Review: Catwoman Vol. 3: Duchess of Gotham trade paperback (DC Comics)

Given it’s been about a year since I read Tini Howard’s first two Catwoman volumes, I did go back and re-read them before I started Catwoman Vol. 3: Duchess of Gotham, and enjoyed them more than I did before. Howard’s first Catwoman volume, especially, rewards careful reading, with maybe a smidgen more connecting matter between the various mobsters' machinations if one parses every line of dialogue.

It remains that Howard’s Catwoman turns on a specious idea, this belief that Selina Kyle is devoutly against killing, to a near pearl-clutching extent. Some of my slowness to warm to this run comes from my different conception of Selina, who’s no villainous killer but who’s rarely been this squeamish about dropping a body. But in Duchess especially, Howard presents a “peaceful warrior” Catwoman, a Robin Hood-esque protector of Gotham’s downtrodden and disenfranchised, and I found that fascinating even if I think Howard’s too aspirational as to who the Catwoman character is.

We’re far enough into Howard’s Catwoman run that the author’s no longer setting Selina’s core group of allies; rather they’re all working together now and at common purposes. For the third volume in ostensibly a crime noir drama, Duchess ends up almost “cozy,” a book where most of the enemies involved become allies, most everyone gets a dose of self-actualization, and the end is pretty tidy. I’m interested in the Batman/Catwoman: Gotham War event to follow mainly to see where Howard will find crossover-level angst in what seems a pretty benign Catwoman status quo.

[Review contains spoilers]

I admit, Howard sending Catwoman off to jail made me concerned we were in for a Bronwyn Carlton “cat-fight in the showers”-type of volume. If anything, Howard goes too much the other direction; despite the narration’s insistence that Selina and the women she’s imprisoned with are “treated like garbage,” Howard doesn’t make much mistreatment really concrete. Hard labor here consists of raking leaves; amidst visits to the library, commissary, and dentist, Selina recruits the women to her side, teaches them all to fight, and leads them in a successful and seemingly trouble-free breakout.

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That Selina should be sidelined in jail for four issues does make me wonder if some of this is biding time to line up with Chip Zdarsky’s Batman. But it gives Howard some time to shore up the book’s thesis, which has been murky thus far. Why does Catwoman want to bring Gotham’s crime families to heel and what will she do when that happens? Now we begin to get a vision of a city of controlled, nonviolent thievery, in which the poor steal from the rich, give a portion to charity, and keep the rest for themselves. Of course it can’t work, being mainstream superhero comics, but it’s such a bizarre utopian concept that I’m curious to see what Howard does with it in the issues she has left.

Meanwhile, on the outside, Howard spins stories of Eiko “also Catwoman” Hasigawa and sidekick Dario “Tomcat” Tomasso. Eiko’s got history from Genevieve Valentine’s DC You Catwoman days, but Dario puts me in mind of a variety of Selina’s help-mates over the years who never quite last more than a run or so, Carlos Ayala and Alice Tesla and such. I do like Dario though, and maybe the most interesting through line in Howard’s run so far has been Dario’s journey from oblivious son of a crime don to leader in his own right, under Selina’s tutelage as well — the same as Eiko finding her power outside the Catwoman mask.

In what is, again, a rather cheerful Catwoman volume, at times I felt Howard could have sweated the details more. There’s a painfully awkward sequence in the jail when the locked-up Queen of Hearts wants Selina — who just jumped out of a vent and landed like a cat — to tell her which other of the prisoners is actually Catwoman.

Eiko promises the other mobsters that if they ever see her in the same room with Catwoman, they can kill Eiko — a hedge against the idea that Eiko might be Catwoman — but then they seem weirdly ready to do so just because Catwoman invades a meeting where Eiko’s in attendance; similarly, Eiko gives up the ruse at that point seemingly for no reason. Dario and boyfriend-turned-foe Noah meet, but the dialogue makes it confusing who arranged the meeting; then they agree to meet again at a different place to try to kill one another, meandering that the plotting needs more than actually makes sense.

I’ve read some rumblings about art difficulties with this Catwoman run. I’ve no complaints necessarily, as Sami Basri for instance seems just as appropriate for this title as Nico Leon, though clearly Leon’s work here for purposes of time and etc. isn’t as detailed as in Catwoman Vol. 1: Dangerous Liaisons. Notably, Howard writes a few bits of verbal comedy in the second-to-last chapter (issue #55) and I thought Leon’s faces looked straight out of Kevin Maguire, which is near exactly what you want.

With Gotham War following on the heels of Catwoman Vol. 3: Duchess of Gotham — in which I presume Catwoman and Batman will be at war with one another — the note Tini Howard writes from Batman to Catwoman in this book is particularly interesting. Here, Batman opines, Catwoman arrives at “conclusions I couldn’t, and wouldn’t. You are a kind of clever I would never be” and “that makes me think Gotham — and the world — really needs your mind.”

It is, again, like much of this book, almost blithely aspirational, the kind of thing I don’t really imagine Batman saying to Catwoman, but maybe preferable over the emotionally closed-off Bruce Wayne most would write. Here, at perhaps the book’s strangest, Batman encourages Catwoman to lead the others as a better type of criminal. That’s not wholly inconceivable for Batman — maybe among the most sensible ways of looking at the Batman/Catwoman relationship that I’ve seen — but still one gets the sense Howard is imagining things rosier than they are. We’ll see.

[Includes original and variant covers, designs]

Rating 2.25