In broad strokes I can describe the plot of Tini Howard’s Catwoman Vol. 4: Nine Lives. But page to page, in terms of what the characters are concerned with, what they talk about and think about, Nine Lives is very messy, often nonsensical, and boring. I know very little about the next team coming on to Catwoman, but there’s no doubt in my mind this title needs a change.

[Review contains spoilers]

In the wake of Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War, Selina Kyle has gained superpowers or been blessed by a god; either way, she’s got nine lives and she’s determined to spend most of them on otherwise impossible missions. If we accept the specious premise, that Catwoman has been collecting missions she wants to do but hasn’t because the thinks she’ll get killed, then there’s a lot of potential here, tales of an Impossible Mission Force or Suicide Squad that live up to their name. It’s interesting too how Howard delineates throughout that a “get out of death free” card does not mean invincibility; should Selina die in the middle of a toxic radioactive site, she’d die and be reborn continually until her extra lives run out, and the same with dying in the vacuum of space.

But uncertainty, and deviation from that premise, are baked in from the start. Selina’s first “deathless” heist isn’t a heist at all, but rather a quest to return her cat Duchess to her original owner, a Colombian assassin. Except, a few more pages in, Selina’s actually there to stop Santa Espada from killing the locals. No wait, she really wants to talk to Santa Espada about their shared beau Valmont. Nope, that’s a ruse, it’s definitely about the locals. Meanwhile, we get two separate flashbacks to the last time Catwoman saw Batman before she left Gotham, and these too are contradictory to one another.

It is not until the fifth chapter that we see Selina try to steal something for her own gain; the intervening chapters involve stealing to protect humanity, fulfill promises, or the like. But even this fifth chapter strains credibility, as Selina’s willing to squander one of her lives on recovering, from the aquatic Tritonians, a documentary she simply wants to see. Finding the director held captive, she saves him instead, only for them both to seemingly be surprised that the documentary film wasn’t left in the possession of the director while he was imprisoned. This ends up another charitable mission; the whole of the Tritonians are being blackmailed to help a villain lest the documentary film be released, so in the end Selina’s working to help free them.

Howard has another character call the villain “Viceroy,” though it takes a minute to clarify she’s not a viceroy; rather her name is Veronica Viceroy. Over the course of the rest of the story, we understand that Viceroy, formerly of NEMO, has now formed her own organization, White Glove, a take on Simon Hurt’s Black Glove, dealing in stolen magic artifacts. One does wonder if Howard meant to parallel Talia al Ghul’s Leviathan instead of Black Glove, both part of Batman RIP, which would make more sense.

Some of that information, like the existence of White Glove, the characters present as established fact when it’s the first the audience is hearing about it. It’s never clear, for instance, how Catwoman finds it all out; at best Howard is eliding the details and at worst the narrative is just sloppy. There’s a sequence where Selina is determined to erase all the data Viceroy has on her, though we never know what it is Viceroy knows that Selina wouldn’t want her to nor what Viceroy might do with that information. It’s an example, again, of Howard overcomplicating things unnecessarily (and wordily); that Selina has to escape Viceroy’s base makes sense on its own, but then there’s the added, rather inexplicable concern over the data.

At another point, Howard’s Selina tells the reader she’s asked Eiko Hasigawa, mob boss and sometime-Catwoman, to gather her troops for a fight against Viceroy at the docks. Even apparently knowing Selina-Catwoman will be there, Eiko arrives also dressed as Catwoman, but when Selina chides her, Eiko hushes Selina because her troops don’t know Eiko-Catwoman’s secret identity. It is, first, a thematically weird fight to be having this close to the end of Howard’s run, whether Eiko is horning in on Selina’s territory given that Selina has employed Eiko as Catwoman before and the two are mostly copacetic. But second, it’s a further example of Nine Lives' weird gymnastics; at a point where the focus is on Gotham vs. Viceroy, Howard pens a sequence where Eiko chooses to ride out with her gang as Catwoman and then frets about them knowing her identity.

It’s enough to make one wonder whether the “Marvel Method” is in use here — Tini Howard gets the pages of Carmine Di Giandomenico art and feels the need to parse out why Eiko is in costume — though I doubt the reader would have questioned if she’d just left it alone. Back in Tritonis, Viceroy and her assistant Kaspar wear rebreathers even though they’re obviously in a room with oxygen. Di Giandomenico’s art is attractive as always, and Ivan Shavrin is a revelation in a style similar to Otto Schmidt, but the art seems at times complicit in the book’s confusion.

It was a fun reveal in Gotham War that Scandal Savage was secretly helping Selina, though I was disappointed it was not the Secret Six Scandal, which I chalked up to continuity foibles. In Nine Lives, Howard makes a big, if awkward, swing to address this, explaining away Scandal’s out-of-character behavior as appeasing her famous father Vandal. I appreciate Howard’s deference to the Gail Simone series, from Jeanette in her banshee form to Scandal’s wives Liana and Knockout, though one might have thought the super-strong Knockout would be more active here and the characters are still somewhat far from how Simone voiced them.

Howard has referenced Heart of Hush many times, so it was not wholly a surprise in Catwoman Vol. 4: Nine Lives, when Selina needs a surgeon, that Hush would arrive on the scene. Though I am flummoxed that DC would let another writer use Tommy Elliot a mere seven months before “H2SH.” (I’ll be curious to see if Jeph Loeb references this.) But it remains that even with Hush, even with Scandal Savage, even with the unusual teaming of Catwoman and Superman, Nine Lives consistently failed to hold my interest.

Too much chatter, even for me; too much of the characters worrying on the page about things tertiary to the plot; and ultimately more superheroics than I’d prefer for a Catwoman comic, vs. this be some spy-toned Green Arrow adventure or something. Again, clearly time to move on.

[Includes original covers and some but not all variants]