Catwoman #30 Review

             Wowza, that was painful.

            If you’ve read any of Ann Nocenti’s Catwoman, you know this book could not possibly be good. You aren’t reading this to see if this book is good or not. You’re reading this because you hate this book and want to stew in rage about it with me.

            There are a lot of really terrible comics out there. God knows. But in maybe 15 years of reading comic books, I don’t think I’ve read anything that quite approaches Ann Nocenti’s Catwoman. It’s hard to put into words, without over-extending my vocabulary, exactly how terrible this book is, and how sad it is that DC cares so little about this wonderful character that they’ve put her in the hands of a writer I wouldn’t trust to pen a grocery list.

            I just . . . I don’t know where to start. So, Nocenti’s been running with the New 52 doctrine that Selina Kyle isn’t a confident, intelligent, complex woman who’s just trying to get by, and is dealing with certain very real emotional traumas. Nope, now she’s actually an incredibly insecure crazy cat lady who has been variously portrayed as a nymphomaniac, a kleptomaniac, and now she apparently suffers from a split personality disorder. Looking at the kind of dialogue and inner monologue Nocenti gives her, she may also suffer from early onset dementia. Compared to her, John Ostrander’s Catwoman had the dry wit of a Lauren Bacall part. Oh, and they also made her boobs bigger. A lot bigger. That’s literally all they changed about her appearance.

            Look, I don’t hold mental illness against anybody. I’ve seen how it can effect people all throughout my life, people I love and people I admire. I’ve always considered Selina an emotionally damaged character, and I’ve enjoyed seeing her deal with those things over the years a great deal, on the occasions it was handled well (I don’t think it’s ever been handled quite this badly). But she also used to be fucking cool. Now she not only has way more problems, with no real explanation as to why she has them, they either go completely unaddressed or Selina deals with them with all the subtlety and conviction of a thirteen year old who just got dumped.

I have nothing to say about the plot of this comic, so I’ll just give you a synopsis. Spoiler alert, I guess.

So in the beginning of this issue, Selina burns her Catwoman costume, declaring she’ll never give in to Catwoman’s “wild ways” again, insisting that she and Catwoman are actually two separate people. Some guy propositions her, thinking she’s a prostitute. Why? Absolutely no discernible reason; in fact, it’s one of the rare times in the series where she’s dressed rather modestly. Then she goes to a gym and punches a bag for a while, and then sees the most poorly named and under-developed love interest in comics, Trip Winters. They don’t say anything of importance to each other or anything, Nocenti just wanted an opportunity to remind us that this guy exists and for Selina to tell us that she liked him (again, just cause), but doesn’t seem to see why she should use it as a chance to, I dunno, give him a personality or anything. Selina buys a bunch of cats, then goes home and finds out Trip slipped a puzzlebox into her bag and . . . Jesus fucking Christ. Look, you don’t want to read this any more than I want to write it, so we’ll just sum it up: Selina became a suicide hotline operator (which is odd because we’ve already established that she has a lot of problems of her own that she hasn’t really worked on at all yet) but she’s really bad at it, Roulette challenges Selina to a thief competition to prove she’s a better thief than Roulette and also to save the lives of a bunch of kids, but then finds out nobody actually kidnapped any kids. She decides to do the competition anyway and becomes Catwoman again because she’s really desperate to prove she’s the best thief there is, apparently. She goes to the thing and they all fight. Also, Trip Winters is apparently Roulette’s boyfriend. Mirror Master’s there, but all his dialogue is awful like everybody else’s. Selina gets pushed into the mirror world, and then there’s a bunch of god awful exposition and the issue mercifully ends.

            Oh, and Pat Oliffe’s art is fine. Just fine. I’m not enthusiastic about it, but maybe I would like it better if it wasn’t backed by such a god awful script, but even then it’s at best okay, bringing nothing new or interesting to the table. But I can’t really blame Pat Oliffe for that: if I was penciling this book, I wouldn’t put any extra effort into it either. Hell, I don’t even like the cover by Terry and Rachel Dodson because I know what a book with Catwoman on the cover means now.

            This is one of those books you read because it’s awful and it makes you angry and you like being angry. It’s an insult to the character it depicts, it’s an insult to the world it inhabits, and in a lot of ways it’s the artform at its worst. It's probably for the best if you just don't give in to the temptation.