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inamindfarfaraway · 2 years

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My Excessively Detailed, Heavily Opinionated Catwoman Comics Timeline (Major Spoilers)

Backstory

Selina Kyle is born in the East End in Gotham, in the area’s typical poverty, to Cuban immigrant Maria and Irish American Brian. Maria is a loving and protective parent, if troubled and sometimes emotionally distant. She loves cats and in some stories explicitly keeps several at home, preferring them to humans. Brian is your classic abusive alcoholic archetype with a side of racism - he isn’t confirmed to have physically abused his daughters, but he is verbally aggressive toward them and Maria is shown to make a point to send them away when his anger is peaking. He also regularly mistreats her, including in front of their daughters, and generally has no observable love for his family.

Yes, I said daughters, plural. Selina has a little sister named Maggie. (Their exact age difference is never specified, but it’s probably about two or three years. Maggie is drawn noticeably smaller when they’re kids. In one flashback she has toddler proportions when Selina is clearly older than that. Also, her hair colour oscillates between ginger, light brown and blonde, and her eyes are usually brown, but sometimes blue.) The two are polar opposites. Where Selina’s idealism rapidly degrades, Maggie’s persists; where Selina sharpens her edges and puts up emotional walls, Maggie openly seeks love and validation; where Selina lashes out at the world and looks out for herself, Maggie is kind, selfless and pacifistic. It’s easy to conclude that Maggie gets to be softer because her big sister is growing up too fast for her. Basically, they’re both put through early childhood trauma, and as Maggie puts in in the Relentless storyline, “[they] both survived [it] in entirely different ways” and both “thought [their own] way was right” for years.

Age is still never specified, but Selina is consistently described as ‘just a girl’ when Maria kills herself. The girls find her in the blood-filled bathtub. This moment will be recalled repeatedly, including in full-on traumatic flashbacks, and is agreed to kinda be Selina’s ‘equivalent’ in defining traumatic childhood events to Bruce’s night in Crime Alley.

Selina has been doing gymnastics since she was a little kid, BTW, supported by Maria. It’s said to be all she was still interested in once her mother died.

Brian’s parenting does not improve now he’s a single parent. The time of his death is another thing disagreed upon: in the Kyle sisters-centric Catwoman origin story Her Sister’s Keeper, he dies two months before the plot when both his daughters are adults, the news of which shocks Selina but she doesn’t seem to particularly mourn him for what a great guy he was. However, later tellings quietly retcon this to him dying ‘not long after’ Maria (the constant imprecision is very annoying to me. Give me numbers, dammit!).

Either way, just a few years after Maria’s death, the girls end up orphans and homeless. Selina goes to Sprang Juvenile Hall because Gotham’s social safety net is fantastic, but rather than let Maggie be cast to the winds of chance, before she’s locked up she takes Maggie to a children’s home run by actually good people - nuns - and abandons her there. Why doesn’t she stay and grow up there too? Well, given her intense self-hatred, bad luck and how throughout their interactions she puts Maggie before herself, I read this as her not believing she deserves it and/or believing she’d ruin any happiness she had, and Maggie had with her present, due to her supposed inherent badness. That’s just my interpretation, but I think it makes the most sense. So Maggie has a much healthier, happier and more stable late childhood and adolescence. She becomes a nun herself called Sister Magdeline, in fact. And always feeds the stray cats outside the convent.

Meanwhile, Selina is abused in juvie until she breaks out at thirteen and lives on the streets. Namely Alleytown, a slum between the East End and Old Gotham. She starts her career as a thief and swindler here, in the Alleytown Kids gang run by Mama Fortuna, who lets them stay in her house, nicknamed the Nest, and teaches them to use people’s underestimation of kids against them. Selina takes to crime like a cat to hunting, earning the woman’s respect. She befriends a fellow kid there, Sylvia Sinclair. But Mama Fortuna takes all the kids’ loot for herself and makes them do her chores and dirty work, so Selina and Sylvia run away together.

A pimp named Stan hires Selina as as sex worker. You get three guesses if he’s an abusive bastard; the first two don’t count. Sylvia likewise becomes a sex worker, and when they have their first times at fourteen, Sylvia volunteers to go first. Selina has no idea how to comfort or help her in the wake of this extremely traumatic experience, so she just… doesn’t. Unbeknownst to her, Sylvia holds a grudge over this. They’re pulled apart quickly after that by the chaos of the streets. Years later, Selina fails Sylvia again when she ditches her to get arrested during a diamond heist Sylvia asked for her help with. Sylvia goes to prison.

When Selina’s seventeen, she meets thirteen-year-old homeless girl Holly Robinson (whose hair oscillates between blonde, red and strawberry blonde because again, comic books are as consistent as Greek mythology). Holly’s turned to sex work too after running away from her abusive junkie parents, leaving her older brother behind. She’s at that moment being assaulted by a cop. Selina punches him out and rescues her, taking her under her wing. This is the first time Holly realizes that she doesn’t have to passively accept whatever cruelty life subjects her to, and she becomes Selina’s sidekick and little sister figure. Selina canonically has strong Big Sister Energy.

Comics Timeline

Her Sister’s Keeper. Selina learns martial arts from Wildcat and becomes Catwoman, inspired by the early appearances of Batman, initially to get her revenge on Stan. (Her age is vague, but a cop guesses that she’s sixteen or seventeen and Holly looks like a young teen, so she’s probably in her late teens to early twenties. Except Maggie is a fully fledged nun, and you need to be eighteen for that. Damn comic book chronology. Maybe Selina and Holly look younger than they is because of their chronic childhood malnutrition stunting their growth?) She reunites with Maggie, Stan captures Maggie to hurt her, Selina technically doesn’t murder him but does in spirit, Holly also gets beaten up by a cop, Batman is just trying to do his job and the Batcat ship is born in what else but a fight where she neatly summarizes their stage one relationship with a kiss immediately followed by a scratch. It all escalates into a whole debacle. Selina ultimately comes to three conclusions: 1. she’s gonna be a badass thief now; 2. Batman is hot and they’re into each other, but he’s a little too much like a cop for her to trust him; and 3. she’s willing to take the risks of her lifestyle, but not to let her loved ones get hurt, and so sends Holly to live with Maggie in the convent. That last one is important! Though Selina is habitually selfish in practical terms, she also will always want better for those she loves and has a responsibility/guilt complex about needing to protect them from harm. Her foundational self-concept is to some degree inherently a Bad Person, therefore pushing people away from her is her idea of doing what’s best for them. Almost every time someone she cares about gets hurt by a villain’s own actions or something else beyond her control, she believes it’s her fault! When she cares, she cares so much!

Ahem. I have strong feelings about this character. She has broken into my head and is stealing my time and mental energy.

HSK is Catwoman Volume 1. For a long time after this we’ve got the classic status quo. She’s the best thief in the world. She steals from the rich and gives to herself, mostly, to the point that she becomes a self-made socialite with fabulous outfits. She and Batman have their on-and-off enemies-and-lovers relationship, or alternatively, they speedrun enemies-to-lovers arcs and back again over and over. Sometimes as a socialite she flirts and has flings with Bruce Wayne, who’s nice, but her real love is Batman! (Cut to Bruce and Clark commiserating in a bar that their crushes have dumped them for themselves in a costume.) Occasionally she and Bats dare to dream of something more serious and committed between them, but his strict moral code and her amorality and both their intimacy and trust issues keep getting in the way. Go to therapy, you two. Please.

Volume 2 gives Catwoman her own rogues’ gallery. This includes bitter copycat rival She-Cat, who Selina rejected as a friend when they knew each other as orphan kids and must now deal with as an enemy; the scientist Cyber-Cat who uses shiny feline power armour and gets just a tiny little bit obsessed with the thief who humiliated her despite it; and Hellhound, her former classmate at a martial arts dojo with an ego even greater than his actual skill. Selina’s also presumed dead for a few years at the end because comics. The list of comic book characters who have never been truly, functionally or presumed dead is getting worryingly short…

I will summarize its major events, but before you read any further, I implore you to read Ed Brubaker’s run of Volume 3 (2002) if you have the time. Please. It is the Catwoman run. Brubaker is the best writer the character has ever had and - the abomination that was Selina and Slam being a couple notwithstanding - his writing is overall some of the best DC’s ever had in my opinion. Just read it if you want to know who Selina Kyle is and what she’s about.

I’m serious. I’ll wait.

Okay! Offscreen in the years before Volume 3, Maggie and Holly leave the convent and Gotham and part ways. Maggie fit in great there until an apparent crisis of faith, but Holly never felt like she fully belonged in that world and this feeling of discontentment only worsens. Maggie gets a degree in psychology, falls in love with a good man named Simon and settles into a comfortable life of domestic bliss. Holly in contrast spirals downward, returning to sex work on the streets and doing heroin.

Volume 3 proper starts with the story Catwoman: Anodyne. A series of murders of working girls gives Selina a blast from the past and makes her take a look at herself in her penthouse with her collection of lavish ball gowns and jewels. She realizes that she’s lost sight of her roots of standing up for people like herself and Holly against corruption and abuse. So she reinvents her Catwoman identity to be an antiheroic vigilante actively championing social justice, particularly focused on the East End. Respect. Because as this story’s events remind her, the cops don’t care about the poor and marginalized like sex workers. Private investigator Slam Bradley is her contact in legal crime solving, rather than a police officer, and he consistently disdains cops. Obviously she still steals, but it’s less of her defining characteristic. She’s more generous with the spoils too. For example, she funds Bruce’s charity projects. Stealing with no noble ulterior motive is presented less as empowerment from now on and more as a self-destructive compulsion, a symptom of her unhealthy, trauma-based survivalist mindset that she’s trying to escape.

Her change of heart improves her relationship with Batman. They get to know each other’s secret identities. The more cooperative Batcat, with the added intimacy and domesticity of Brucelina, is pretty much the Batman franchise OTP with Brutalia having petered out. I don’t want to get into ship wars, but at present canon, ever fickle mistress that it is, does largely lean my way.

Selina reunites with Holly in Anodyne, Holly only a few months off heroin. She starts pretending to be homeless, truly acting as Catwoman’s eyes and ears on the East End streets, and later becomes the new leader of the Alleytown Kids. She’s also a lesbian and has a girlfriend named Karon (whose hair is finally a consistent colour - purple). Selina tracks down and reunites her with her long-lost brother Davey in a nice roadtrip story. In One Year Later, the timeline in which Selina and Bruce have Helena Wayne, she succeeds the Catwoman mantle when Selina quits to be a more devoted mother. And in the buildup to Infinite Crisis, she befriends the antihero Harley Quinn and lives with her for some time.

Speaking of Harley Quinn, Selina has close friendships with her fellow morally flexible badass women, Harley and Poison Ivy. They collectively form the Gotham City Sirens. Their comic run of the same name brings this to the fore with them sharing a home and on paper all going straight. (They don’t, obviously). Bruce actually encourages these bonds because Selina keeps the other two in check and their friendship brings out their inner altruism; he knows Selina will side with him if Harley and Ivy, traditionally outright villains, fall too far into the darker shades of grey. The three still hurt each other, all having their own issues and different worldviews, but overall they’re a heartwarming, fun, awesome trio.

Selina trains Stephanie Brown as rookie Spoiler for a bit. Another interesting relationship given how similar Selina and Steph’s childhoods were that writers refuse to explore, because DC doesn’t let us have nice things. At least not for long.

Leslie Thompkins is another good friend of Selina, supporting her in helping the East End community.

But wait! Did you think DC would be satisfied with the amount of pain these characters have already gone through? Hell no! Catwoman: Relentless, chronologically before Gotham City Sirens, is a great big kick in the teeth. Buckle up. Selina’s been a significant thorn in Black Mask’s side, stealing $28 million from him in diamonds to fund an East End Community Centre, and he wants to make her pay for it with interest. He blows up the centre and kidnaps first Simon, then Maggie. Sylvia comes back into Selina’s life leading the Alleytown Kids (before Holly does it, sorry if my ordering is confusing) and seemingly is a friend and ally. But it’s revealed that due to her animosity toward her she’s been working for Black Mask the whole time and luring her into a trap. She was the one who told him her secret identity, enabling him to do all of this. Meanwhile, Black Mask is holding Maggie hostage. How does he hurt her to hurt Selina? Well, he tortures and murders her husband in front of her, cuts his eyes out and makes her eat them. Under-fucking-standably, Maggie’s sanity is… broken. Holly, who naturally also gets captured and tortured, ends up shooting Sylvia to save Selina’s life. Not just wilfully allowing her to die, actively shooting her. Selina also basically breaks her no-killing rule here. She kicks Black Mask off his balcony, then stands right in front of him and watches him slowly lose his grip on the ledge he caught in disgust while he begs her to help him. So that’s cool. But she and the people she loves are very, very hurt and traumatized, and she blames herself for all of it for trusting Sylvia and not being able to protect them.

Maggie has to live in a mental hospital after Relentless, trapped in an unresponsive catatonic state. What happens to her afterward… well… yet again, comics can’t give a straight answer. Blackest Night, that big crossover event with with loads of dead characters being revived as evil Black Lanterns, has Black Mask return to life and kidnap her to hurt Selina again, only for the Sirens to rescue her. But Maggie runs away and the chronologically later Gotham City Sirens run picks that thread up with her being homeless and now believing Selina is possessed by a cat demon and that’s why her life is full of sin, misfortune and general bad things. In the course of seeking to exorcise her, she gets possessed herself by an apparent (though suspiciously harmful and violent) genuine angel who not only causes her hallucinations that make her delusion look true, but gives her supernatural powers and possesses Harley too at one point. Maggie turns into the Christian extremist antivillain Sister Zero determined to ‘save’ her sister’s soul whether that keeps it in the mortal plane or not. It’s very weird. The nature and goals of the ‘angel’ are literally never explained, and that itself isn’t necessarily bad, but… I personally don’t like or agree with that direction, the whole thing just comes out of nowhere for me and I think the sisters have had enough angst and division already. I haven’t seen Sister Zero appear outside that series. The ongoing Volume 5 ignores all of that and begins with her still hospitalized and catatonic, having been so long enough that her straight bob has grown to be shoulder-length and curly. This run immediately follows the failed wedding fiasco in Tom King’s Batman run that I know a lot of fans, myself included, disdain and disregard. Here Maggie gradually improves. She’s taken to live with Selina to save her from villainous scheming. She regains her speech, she’s happy, she makes peace with Selina being Catwoman and the risks and pragmatism it entails. However, by issue #35 another villain, Christian fundamentalist assassin Father Valley, nearly kills Maggie just because of her association with Selina, and both sisters are pretty damn sick of people doing that. Maggie also wants to live on her own and reassert her independence. So she leaves Gotham and isn’t planning to come back, last time I checked.

During the time where Dick is Batman, we’re introduced to (vaguely aged, of course) adolescent Kitrina Falcone, the youngest child of the notorious Falcone crime family. She’s raised by her abusive, negligent uncle Mario. She spends a lot of time on the streets to avoid him, running jobs for criminals like the Penguin and getting prodigiously skilled at theft, breaking in and out of places, escaping restraints and mapmaking. Catwoman is her hero. Selina meanwhile wants to get ahead in an evolving crime scene, so she infiltrates the Falcone home and steals Kitrina’s maps of the new Black Mask’s territory alongside other valuables. The family accuse Kitrina of helping her and try to murder her. Lovely. She escapes sleeping with the fishes, confronts Selina and impresses her by escaping her and stealing her maps back. A familial bond forms between them and Kitrina is reborn as Catgirl! Catwoman’s very own Robin equivalent on the frontline. We joke about Bruce’s pattern of taking in traumatized young boys with nowhere else to go, but Selina has exactly the same pattern with that type of girl. I guess after she left one behind in Maggie, in repentance she’s proceeded to open her heart to every new one she comes across. Bruce is a massive hypocrite and disapproves of Kitrina being endangered like this, even though he’s permitted multiple Robins and Batgirls by now, and wants her to go to a boarding school upstate and improve her life the mundane way. Kitrina nearly dies one too many times and she and Selina concede that as hypocritical as it is, his argument holds water. Kitrina promises to return, though. A promise DC has yet to uphold!

Volume 4 confirms that Selina Kyle is canonically bisexual! She has a romance with Eiko Hasigawa, a Yakuza heiress and admirer of hers who takes up the Catwoman mantle while Selina temporarily operates as a crime kingpin. But in a good way. It’s complicated. No wonder she hangs out with Harley and Ivy as much as Bruce…

Volume 5 has Selina declare herself the ‘queen of Alleytown’ and take over the Nest, rebranding the Alleytown Kids the Alleytown Strays and teaching them to protect and provide for themselves with genuine care unlike her predecessors except Holly. It’s nice. But a lot of shit goes down involving Selina matching wits and trading blows with villains like the aforementioned Father Valley, the Penguin, the Riddler, and more! There are always more! The issues in the Fear State crossover overarching storyline are the climax, wherein the corrupt mayor and GCDP put Alleytown under siege at the same time as the villains’ overlapping schemes, and the Token Good Cop supporting character Hadley is killed for trying to help Selina. Alleytown is in ruins, but Selina sees it’s always been the people that are truly important, not the place. The people of this neighbourhood, her people, will endure. Deciding that mentoring them in professional crime is actually kinda counterproductive to giving the Strays better lives in the long term, she ‘abdicates’ her throne and gives the Nest to them as a safe haven in issue #39, the conclusion of Ram V’s run. Oh, and special attention is placed on one member of the Strays, a teenage girl known only by her nickname Shoes, and connected to the assassin Cheshire *SPOILERS* because she’s her and Arsenal’s long-lost presumed dead daughter Lian Harper. I personally disagree with this entire concept, but oh well. That makes four traumatized adolescent girl protégés from broken homes plus one token biologically related family member. Selina, you really are Bruce’s match.

#catwoman says defund the police fund the community #and women and sex worker’s rights!#watching selina build her own found family of kindred spirits she gets to mentor and support like nobody did her at their ages: 🥰#watching them all be separated from her in a tragic cycle and her blame herself for not being able to maintain positive relationships: 🥺#hey her one biological relative (maggie) was the first in her life while bruce’s (damian) was one of the last batkids #i want a comic that’s just batcat meeting each other’s string of young same-gender trainees #batman about holly: being so close to your dangerous lifestyle and at risk by your enemies is no life for a child #selina: yeah okay fine i can’t let her get hurt #[cut to selina seeing fresh-out-of-the-cave robin i]#bruce: i know what you’re -#selina: don’t you think that’s nO LifE foR a CHiLd #selina: mine wasn’t directly fighting criminals holy shit this is way worse #[cut to bruce seeing catgirl]#bruce: looks like your kid there is… directly fighting criminals #selina: if the ‘i trained them and they need it’ argument works for you -#bruce: at least all of mine still went to school #selina: at least none of mine have DIED!#bruce:#selina: fuck that was too far i’m sorry #oh no now it’s sad #selina kyle #catwoman #maggie kyle #holly robinson #kitrina falcone #catgirl #dc #dc comics #her sister’s keeper #catwoman relentless

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