Hell(o) (t)here and welcome to the World of Bats, the Batman Book Club!
This week, in keeping with our deep dive into the rogues utilized in The Batman, we’ll be looking at the feline fatale herself, Catwoman! Specifically, we’ll be looking at the first five issuesthe 2001 series written by Ed Brubaker, with art by Darwyn Cooke and Brad Rader.
A serial killer is racking up bodies in Selina Kyle’s old haunts, taking her back to a life she thought she’d left behind permanently. Witness her triumphant return as Catwoman, brought to you by Ed Brubaker (BATMAN) and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke (BATMAN: EGO) & Mike Allred (X-Force).
And if you’re looking for a little extra, check out the back-up stories that lead up to this series, also by Brubaker and Cooke, featuring one of the big supporting characters of the series, Slam Bradley!
Reading will last from 2022-03-12T06:00:00Z→2022-03-18T05:00:00Z, but if you’re seeing your psychologist while being considered legally dead, you can always come back and share your thoughts then.
Looking forward to talking this story with you all!
Interesting to see Selina in therapy. I think she has a good heart, which is shown by both her efforts to find the killer and her compassion for him when she hears his story. I thought this was a great start to her series.
This is my secend time reading the story line and the first comic is my favete, i just love how it examins the moderatian of catwoman, and on my secend read i saw some forshodowing!the prostitute was wered out by the killers face at the beging of the comic, and in the end, it is reveled that the killers is a verson of clay face!
That was interesting to see – and somewhat refreshing, since Zod knows the entire Batfamily could use some therapy.
The funny thing is that we technically we covered Selina’s Big Score twice, once on it’s own, and again with the link you posted, where it was included with Batman: Ego.
This was great. The scenes with Selina and Dr Tompkins were interesting. I didn’t know Leslie was a therapist; I guess, like Alfred, she can do pretty much whatever’s needed.
It’s nice to see Catwoman being one of the good (but not too good) guys and doing a bit of detective work. Too bad things didn’t end up quite like she intended.
The Slam Bradley backups from Detective were enjoyable, too. A fun, noir-ish, detective story.
That is interesting. I wonder what story was it that she started to do therapy stuff because she was definitely a regular medical doctor when she was first created. I guess she just studied up thinking “If Bruce won’t go to therapy, I’ll bring the therapy to him!”
As an aside, before I got into comics proper, I thought Leslie was a psychiatrist because I thought she was also Harvey’s shrink in the Two-Face episodes of BTAS. Their models looked just enough alike!
Definitely, I think this very influential for how we approach Catwoman in the modern day, including the recent movie, which is why I added this story for this theme month.
Absolutely, Cooke was an absolute GOAT in the industry who left way too soon.
In her first appearance (Detective Comics #457 by Denny O’Neil), she is a social worker, not a doctor. This characterization remains true in her second appearance (Detective Comics #483, also by O’Neil):
That second issue just happened to mark Batman’s 40th anniversary, a fact which was celebrated in the back of the issue in an article written by Leslie’s second-most important creative influence, after Denny:
Mike W. Barr would use Denny’s version of Leslie Thompkins once (in Batman Special #1) before reinventing her as a doctor for the post-Crisis era (in Detective Comics #574).
But Denny would bring back Classic Leslie one last time in Detective Comics #1000:
And yes, this was just another excuse for me to talk about Mike Barr.
This group counseling scene is from Shadow of the Bat #26, which is part of Knightquest: The Crusade. So it’s unusual, but it’s not unheard of. I suppose it’s a natural extension of her classic backstory of comforting Bruce on the night of his parents’ murder, but it does sorta feel as though the writers are treating her as a Doctor of Whatever the Plot Dictates.
I really liked issues 1-4. Issue 5 wasn’t bad, I mean Brubaker is great but Stewart ain’t Cooke.
The thing that I really liked about this story was that it had references all the way back to Catwoman’s first miniseries, seeing Darwyn Cooke’s reimaginings of those scenes was great. I did like Leslie’s role in Selina’s wellbeing a lot has been said about that here and I don’t have much to add but it was nice.
Issue 5, a single-issue story, was okay. Brubaker’s writing was what I have come to expect but the art wasn’t great. It wasn’t bad but not at the same level seen in the first 4 issues.
