Review: Catwoman Vol. 8: Run Like Hell trade paperback (DC Comics)

I know Frank Tieri’s work mostly from interstitial stints on books like Batman/Superman and Savage Hawkman — places where Tieri is pinch-hitting for a book already in trouble. As such, Tieri’s name is not necessarily a draw for me on a book, though I do recall enjoying both his Harley Quinn and his Old Woman Harley miniseries.

Tieri’s run on Catwoman, however — and this is no fault of Tieri’s own — seemed to me cynical in that it appeared mainly just to pad out the book to 52 issues (to end with the rest of the New 52/DC You titles) and also to largely rebut Genevieve Valentine’s more down-to-earth, less superheroic Catwoman run. DC’s frantic assurance that “yes, Catwoman is still a thief who runs around in tight leather” wasn’t something I particularly wanted a part of.

So, along with going straight from Valentine’s DC You Catwoman Vol. 6: Keeper of the Castle to Catwoman’s later Rebirth-era series, I had skipped (till now) Valentine’s Catwoman Vol. 7: Inheritance and Tieri’s Catwoman Vol. 8: Run Like Hell. But since I was catching up on Valentine’s run (see the Infinite Frontier-era Catwoman Vol. 1: Dangerous Liaisons), I figure I might as well close the loop and read Tieri’s book too.

Indeed I liked Run Like Hell much more than I expected. It is unabashedly filler, and it does seem like an exercise in reestablishing the most basic (even mundane) characterization of Catwoman Selina Kyle for the purpose of reassuring the pundits. But Tieri’s Selina is likable and capable, and artist Inaki Miranda never stoops to oversexualizing Selina unnecessarily the way many of his predecessors have done. Moreover, I appreciated that Tieri does nod back to Valentine’s run — not significantly, not as well as had Valentine’s run just continued, but with a sense of continuity that I thought was in good spirit.

[Review contains spoilers]

I don’t think Tieri intends it, but here at the end of Catwoman’s New 52 title, the “Run Like Hell” story mirrors that of Judd Winick’s Catwoman Vol. 1: The Game — not sex with Batman, but rather one of Catwoman’s fences being murdered and Selina having to go on the run. There’s no small amount of blood in Run Like Hell, but it’s notable how a similar story can be much more palatable (here) without pressure on the writer to shock and with an artist like Miranda depicting the characters (consider Miranda’s New 52 variant cover at the end of this book compared with Guillem March’s original).

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

The beats in Run Like Hell feel awfully familiar, from Catwoman afoul of the Penguin to negotiating with frenemy Killer Croc, up against the Riddler, battling through a women’s prison, double-crossing Lex Luthor. In Catwoman stories previous (or maybe, from the time of this publication, since), we’ve seen all of this before. But Tieri times it right, and so things like Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy’s deus ex machina save or the revelation of Lex as the mastermind all keep the audience on their toes. For a generic “pit Catwoman against the Gotham regulars” story, Tieri succeeds in making it fun.

Again, I appreciated that Tieri name-checks the Calabreses on just the second page, positing Selina’s experience through the eyes of someone who was the head of a crime family a second ago, instead of just starting from (sorry) scratch. It’s a little unusual that Tieri does away with Antonia Calabrese by virtue of a headline in a newspaper (we might have otherwise imagined Antonia out there running the Calabreses in perpetuity), but again, at least Selina’s feud with Penguin is in the context of what came before instead of ignoring it. Perhaps even more charitable is that where Valentine only mildly mentioned tech sidekick Alice Tesla from Ann Nocenti’s Catwoman run, Tieri puts her front and center, again helping this feel not just like filler.

Tieri pens what seems an out-of-place historical ghost tale in a backup to Catwoman #50 collected here, but then ties it in to the final two-part story, “Faceless.” Likely we’ve reached the pinnacle of Catwoman writers building on Ed Brubaker when Tieri suggests a young Selina Kyle had a rivalry with Black Mask’s father, making Black Mask not only Catwoman’s perpetual enemy ad nauseum but also making it a generational thing. And yet, this story is good too, and I admit I didn’t see the revelation of the “White Mask”’s identity coming, as obvious as it is in retrospect.

Given the instruction to just fill six issues of Catwoman, Frank Tieri could have done a lot worse, and Catwoman Vol. 8: Run Like Hell is a nice surprise. The references to the Calabreses probably keep this from being entirely a Catwoman book you could just give to a casual fan (also the amnesic Bruce Wayne and the robot Batman), but it’s still probably more comprehensible to the uninitiated than Batman/Catwoman. And now a hole in my own sequential reading is closed up!

[Includes original covers and New 52 variant]

Rating 2.25