It is a conundrum that makes raw, as King is wont to do, the contradictions inherent in the strange case of Batman and Catwoman. 1 It’s troublesome, and good fiction, because it’s such an easy choice that most wouldn’t struggle with even when the Joker abuses their weird friendship, purposefully complicating Selina’s relationship with Batman, she still returns to him. And beyond that, beyond homages to Batman history galore, this is above all a paean to that work of art all the more precious these days, Batman: The Animated Series.Īt it’s most difficult, Batman/Catwoman presents a Selina Kyle torn between loving, handsome, rich, and most of all good Batman, and the vile, twisted, sadistic, homicidal Joker. Panel A does not follow linearly to panel B, a delicious flouting of one of comics' cardinal rules. The book offers no quarter for the reader, routinely changing timelines not between pages, but in the midst of pages. Not to mention the push and pull on a female antihero in a decidedly male superhero world.īatman/Catwoman is also impressively ambitious, nothing new from King, in its relating three stories - near past, near present, and far future - intertwined. Among the annals of great Catwoman stories, it is a diligent study of that greatest of conundrums, the feline villain that Batman, despite being an apex crimefighter and deliverer of all things justice, loves. It is really Catwoman’s story, hardly Batman’s at all - perhaps deservedly, to the extent that King’s Batman kept or ejected Selina Kyle as the narrative needed.
Tom King’s Batman/Catwoman – epilogue to his sweeping post-modern Batman run and a magnum opus in its own right - might have just been called “Catwoman” (short of the title’s potential double meaning).
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