts of his life.

That was what struck me as so unusual about Catwoman's decision. They have apparently been living together and she has essentially replaced the role traditionally played by Robin in the pages of Batman. King's entire run from "I Am Suicide" on has been an argument for the effective-ness of a Batman/Catwoman relationship, whether they simply continue sharing a bed at Wayne Manor or officially tie the knot or not.

And I suppose that's the worst thing about Catwoman deciding not to marry Batman. There's been nothing within the pages of King's Batman to indicate that Batman's effectiveness as Batman is dependent on him being a broken, hurt little boy, and that his being in a relationship with Catwoman might at all blunt that effectiveness. Or to suggest that Catwoman might think that; literally all we as readers or she as a character have to base that on is a panel's worth of dialogue provided by Holly Robinson.

In fact, Batman #1-49 suggest the exact opposite; that Batman is better off fighting crime with Catwoman.

Look at the story arcs in that run and, specifically the ones Selina mentions in her letter: "[T]he desert, the boy. Superman, Wonder Woman, Ivy" and then she mentions the events of both "The Gift" and "The Best Man."

So Batman's plan to take down Bane and Psycho-Pirate in "I Am Suicide." During "I Am Bane," in which Bane specifically targeted and took down Nightwing, Red Hood and Robin, Catwoman rescued Bane's prisoners and took down his lieutenants. She helped him fight a variety of low-level villains, including Dr. X, Kite-Man, Zebra Man and so on. In "Rules of Engagement," she fought hordes of assassins with Batman and beat Talia in a sword fight. In "Superfriends," Catwoman saved Batman and Wonder Woman years, perhaps decades, of fighting in a weird, alternate dimension. In "Everyone Loves Ivy," she and Batman were the only two people on Earthy not under Ivy's mind-control, and they worked together to defeat her and save the world. In "The Best Man," she saved Batman's life and defeated The Joker...by herself.

If King's run has demonstrated anything about the possibility of a Batman/Catwoman partnership, it's that she makes an excellent crime-fighting partner for Batman.

I'm not sure why Catwoman found The Joker's argument that a married Batman wouldn't be able to stop him compelling, since in that story a Batman-who-is-living-with-his-girlfriend failed to stop him and said girlfriend was needed to stop him (Additionally, The Joker is a literal madman, so I'm not sure how much stock one should put in his word, Selina).

As for that other example, "Booster," that is a weird one. The suggestion of "The Gift" is that if Batman's parents hadn't died, Gotham City would be hell on Earth, and The Joker would have taken over and/or killed every single superhero on Earth. King doesn't really follow the dominoes falling to get to that point which...well, okay, whatever. But the idea is that if Bruce Wayne were happy--i.e. his parents weren't dead--he wouldn't become Batman, and therefore Catwoman would be a barely-human, feral serial killer. How does that track? I don't know, but it's weird Catwoman herself would accept that as inevitable, that she lacks such agency in her own life's story that the only thing separating her from being who she is verses an animalistic serial killer is the fact that The Waynes got gunned down in Crime Alley twenty-some years ago.


5.) THE POTENTIAL

As that last panel showed, King has apparently been working toward this whole story about how Bane decided to break Batman's heart instead of his spine story for a while now, and it is apparently an ongoing story, as there will surely be follow-ups. I've heard King describe this as the middle of a 100-issue story.

That may be, but I think it's pretty safe to say that the 100-issue story will not, in fact, end with Catwoman and Batman getting married, because if that was the plan, well, DC probably shouldn't have marketed this as the wedding issue, huh?

Their marriage would have made for a pretty radical shift in Batman's status quo, sure (although, not that radical, given that they appear to have been living and working so closely together for the past few months of DCU time). But it also would have been different than the present...which is another way of saying interesting.

All those past changes in Batman's status quo, the killing off of Robin Jason Todd, the breaking of Batman's spine, the introduction of his long-lost son Damian, the killing off of Batman himself...? Those all lead to a lot of interesting and, in some cases, great stories. Personally, I would have been opposed to pretty much all of them. I wasn't reading comics back then, but if you asked me if DC should have had The Joker kill off Jason Todd, I would have said hell no...but then we would have missed out on Robin Tim Drake, a character I loved and who was central to a lot of great comics.

I didn't like the idea of The World's Greatest Detective having conceived a son ten years ago and never having known the first thing about it when Morrison first introduced Damian, but I've grown to love that character (even though his presence supplanted Tim as Batman's Robin, and DC has struggled to find a good place for Tim ever since).

Similarly, I wouldn't have thought marrying Batman and Catwoman was a very good idea, but King's run has convinced me that it would work out just fine, and a married Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle would have opened all sorts of new territory for future Batman comics that couldn't have previously been written. And in five years time, they could always get a divorce or annulment or one of them could get temporarily killed off or whatever; marriages are a lot easier to undo than things like broken spines or babies, status quo changes the pair had experienced individually before.

In other words, King set his characters up with a set of two options to go in, a choice between "I do" and "I can't," and he had one of them choose the less interesting of the two, while failing to make the choice convincing.

So, what happens next? Well, instead of a comic book story about Batman and Catwoman's honeymoon, Batman #51 will feature Batman fighting villain Mr. Freeze yet again, while Catwoman will get her own series again, after a two-year hiatus following the cancellation of her 2011 series.

It's Batman vs. Mister Freeze, a match-up we haven't seen since at least March of last year!

In other words, it looks like we're back to business as usual, with on caveat:The price of  Batman is going up from $2.99 to $3.99 starting with Batman #51. Seems like a good time to go ahead and drop the series then, huh...?



*One of the many things about "The War of Jokes and Riddles" that felt off to me was that Batman kept fighting and defeating his villains, but none of them ever got arrested or otherwise taken out of the conflict. It was as if he was just beating them into unconsciousness, waking them up with smelling salts, and telling them he hopes they learned their lesson and swinging away. Kite-Man has appeared in just about every arc King has written so far. I can only assume Batman either never bothers to let the police know which rooftop Kite-Man is laying unconscious atop after their encounters, or Arkham Asylum has yet to fortify itself against kite-based escapes.

**Oh man, how pissed is Damian going to be that he went to the trouble of going to a tailor to get a special wedding thawb made for his father's wedding--a tailor who, it turned out, was actually an agent of his grandfather Ra's al Ghul's who then pricked him with a special psychoactive drug making him believe he was engaged in deadly combat with the evil son of Batman and Catwoman, who had traveled back in time to battle him--only to find out that his dad didn't even bother to invite him to the ceremony?


***So apparently The Joker is not only not-dead, as Batman #49 seemed to imply, but he is totally and completely fine after Catwoman tore open his throat with her claws and he lie bleeding to death for hours, ultimately lapsing into unconsciousness before the injured Catwoman and Batman. And I guess he then escaped them, and broke into Arkham? What a weird fucking story "The Best Man" was...made all the weirder by the complete and total lack of follow-up to a story in which Batman's fiancee Catwoman attempts to tear out The Joker's throat...

A particularly rambling and discursive "review" of Batman: Zero Hour

I found this to be a curious collection. On the one hand, DC has been rather focused on going back and collecting or recollecting comics from the 1990s, and the issues between these pages--all of the then extant Batman line's tie-ins to 1994 event series Zero Hour and all the #0 issues that were released the following month--are a near-perfect sampling of the line as it existed at the time. On the other hand, because the focus of Zero Hour was in-story continuity maintenance, with a new, surprise villain destroying all of the universe in order to remake it, the side effects which included time anomalies before the #0 issues offered then-current, canonical origin stories of all the characters, these issues are no longer "relevant" in terms of their original, intended function.

Reading it cover to cover then was, for me, a weird mixture of nostalgia and regret, as DC has changed so much of what is in here in the years since. The Batman origins, of which there are three direct ones and a fourth, more thematic one, still work okay today, as DC and New 52 Batman writer Scott Snyder didn't mess much with his basic story, but the Catwoman and, especially, the Robin origins have been wiped-out and overwritten, replaced by...well, by nothing good (I still wonder about the whys of the New 52 reboot, and it seems like the point of collapsing DC's generations of heroes into a single "now" was simply all about making heroes like Batman, Superman and the others seem younger, something of rather dubious value; this collection ends with a pair of ten-year timelines, which would put Batman at maybe his early thirties...did someone with some power in corporate and/or editorial really think that was too old for the publisher's gray, gray readership to relate to?).

Also of interest was the fact that their was no introduction or preface explaining what the hell Zero Hour was*. All you get is a paragraph on the back cover:

Time is collapsing in on itself. The villainous Extant has ushered in a series of black holes that are swallowing the universe--past, present and future! The Bat-family, like everyone else in the DC Universe, has seen time loops affect their lives. The result? The return of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, teenage Dick Grayson as Robin, and Bruce Wayne's parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne. Then, after the crisis in time has been averted, new details about the origins of Batman, Robin and Catwoman are revealed.

I guess "time is going crazy, yo" is all you really need to know to make sense of the first half of the collection, but I think some context would have helped, particularly to explain what the #0 issues have to do with the anomaly issues. (DC has collected Zero Hour into a trade of its own, by the way, although looking at Amazon, it doesn't look like Zero Hour: Crisis In Time has been republished since 1994...is that possible? Well, the series was "controversial" among some for its treatment of Hal Jordan and the Justice Society of America and, I don't know, however many Hank Hall fans there still were in the wild back then, maybe, but I liked it a lot, and Geoff Johns gradually un-did everything everyone hated about it over the years in the pages of Green Lantern and JSA.)

This trade is almost 300 pages, and collects 11 issues, so it completely dwarfs Zero Hour, which is only 160 pages and collects the five-issue miniseries, plus two prelude-like shorts from the pages of Showcase '94. Though it represents six different ongoing monthlies, the Batman line at the time was still relatively tidy compared to what it is today; counting all the satellite books, I think we're at around a dozen titles, depending on which you want to consider Batman books and which you don't, in June of 2017.** Back then, Nightwing and Birds of Prey had yet to launch as ongoing monthlies.

In the "anomaly" half of the trade, there's an issue each of Batman, Detective, Batman: Shadow of The Bat, Robin and Catwoman, each by the current creative teams of the time, which means a lot of very familiar names among the writers, and a lot of great artists. For the most part, Zero Hour provided a pretty perfect springboard for tie-ins, as it was a crossover event that presented a world-wide crisis that would find the heroes wherever the heroes were, rather than necessitating them all actively participating in a plot-line of some sort (that active participation was done in the Zero Hour miniseries proper). So the writers and editors were basically free to play with the idea of "time is screwed up," and think of the best way to use that premise to tell interesting Batman stories.

In Batman, Dough Moench, Mike Manley and Josef Rubinstein had an alternate timeline occasionally over-writing the current one, so that a Batgirl Barbara Gordon appears, and Batman and Robin Tim Drake find themselves dealing with a different Joker who killed Commissioner Gordon instead of paralyzing Barbara during The Killing Joke, a Commissioner Harvey Dent and a very confused Barbara (this Batgirl seems to be a different one that the one that appears as a major player in Zero Hour; Batman's Batgirl is apparently from an alternate timeline, while Zero Hour's Batgirl is this timeline's Batgirl from before she retired). The issue ends with Batman heading to Metropolis to meet with Superman so they can begin to figure out how to fight this new crisis, and I believe it leads directly into the fairly awesome Superman: The Man of Steel #37, which technically came out of the Superman office, but was a pretty dynamite Batman comic book, as it involved Superman being barraged with different Batmen.

Just look at all those Batmen!

In Detective, Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan and Bob McLeod send Batman back to the night of his parents' murder, only to find that this time Bruce Wayne was shot to death in front of them, and, knowing the name of the murderer, Batman runs around pre-Batman Gotham City looking for Joe Chill to avenge his own death and/or that of his parents, only to find that apparently it wasn't Joe Chill after all...at least, not in this timeline (There's some discussion of a point of interest that Batman fans like to talk about, whether it matters if Batman ever catches the guy who shot his parents or not; here the answer is no, and it will be reflected in the "new" origins in the #0 issue portion of the books).

Man, I forgot how great Nolan's art was, and every time I see his pencils from this era I'm surprised anew regarding how clean his lines were and how elegant his figure work is. It really stands out next to the work of Manley and Bret Blevins, too, whose styles are somewhat similar, particularly in the way they draw their Batmen.

In Batman: Shadow of The Bat, Alan Grant and the aforementioned Blevins saddle Batman and Robin with an alternate version of Alfred, the overweight, bumbling, comical version who wanted to be a detective and fight crime alongside his Dynamic Duo. This issue had one of the better Zero Hour related covers, by regular Shadow cover artist Brian Stelfreeze, and it was rather well-suited to what was going on in Gotham City at the time, as the regular timeline's Alfred Pennyworth tendered his resignation towards the end of "KnightQuest," leaving Batman and Tim Drake to figure out how to feed themselves and do their own laundry.

In Robin, Dixon, Tom Grummett and Ray Kryssing team Tim up with a young, time-lost Dick Grayson, previously seen prowling around the rooftops of Batman, where Manley drew him in a charmingly Sheldon Moldoff-esque design. The Boys Wonder crack a case involving a jewel thief, but the main pleasure here is seeing the two together, allowing us to compare and contrast them (post-Flashpoint, Tim was unfortunately given a more Grayson-like background; I liked the fact that, back then, the two Robins had very, very different specialties, even though they were both competent at all-around vigilante crime-fighting and side-kicking). Well, that and seeing Grummett draw the classic Robin costume, which dammit, is a pretty great design, pants or no. This issue, like the one of Catwoman that follows, ends with the panels and art on the comic book being un-drawn as everything fades to white; this happened in many of the Zero Hour tie-ins. As Extant and Parallax un-made the DC Universe, the comic book stories were apparently fading away right before our very eyes!

Finally, in Catwoman, Jo Duffy, Jim Balent and Bob Smith have Selina Kyle waking up to find a Gotham City gone mad. There's a saber tooth tiger in her bed, and a hunky "caveman," who looks more like Ka-Zar than a primitive human ancestor, in her living room. They run around the city, which is full of dinosaurs and randomly transforming vehicles and buildings until the issue disappears at the end. This isn't Balent at his best quite yet, but he's good, and, as I know I've mentioned before, it's easy to forget that the guy could draw pretty good superhero comics, given the peculiarities of the creator-owned project he's devoted his career to since.

At this point, I guess one would need to go read Zero Hour or, at least know that Superman, Damage, Green Arrow Oliver Queen and a handful of other superheroes defeated Parallax and re-created the Big Bang, essentially restarting the universe, with a few tweaks in coninuity...for the purposes of the Batman family of books, these were all pretty minor, and seemed more organizational than anything else. Batman, by the way, did not make it to the climax of Zero Hour, having been eaten by a white blackhole of nothingness while fighting dinosaurs or something in Gotham.

In Batman #0, Moench, Manley and Rubinstein tell Batman's basic origin story and abbreviated history, right up until a few months prior to the book was published, actually. In the present, they have Batman tracking down a series of killings that are a little too close to the one that took his parents for comfort, allowing for the flashbacks, each of which is colored in semi-black and white as if to evoke "Batman: Year One." The book ends, as a few of these would, with Batman thinking portentously about perhaps not being Batman anymore: "Can he really do what he must... ...and walk away from it all?"

These issues are all leading up to the next chapter of the Batman saga, which was "Prodigal," during which Dick Grayson temporarily assumed the role of Batman while Bruce Wayne went off on a mysterious "Sumatran Rat" adventure.

Shadow of the Bat #0 covered much the same ground as Batman, with Alan Grant and Bret Blevins also retelling Batman's origin, hitting a lot of the same notes. In the present, he is trying to capture a pair of thieves who are both pretty great fighters, during which time he scares a gang of young punks into hiding; knowing his reputation, they debate about what to do if they have Batman's attention, unaware of the fact that rather than  laying siege to them he's blocks away on more important business.

The flashback sequences may cover much of the same ground, but there is a slight difference in focus, I guess, playing up Batman's fighting skills and use of fear as a psychological weapon.

 In another teaser to "Prodigal," the penultimate page has Bruce Wayne considering the fact that there are things that being Batman has prevented him from doing, but he knows the city needs a Batman. The last page features someone suiting up as Batman, but the language is intentionally vague: "A hand reaches for the costume," and like that.

Nolan's Batman

For Detective Comics #0, the cover of which was repurposed for that of the trade, Dixon, Nolan and Scott Hanna use the same basic formula of the previous two zero issues, showing Batman on a current case--here, a kidnapping which involves him fighting his way through a building full of bad guys--while flashing back to elements of his origin. In this case, they focus the origin on specific elements, however, so it's much different than those previous entries. Specifically, they tell of how Bruce Wayne and Alfred discovered and created the Batcave, and some of the vehicles and weapons that filled it.

There wasn't a Legends of The Dark Knight Zero Hour tie-in (that is, an anomaly issue), but the title, like all of the DCU titles, participated in "Zero Month." This is a jam-issue of sorts, and a pretty great done-in-one, evergreen Batman story. If I can make sense of the credits correctly, editor Archie Goodwin scripted the framing sequence, in which a cartoonishly evil publishing magnate assembles a room full of writers and storytellers in his cartoonishly evil mansion to try to understand just who or what the Batman really is.

How evil is this guy? Look, he has a koala bear's head mounted on his wall. A koala bear!

And an actual room full of comic book writers and cartoonists offer various, one-page visions of Batman, including Gerard Jones, James Robinson, Steven Grant, Scott Hampton, Jeph Loeb, Mike Baron, J.M. DeMatteis, Ted McKeever, John Wagner and Roy Burdine. The all-star roster of artists that illustrate these passages are Karl Kesel, Tony Salmons, Mike Zeck, Hampton, Tim Sale, Mark Badger, Brian Murray, Steve Mitchell, John Watkiss, McKeever, Carlos Ezquerra, Frank Gomez and Phil Winslade.

The artist who contributes the most, however, is Vince Giarrano, whose work I like quite a bit. I know I've mentioned him on the blog, before, but if you're unfamiliar, Giarrano worked in a highly-exaggerated, almost Kelley Jones-like style that I like to think of as "sarcastic '90s," with huge, overly-muscled, heroic figures with lots of unnecessary lines, lots of points and melodramatic poses that, like the work of Jones, can teeter between operatic and ridiculous.

He draws the "devil bat" conception of Batman (above), which is paired with Kesel's more classic, heroic-looking "Dark Knight" conception, and the framing sequences. So it is Giarrano, of all people, who gets to draw the "real" Batman, despite the presence of so many artists with much more realistic styles.

Here then, is what Batman "really" looks like:

This issue, by the way, features a cover by some kid named Joe Quesada.

For Robin #0, the regular creative team has Robin and Nightwing hanging out on a rooftop, waiting for a group of thieves to finish blow-torching their way through a safe in order to bust them. While killing time, Tim asks Dick about how he became Robin, and they essentially swap stories about their origins--and that of the late Jason Todd. They both know the broad strokes--Dick was even a key player in Tim's origin story--but not the details, as at this point in Bat-history Dick was more-or-less estranged from Batman, and had been spending most of his time with the Titans. This was between "KnightsEnd," in which Dick joined Bruce, Tim and even Catwoman in retaking the mantle of the bat from Jean-Paul Valley, and the aforementioned "Prodigal," when Dick Grayson was returning to the Batman Family fold, eventually getting his own, ongoing book for the first time.

Almost none of this issue is relevant anymore--I guess Dick's origin and Jason's origin still "happened," although they were dressed dumber in the new version and they weren't Robin longer than a year or so, and Tim's origin was completely erased and replaced. It was a nice jumping-on point in 1994 though, providing a brief history of Robin--or Robins--and setting up the Dick/Tim partnership that would be the focus of "Prodigal"...which this issue actually ends with a direct prelude to, with Dick suiting up as Batman to temporarily replace Bruce (for the first time; he would, of course, also do so when Bruce Wayne was temporarily dead-ish around the time of Final Crisis).

Because the previous issue was the end of Jo Duffy's short-ish 14-issue run on Catwoman, regular pencil artist Balent and inker Bob Smith are joined by Doug Moench for Catwoman #0, after which point Dixon would inherit writing duties for a while. Moench, as was typical then, works a theme throughout the issue, comparing Selina to a cat in various ways throughout this story of her troubled childhood, some relatively subtle, some as subtle as a frying pan over the head.

We learn that her mother died when she was young (after pushing her to devote herself to gymnastics), her father drank himself to death shortly after and she ended up in a typically Gotham corrupt orphanage for troubled young girls, where she taught herself rooftop climbing, thievery and overall sneakiness.

There are a few scenes that seem to reference her role in "Batman: Year One," although rather than being an actual prostitute, Moench implies that it was just another form of thievery, wherein johns would hire her as prostitute and she would just mug them immediately, because they were bad guys anyway. Inspired by Batman's costume, she put on her gray, "Year One" costume and becomes a more spectacular cat burglar (That is one of my favorite Catwoman costumes from the comics, by the way). Most of the attention is paid to her childhood in the orphanage, though.

I'm not sure how much of this is relevant anymore though; both Jeph Loeb's Year One-era stories and Batman Eternal gave Catwoman biological fathers who were actually crime kingpins (but different ones at that), and while that doesn't necessarily negate this origin, I've seen just enough of the post-Flashpoint Catwoman to know her childhood was different there than it is here (Fun fact: This run lasted 96 issues, counting #0 and #1,000,000; the 2000 series lasted 82 issues; the New 52 series only lasted 53 issues). I suppose I should really set about tracking down various Catwoman origin stories that I've never read at some point, to try to make sense of the different takes on the character...that, or I guess I could just wait for Tim Hanley's next book.

It ends with the two timelines I mentioned, although I'm not sure where they originally appeared. The first is titled "Batman Timeline," and it spans ten years. The first three years all produced comic book stories with those names--"Year One," "Year Two" and "Year Three"--and while it's a pretty compressed timeline, it seems to hold up okay (Dick was only Robin for three years according to this timeline, which doesn't seem too terribly long, really; Barbara retired from being Batgirl after just three years, two of which were after Dick took on his Nightwing persona). "Year 10" was a very busy one, staring with "Jean Paul Valley becomes Azrael," which means the miniseries Batman: Sword of Azrael, and contains "Knightfall," "KnightQest," "KnightsEnd," "Prodigal," "Troika," "Contagion" and "Legacy."

That's followed immediately by a "Batman Villains Timeline" which starts in 1921 with the creation of Arkham Asylum, and then runs through the same ten-year timeline, ending with the events of "Cataclysm" in "Year 10."

I'm kind of curious what "year" it would be right now had DC not done the 2011 reboot, if we factored in "No Man's Land" and Damian's three years as Robin and so on...I think we would be in Year 15 or Year 16 now, although that seems mostly a matter of the ten-year-old Damian celebrating his 13th birthday in DC Universe: Rebirth. If Talia met Bruce in Year Three, and they had a ten-year-old son by the time "Batman and Son" rolled around, then that would have been Year 13, and then it's been another three years since then. Again, if Flashpoint and the New 52-boot never happened. Now it's Year Eight, and all of the events of the decade represented on these timelines supposedly happened in drastically different form during Years One through Five.



**********************



While reading this, I began wondering if DC would bother collecting any other tie-ins from the Zero Hour event, and I consulted Wikipedia to see just how many of the damn things there were. (It's a lot!)

A Superman: Zero Hour would certainly be the next easiest trade to assemble, as there were then six titles in that particular franchise: Superman, Action Comics, Adventures of Superman, Superman: The Man of Steel, Superboy and Steel.

A Justice League: Zero Hour title would also be relatively easy, as there were then three League titles: Justice League America, Justice League International and Justice League Task Force. I guess they could fill that out with...well, hell, I guess here it gets tricky, huh? They could use solo titles featuring characters from those line-ups, like The Flash, The Ray, Wonder Woman and Guy Gardner: Warrior.

I'm actually a little surprised to see that there were three Legion of Super-Heroes-related titles going into the event, so maybe they could do a Justice League/Legion of Super-Heroes: Zero Hour collection, and include the relevant issues of Legion of Super-Heroes, Legionnaires and LEGION '94...?

Or, given that none of those Leagues are really remembered at this point, and have been rebooted away anyway, maybe a theoretical Justice League: Zero Hour trade would include the big, non-Superman, non-Batman DC superheroes that we tend to think of as Justice Leaguers, whether or not they were on a League roster in 1994 or not: Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Hawkman and...Oh, that's all of the solo titles featuring long-time Leaguers. Unless you put Guy Gardner: Warrior in this theoretical collection...?

Looking at the complete list, its interesting to see the participating titles that have long since disappeared (Damage, Anima, Valor, Team Titans, et cetera), and the handful of books that launched following the conclusion of Zero Hour during "Zero Month" (Fate, Manhunter, Primal Force), only one of which really caught on (Starman).

J'onn! Gypsy! The Ray! Triumph! L-Ron-in-Despero's body!

Aside from the Batman books, the #0 issues I remember reading and really liking were Justice League Task Force, when writers Mark Waid and Christopher Priest refocused the title from a book featuring rotating creators and squad of superheroes into a regular book with a regular line-up, premised on the Martian Manhunter training a motley crew of new superheroes (of one kind or another). The Sal Velluto art helped differentiate it from a lot of the super-comics DC was publishing at the time, which suffered from artists trying and often failing to ape that hot new Image Comics style that the kids liked so much at the time.

I also really dug the post-Zero Hour line-up of New Titans; while all of those individual comics weren't great, I loved that particular line-up, and the way it allowed many of the original New Teen Titans line-up to have their endings while carrying on with a rather weird line-up of young heroes from throughout the DC Universe at the time. Sadly, it didn't last too long (18 issues; which I would totally buy a collection of, as I still don't have all of the individual issues from this run).

Arsenal! Changeling! (A) Terra! Damage! Impulse! Green Lantern Kyle Rayner! Mirage! And, not pictured here as they hadn't yet joined the team, Darkstar Donna Troy, Supergirl and Minion!

*Which is weird, I think. I guess they wanted to keep costs down, but would spending a single page on an introduction instead of a house ad really have broken the bank? They didn't have to get a Batman line editor from back in the day or Zero Hour writer Dan Jurgens or Doug Moench or someone to write it. Maybe DC has an intern who they could have assigned it to? Hell, I woulda written it for ten bucks and a free copy of the trade. Oh, you know what? If you need more context on Zero Hour, this is a pretty fun way to learn more about it!

**Batman, Detective Comics, All-Star Batman, Nightwing, Batgirl, Batgirl and The Birds of Prey, Batwoman and Batman Beyond, sure; what about the Gotham-set Gotham Academy, and does Trinity or Red Hood and The Outlaws or Super Sons count? How about Harley Quinn...?

Review: Catwoman Vol. 7: Inheritance

Catwoman Vol. 7: Inheritance contains the second half of writer Genevieve Valentine and artists Garry Brown and David Messina's short-lived, new direction for Catwoman (the character) and Catwoman (the comic book), a direction that ultimately only filled two collections: This one, and the preceding Volume 6: Keeper of The Castle. Together, they tell a complete, relatively self-contained, rather solid story about a powerful woman reluctantly wielding even more power than she's used to, and in completely different ways.

It was a direction that was always going to be a temporary one, but I wonder if it had truly run its course, or if the shift to yet another new direction was just another case of editorial panic in the face of less-than-expected sales, a herky-jerky over-correction in the opposite direction of the sort that has characterized most of the New 52 books that aren't Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo's one creative team, one direction, almost five-year, best-selling run on Batman. (Valentine was the third ongoing writer on Catwoman, following runs by Judd Winick and Ann Nocenti, and, as per usual, there were rather frequent changes in artists, as fill-in artists would pop in to support the work of Guillem March or Rafa Sandoval.)

In fact, this new direction seemed to be inspired both by its new-ness and it's temporariness. Just before the launch of the Snyder and James Tynion VI co-plotted, 52-issue weekly series Batman Eternal, there was a weird "flash-forward" issue of Batman meant to intrigue readers about how radically Gotham City was going to change during the course of the series, featuring Harper Row (a one-time popular candidate to replace the temporarily late Damian Wayne as the new Robin) as a new character Bluebird and Selina Kyle not as super-thief Catwoman, but as a plain-clothes, real world-style crime boss.

And that was the direction of Valentine's run. During the course of Batman Eternal, readers discovered the true identity of Selina Kyle's father, long-imprisoned, old-school mob boss Rex "The Lion" Calabrese, and, after Carmine Falcone and The Penguin's turf war ended with them both losers, Selina hung up her cat-suit for a business suit to somewhat reluctantly become the new kingpin of crime in Gotham City. Her goal? To minimize the damage the warring crime families did to the city, and try to make them as much a force of good as possible...while still being, you know, organized crime families.

See? That's a pretty unusual direction to go with Catwoman. Valentine's run was tightly, even elaborately plotted, and though there was first-person narration from Selina's point-of-view throughout the book, plot seemed to get greater emphasis than characterization.

In this volume, Selina tries to hang on to control of Gotham's gangs after the loss of one of her cousins and the loss of Batman, whose apparent "death" is addressed about midway through (somewhat clumsily, I'm afraid, and it will likely date this collection to a degree, as it will be tied to the Robo-Bat era of Batman comics). She's facing a major challenge from Roman "Black Mask" Sionis, who has allied himself with The Penguin and The Hasigawa Family, but has allies of her own in Eiko Hasigawa, who has taken up the mantle of Catwoman; The Penguin, who is secret on both sides of the gang war; and, later in the book, Killer Croc.

I hate to call a book like this "realistic," because it does feature a crocodile man and a policeman in a robot battle suit, but it is down to earth in a way that almost dampens the explosively, colorful nature of the characters. The Penguin, for example, is just a well-dressed, fat old man with a big nose, with no lunatic-fascination with birds r umbrellas, not even a casino/nightclub shaped like an iceberg with pools of seals in the lobby. The Black Mask has the black skull face he wore in animated series The Batman and towards the end of the pre-Flashpoint DCU (circa "War Games,") rather than his original mask, and his gang is just a bunch of random, central casting thugs, rather than guys forced to wear masks by their insane boss.

This is a bit of a blessing, and a bit of a curse, I suppose. It allows Valentine to play the crime story straight, and demand a comic lead by Catwoman and filled with various Bat-villains be taken seriously, but it's also dulls the characters and the milieu quite a bit.

Messina's art, expertly colored by Lee Loughridge to reflect the tone of each scene, is a nice balance between DC house-style superheroic art and a more real-world look, but it's never quite as accomplished or as exciting as Kevin Wada's covers, or all the variant covers collected in the back gallery (By Javier Pulido, Ben Caldwell, Des Taylor, Robbi Rodriguez, Darwyn Cooke and Emanuela Lupacchino).

I suspect Valentine had to wrap-up her story up perhaps a little quicker than originally expected (or at least hoped) as some of the sub-plots get less attention at their conclusion and resolution than in their build-up (particularly the rather tossed-off exit Spoiler plot), but everything does get resolved satisfactorily enough. By the time the trade reaches its last few pages, and Selina has passed on her duties as head of The Calabrese Family, eliminated Black Mask, ended her relationship with Eiko and put her Catwoman costume on to ride her motorcycle out of town (With no luggage or cats, apparently), the character, and the book, are more or less back where they were before the beginning of Valentine's run in a way that feels logical (Well, except for Selina's lack of luggage).

Economically, the Catwoman-as-crime boss direction must not have worked for DC, as the next writer was old school superhero writer Frank Tieri, and he kept Selina in her costume as she resumed more superhero-style adventures. That didn't work either, however, as sales to comics shops not only continued to decline at the end of the Valentine/Messina run, they dropped drastically. According to the sales chart analysis offered at The Beat, comic shops ordered an estimated 21,600 issues of the last issue of the Valentine run, and then slashed their orders down to an estimaed 15,000 for the start of the Tieri run.

When DC culls their superhero line and relaunches what's left with new #1s as part of the June "Rebirth" initiative, there won't be a new Catwoman. This volume of the series is therefore set to conclude with May's issues #52. For perspective, the original, 1993-launched volume of the monthly Catwoman comics lasted 94 issues (almost all of which were penciled by Jim Balent), while the 2002-launched second volume lasted 82 issues. I'm sure this won't be the last Catwoman monthly DC tries, as this is only the third time a monthly has been cancelled. She should have six more lives to go.

So how many of of these do you think Mike Sterling will be given in the next week...?

I'm going to guess...thirty-six. That is one of the 18 tear-out valentines available in this week's Young Romance: The New 52 Valentine's Day Special, which, as you can see, are modeled off the sort of valentines you probably got and gave in grade school.

They're not as funny as the New 52 valentines you can probably find online from the likes of Mr. Chris Sims (That first Aquaman one just made me laugh again), but it's a cute idea.

I was a little surprised to see this one, given the notoriety of the pose:

It's the zipped-up, straightened-out version of that pose; the one that ultimately shipped on the cover of Catwoman #0, rather than the one that was originally solicited.

Of all the possible New 52 images of Catwoman though, the choice of that one seems almost calculated to annoy some online critics, as much as that first one seems calculated to give people something to give Mike Sterling.

Personally, I thought this one was the most clever...

..but now that I've revisited that Sims-written piece on ComicsAlliance, I see that valentine rather echoes the headline.

Anyway, for more on Young Romance (i.e. actual reviews of the contents), click your way to Robot 6 using this here link.

For the second Wednesday in a row, I'm not going to have enough time/enough comics waiting for me to inspire me to make it to my local-est comic shop, so I'm afraid that's all of the new content I have for you. I hope to have some more substantial reviews this weekend, when no one is reading.

Wednesday Comics vs. The New 52: Catwoman and The Demon

The disguised witch Morgaine le Fay hires super-thief Catwoman to steal a powerful artifact from handsome occult collector Jason Blood which will allow her to commit great evil; when Catwoman discovers she's been duped, she teams up with Blood and Blood's demonic alter-ego Etrigan to save the day. By Walter Simonson and Brian Stelfreeze.

Gotham City cat-burglar Selina Kyle has been targeted by unknown antagonists who want her dead badly enough to blow up her apartment—before she can get to the bottom of that mystery, however, she has Russian mobsters to steal from, revenge to be taken and Batmen to bang. By Judd Winick and Guillem March.

—AND—

The demon leads a sort of medieval Justice League consisting of such characters as Shining Knight II, Madame Xanadu and Vandal Savage in the Dark Ages of the New 52iverse. By Paul Cornell, Diogenes Neves and Oclair Albert.

A quick question for any Catwoman scholars in the reading audience

See this lady in the skintight catsuit? She's not Catwoman.

No, she's Tarpé Mills' Miss Fury, from the Golden Age comic strip of the same name.

Those partial panels are all from Sunday strips form the mid-to-late-40s, and were all scanned from the Trina Robbins-edited Miss Fury: Sensational Sundays 1944-1949 (IDW;2011), which I just started reading.

Miss Fury is really the heiress Marla Drake, who disguised herself using a panther skin her African explorer uncle gave her. Though not in the images above, the panther skin costume sometimes includes a tail, as you can see in this comic book cover from 1942:Miss Fury debuted in 1941.

Batman's villainess Selina "Catwoman" Kyle appeared a year earlier in 1940's Batman #1, but at the time she was an un-costumed jewel thief called simply "The Cat."

When she first donned a costume, it was merely a furry cat's head mask topping off a dress. My question is, when did Catwoman first start wearing a Miss Fury-like cat-suit?

As far as I can tell from the comics I've read, she didn't start dressing similarly to Miss Fury—in a dark, skintight catsuit with a cowl and ears—until 1987's Batman story arc "Batman: Year One"and the 1989 Catwoman miniseries that expanded on the post-Crisis origin story Frank Miller's "Year One" suggested She kept that suit until about 1992-1993, when she got a new, purple costume with thigh-high boots and a hole in the back of the cowl to allow her regrown, long hair to flow behind her.

The 1992 film Batman Returns outfitted her in a black, Fury-esque catsuit, albeit one with very visible white stitching zigzagging it.

When Batman: The Animated Series began, its Catwoman started in a gray costume similar to a more highly accessorized version of the late-80s, early-90s costume. When the characters were all redesigned for the show's 1997 fourth season, however, in which the was retitled The New Batman Adventures, the animated Catwoman resembled Fury exactly: In retrospect, it's fairly obvious that Miss Fury had a strong influence on Catwoman as the more popular character evolved, eventually quite heavily influencing her design.

I'm curious as to when exactly Catwoman started dressing...Fury-esque, I guess.

As far as I can tell, it didn't seem like she ditched the purple dress with green cape ensemble for an actual cat-suit until the late-80s, but then, the Bronze Age of Bat-comics is pretty much a black hole to me. Can anyone date a skintight Catwoman costume with a cowl to any earlier than the "Batman: Year One" story arc...?