In tone, art, and general concerns, Torunn Gronbekk and company’s Catwoman Vol. 1: Who Is Selina Kyle? bears resemblance to Genevieve Valentine’s short DC You run, which is good company to be in. The Tini Howard run that just ended also spun off from the Valentine volumes, though the resemblance was less pronounced as time went on, up to the rather flat Catwoman Vol. 4: Nine Lives. I also increasingly disagreed with Howard’s conception of Catwoman’s morality; on this, Gronbekk and I see more eye to eye.

It won’t be until after the second volume that we know what Gronbekk’s Catwoman is really about or what she’s trying to say. Who Is Selina Kyle? reminds me of those other first volumes we tend to see (Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Afterworlds is another) where a writer new to a character finds their footing by, first, not writing about the character at all. That's here in a story about Selina’s past, when she was not even called “Selina Kyle,” and which has nothing to do with her Catwoman persona aside from that the character here just so happens to wear a costume. Whether that continues or abates into the second volume will tell us much more.

Still, I am happier to see Catwoman in crime noir than I am in superheroics; art by Fabiana Mascolo and Marianna Ignazzi is wonderfully sedate throughout; and the words on the page are impressively sparse after a number of overwritten Catwoman volumes previous. Trending upward, and we’ll see where it goes.

[Review contains spoilers]

There is a lot that Who Is Selina Kyle? doesn’t bother to explain, and bravo to Gronbekk for that while at the same time the book mandates slow reading if not another pass through. It would seem we’re focused on a period not unlike what we see in Batman: The Knight, Selina’s equivalent of Bruce Wayne’s walkabout when he went to be trained by warriors and mystics across the world. That’s speculation, however; six issues in and it’s still not explicit what young Selina was doing in Europe or how she came to work for the Belov crime family, even as, in the present, Selina investigates murders within the group.

Among Belov brothers, who now appear to be warring, I clocked Mitya, Ivan, and Alex, though indeed that takes a while to parse out (plus mother Katarina and late father Theodore). It’s complicated by a bevy of other well-dressed men around, Anton and Adam and Shota and a hacker known as Concrete, all of whom in the artists' sparse style tend to resemble one another. We’re also piecing together mysteries wrapped in mysteries — someone is killing the Belovs' former network of thieves; someone has seemingly murdered Evie Hall, Selina’s previous alias, though the deceased was not Selina; there are assassins both within the Belovs and without; and all of that slows the understanding that while the Belovs might be trying to kill “Evie,” there may yet be someone else behind the scenes.

It’s in this focus on an expansive cast of mob characters that Kyle reminds of Valentine’s Catwoman Vol. 6: Keeper of the Castle; largely we’re concerned with Selina as a naif, not a commanding mob boss, but tonally one suggests the other, as Mascolo’s and Ignazzi’s thin line work suggests Castle’s Garry Brown. If I’m permitted to put it this way, it’s the kind of art that makes a DC comic look like an Image comic, and DC’s always better for it. Though Selina’s new (pirate-esque?) costume ostensibly bares more, none of the artists depict her with the same impossible proportions as Stefano Raffaele, for instance, in Nine Lives.

Unlike Valentine’s story, however, Kyle swiftly leaves Gotham, and aside from one shot of the Bat-signal, there’s no Bat-presence here whatsoever.¹ It is a boon to get to experience a mainstream DC comic set in Europe with an entirely European creative team, but the lack of grounding in Gotham makes it increasingly easy to overlook Catwoman’s presence, and even Selina Kyle’s. No one overseas seems to recognize Catwoman, and in regards to the costume, they address it as Evie trying to disguise her identity. (Notably, “Who Is Selina Kyle” appears to be a marketing hedge, not a title in any of the issues.) In the second volume, should we find the action moves back to Gotham, Batman has to get involved, or the plot in some way deals with Selina’s other aliases, that would say one thing about this pseudo-prologue; if it does not, that would tell us something else.

A turning point of Howard’s Catwoman was Selina’s horror over boyfriend Valmont killing their foes, and then her self-flagellation when she herself had to kill Valmont to save Batman. It didn’t jibe for me with a Catwoman who’s never been squeamish about dispatching an enemy in the right circumstances, famously including Black Mask. So I was interested to see that Selina throws one assassin to her death here and doesn’t blink at a bodyguard taking a near-fatal blow to the head; in the realm of fiction, Gronbekk’s characterization felt closer to me to how Selina’s traditionally been written.

I will take a smart, maturely written, crime noir run on Catwoman any day, even if the Catwoman elements are extremely loose, over something that presents the character less well. In that way, Torunn Gronbekk’s Catwoman Vol. 1: Who Is Selina Kyle? is so far a winner. Best case scenario, this far-flung volume out of the way, the next volume will deliver something similar with more relevance to Catwoman added in.

[Includes original covers, variant cover thumbnails, costume designs]