Selina Kyle's having a bad day. She's shipped her daughter off, with the help of a mystery financial backer (guess who, he has a mansion and Bat-everything), to stay out of harm's way. Then her flat blew up, and she escaped half-Catwoman-ified, half barefoot, maskless, terrified. To make matters worse, whoever it is knows about her enough to take the back-up suit and mask stored in a place she told no-one about. She's tried to be a mum, to balance who she is, and in the opening pages all of this has happened, leading her to cut her hair short and take her counterpart's suit. She's back, and angry.
What follows is a cracking little story, which doesn't fall into any of the massive cliché ravines as it weaves its way across the precipice of being interesting. The idea that Catwoman has 'come out of retirement' doesn't feel tired as she wasn't really inactive, just acting differently (being all goody-goody, which has never been part of the character's appeal- quite the opposite, she's known for and respected for always being a grey area). The hunting down different people who know tiny bits of information in order to assess what's going on doesn't, even though it should, feel like a storyline comics readers and cinema-goers have seen a million times before, even though they have. And it's all backed up by brilliantly drawn and coloured panels, made use of in telling the story visually with a lot of detail and the right detail shown to the reader.
Somewhat rarely for a comic series, with this collection (volume eight of the current continuity run, I belief) at the heart of it is character rather than adventure. Instead of the fanboy-fap material of filling a whiteboard with character names, a vs sign and then bending the 'story' improbably to fit, all the way through Crime Pays (and, as it's the same chief writers and certain bits of important plot have already happened, I would think all the way through the current run) what happens to Selina Kyle/ Catwoman dictates what happens next. It isn't just an endless string of 'battle to battle, finish up with a boss'.
One of the core aspects to Catwoman in this volume is the acceptance of and begrudging attitude towards the fact that she is always playing second fiddle to the character whose series she came from, namely Batman. Not perhaps in as meta- a way as that, but the fact the Bruce Wayne/ Batman has to help her out so much, with her daughter and crime-fighting/ solving/ committing, is a sticking point for the independent woman Kyle. And quite right too, as she was initially just another colourful character created to fill the void of villains to go against the Caped Crusader, but has become such a popular character she's synonymous with the series, and in-story having a Wayne-shaped safety net that the writer can deploy every time Kyle gets too cocky or trapped or in real trouble takes away a lot of tension.
Which is solved here, as Catwoman is very much on her own and Batman, when he features two thirds through, isn't what he seems.
The rogues gallery middle- and back-pages get a look in, and the traditional coupling of Lex Luthor and Superman falls by the wayside as Kyle ends up being his anti-hero companion. It feels, remarkably for such a huge and revised universe, nice and almost fresh. The take on dopplegangers and alternate realities has a nice reveal as not quite what you'd expect from the company who have Infinite Earths to play with, just in case they need a world where the Batsuit doesn't have bat-ears or to have Cat-man.
Above all, the fact that Catwoman is not a superhuman, superhero or even really a vigilante constantly on the white side to the black occupied by Harley, Tigress et al really shows through, with the more emotional needs and deeper character securities and insecurities powering the story. And when the reveal comes, the world she's been on makes a lot of sense and teaches us that perhaps not all cats have the imperial confidence you'd think.
No comments:
Post a Comment