In the beginning, comic book artist Bob Kane created his hero du jour, Batman, the most famous crime fighter ever to don purple-gray tights. It was May 1939.
Shortly thereafter, perhaps realizing that a hero is nothing without his Eve — his Lois Lane, his Mary Jane — Mr. Kane created Catwoman, the sometime villain, sometime love interest who debuted as “the beautiful, lithe, mysterious Cat-Woman” in the summer of 1940.
Since then, Catwoman has lived more lives than her namesake felines, with one incarnation following another faster than you can lash a black leather whip: from a 1940s stint as man’s worst nightmare, to her 1950s domestication, to a 1960s television revival by Julie Newmar in black leather, to Michelle Pfeiffer’s 1992 enraged feminist rendition in “Batman Returns,” to today’s “Catwoman,” her first turn headlining a major motion picture all her own.
In many ways, Catwoman’s successive guises reflect those of the American woman over the decades. It’s still a Batman’s world in Gotham City, but one cat is starting to make her mark.
From the beginning, she was one of Batman’s most dangerous villains.
The Joker had his potions, the Penguin his umbrellas, but Catwoman’s weapon was the most lethal: sex appeal.
“There were many, many scenes in the ’40s and ’50s where Batman would almost have her, and it was clearly implied that if it were the Joker or the Riddler, they’d be in jail, but he would somehow accidentally let Catwoman get away,” explains Mark Waid, a writer with D.C. Comics. “There was that sense that she had some power over Batman, because she could get away.”
At some point, Catwoman’s uncanny ability to bring Batman to his knees apparently became too much for her writers, who did something they’d never done before: They retired a villain.
Catwoman’s Beaver Cleaver-era reformation came by the good grace of Batman, who discovered his nemesis’s true origins: Not a femme fatale after all, but a stewardess temporarily deluded into thinking so by a bout of amnesia.
The revelation was enough to convince Catwoman to hang up her mask and quit the crime business altogether. She opened a pet shop and lived happily ever after.
That might have been the end of her had ABC not rolled out a campy, pop-art Batman television show in 1966 that ignored the taming of the comic book feline fatale. Julie Newmar played a wickedly sexy and decidedly criminal Catwoman with plenty of screen time.
But after Miss Newmar left the show in its third season amid sluggish ratings, a new woman in tights would come to upstage Eartha Kitt’s replacement Catwoman: Batgirl, the brainchild of ABC executives who hoped to appeal to the “idealistic young girls” of 1967, Les Daniels writes in “Batman: The Complete History.”
The Batgirl ploy didn’t work, and the show was canceled, leaving comic books to navigate the changed cultural terrain that admired two very different kinds of female stars.
The original sex kitten’s big break came in 1989, when D.C. Comics hired a woman named Mindy Newell to draft a miniseries all Catwoman’s own. Until that point, men had been putting words into Catwoman’s mouth and inches into her bra size. Now Miss Newell was in charge, and she made a choice reflective of the times.
Like black rappers before her, Miss Newell turned a stereotype into a statement of empowerment. So you’re afraid of women who use their sexual allure to secure personal success? Bad girls with black leather whips who lead anti-social lives? These would be Catwoman’s strengths. She would be everything men were afraid of — and this would be her empowerment.
In other words, if the man has got you down, beat him up.
The latest Hollywood Catwoman, “an icon of female empowerment,” according to the movie’s producer, Denise Di Novi, continues to define herself in others’ terms. Like the pseudo-villain first created in 1940, Halle Berry’s Catwoman isn’t exactly a villain, but she isn’t a good girl either. Instead, her defining characteristic is that she doesn’t know who she is.
“Bad, good…Can’t it be a little more complicated?” Miss Berry asks at one point.
Certainly. But the feline fatale never figures out how. Instead, she passively accepts this split personality first imposed on her by male comic writers unsure whether to love her or fear her.
It is only in comic books that Catwoman has stumbled upon an identity all her own. The leap comes thanks to Ed Brubaker, a 37-year-old writer who overhauled the Catwoman comic series in 2001.
“I wrote her more as a woman that I would want to hang out with and respect,” Mr. Brubaker says. “She’s more her own woman. She’s not just a reflection of what everyone else wants her to be.”
Mr. Brubaker’s Catwoman exposes less flesh than her past editions, sleeps with her enemies less often and no longer steals out of anger. Instead, she is a kind of Robin Hood in loose tights, looking after the ghettoes of Gotham City.
In a way it’s fitting that only by becoming more like Batman has Catwoman begun to step out of his shadow.
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