Catwoman (2002) 9

Catwoman (2002) 9
Jul 2002

Disguises (Part 4)
By Ed Brubaker, Brad Raider, Rich Burchett, Matt Hollingsworth

Catwoman talks to Detective Crispus Alllen. She lets him in on what she and Slam Bradley have cooked up. After stealing diamonds from the gangsters in the last issue they are now using the rocks as bait to snare the dirty cops who shot Holly.

In the end everything doesn’t work out exactly as planned or as I envisioned it. There is a nice twist in the tale that impressed me at a point when I thought the story had become a bit too predictable.

Catwoman (2002) 8

Catwoman (2002) 8
Jul 2002

Disguises (Part 3)
By Ed Brubaker, Brad Raider, Rich Burchett, Matt Hollingsworth

This one is mostly action as Selina and Slam work together to pull a fast one on the dirty cops. Slam pulls his weight but it is her idea. There isn’t much in the way of fighting but it is all plot, not much in the way of character development.

I like the pacing and the way the story develops. There are a few pages narrated by Selina.

Catwoman (2002) 7

Catwoman (2002) 7
Jun 2002

Disguises (Part 2)
By Ed Brubaker, Brad Raider, Rich Burchett, Cameron Stewart, Matt Hollingsworth

Selina takes Holly from the scene of the crime. She’s in pretty bad shape. She got shot through the shoulder. Selina leaves Holly with Dr. Thompkins and goes looking for Slam Bradley. She finds Slam in his apartment. She convinces him to lend a hand. He has a contact inside the GCPD, someone he can trust, Detective Farrucci, who isn’t on the take.

Catwoman (2002) 6

Catwoman (2002) 6
Jun 2002

Disguises (Part 1)
By Ed Brubaker, Brad Raider, Cameron Stewart, Matt Hollingsworth

Holly is the focus of this chapter. It opens with her taking a personality test. The results of the test are a recurring theme that Holly thinks about as she goes about her business. She works for Selina now, hunting down leads. She's also a recovering heroin addict and that also plays into the story.

Two worlds collide for Holly when she visits her girlfriend, Karen. Someone interrupts them to tell Holly where she can find David G, a drug dealer. Karen gets angry at Holly. She doesn’t know that Holly is working for Catwoman, only what she just heard and that Holly told her she was clean.

Holly makes up a story which is partly true. Karen seems satisfied.

Holly goes looking for David G. She finds him but he rubs her the wrong way. She’s convinced he’s a cop. She follows him. He meets up with a couple men. They are cops and her hunch turns out to be correct, he is a cop. The men get into an argument. It isn’t entirely clear what the argument is about but David G winds up dead, shot in the back of the head, execution style.

The cops hadn’t noticed Holly but after she sees what went down she panics and unintentionally reveals her presence. They come after her guns a-blazing. She gets shot through the right shoulder and it doesn’t look good for her as the chapter ends.

Selina is on her way. Holly called her before she started eves dropping but it isn’t clear how far away Catwoman is.

I like the change in focus. I like Holly. I like the visual story telling. It doesn’t blow me away but it works.

Catwoman (2002) 5

Catwoman (2002) 5
May 2002

Trickle Down Theory
By Ed Brubaker, Brad Raider, Cameron Stewart, Matt Hollingsworth, Giulia Brusco

Catwoman plays protector. She looks out for the welfare of Brandon, a kid who is being used as a drug mule. She follows Dexter, the guy who is pushing Brandon to work for him. While she’s tailing Dexter she crosses paths with Slam Bradley. He is up to something similar but his motivations are a little less clear. He says he is looking into police corruption. I guess he’s looking for some payback after getting the snot beat out of him by Gotham’s Finest at the end of the Trail of the Catwoman arc.

Catwoman (2002) 4

Catwoman (2002) 4
Mar 2002

Anodyne - Part 4
By Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Mike Allred

Catwoman confronts the killer. He’s seems normal at first but turns out to be anything but normal. He is a shapeshifter. Based on the information provided, for which there are just images without narration, he was in the military and the subject of medical experiments after he was mortally wounded. The shapeshifting ability is a side effect of the experiments or at least that’s my guess. I thought he was Clayface (Matt Hagen) when he first started changing shape and maybe that’s what Brubaker and Cooke had in mind when they came up with the idea for the story but I’m pretty sure it isn’t him.

Catwoman (2002) 3

Catwoman (2002) 3
Feb 2002

Anodyne - Part 3
By Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Mike Allred

Selina continues her search for the killer. She gets some help from Dr. Thompkins and Holly. Dr. Thompkins is having a horrific dream when Catwoman knocks on her window and wakes her up. Selina hopes that Leslie can put her in touch with Oracle. She hopes that Oracle can help with the search.

Catwoman (2002) 2

Catwoman (2002) 2
Jan 2002

Anodyne - Part 2
By Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Mike Allred

Better.

Catwoman looks into the murders of the street walkers. The cops aren’t taking the string of murders. They rough up the live hookers and show very little interest in investigating the deaths of the ones they find dead. They are more of interested in stealing from them, live or dead.

Catwoman (2002) 1

Catwoman (2002) 1
Jan 2002

Anodyne - Part 1
By Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Mike Allred

Selina Kyle talks to Dr. Leslie Tompkins about bad dreams. She reflects on her past first with Dr. Tompkins, then at home, and while running across rooftops late at night. She considers wearing her old costume but ultimately decides not to. She assembles a new costume, instead. She has a rooftop encounter with Batman in her new costume but it is purely platonic. He seems concerned that she is going to return to a life of crime. She promises him nothing.

Detective Comics 762

Detective Comics 762
Oct 2001

Slam Bradley: Trail of the Catwoman - Part 4
by Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart

Slam decides to give up the case, rather than give up Selina. He goes to the mayor and lets him know. The mayor sends some of Gotham’s Finest after him. They beat the crap out of Slam. He gets in a few punches but they get him pretty good.

Love the art in this chapter. There are lots of 9-panel grids.

Detective Comics 761

Detective Comics 761
Oct 2001

Slam Bradley: Trail of the Catwoman - Part 3
by Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart

Slam Bradley continues to look for Selina Kyle. He tries interviewing billionaire, playboy Bruce Wayne but Wayne refuses to tell him anything. Slam gets another visit from a representative of the mob. He finds someone who actually saw her, a gas station attendant. He lent her a pair of scissors. He thinks she cut her hair with them but he has no idea what happened to her. One minute she was there the next she wasn’t.

Slam has an impromptu chat with Batman. I heard Kevin Conroy’s voice reading Batman’s lines when I read this scene.

He returns to his office to find Selina Kyle waiting for him.

Still excellent. Still eager to see how this story winds down.

Detective Comics 760

Detective Comics 760
Sep 2001

Slam Bradley: Trail of the Catwoman - Part 2
by Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart

Slam gets the GCPD to exhume the body of Selina Kyle after he learns that there was no death certificate issued. Slam does some more sleuthing while he waits for the reports on the body in the coffin.

Slam goes to see a reporter by the name of Spender who works for the New York Chronicle. He gets what he can from Spender on Selina and Maggie Kyle, her sister. He is approached by a gangster who knows what Slam is up to and wants to know what he’s found. Maybe approach isn’t the right word for it.

Slam reviews the file that Spender gave him and comes to the conclusion that Selina Kyle is Catwoman.

Halfway there and this story is still head and shoulders above Selina’s Big Score.

This is an 8-page backup story. There is another story in this comic book but I am reading a collected edition which only includes this part of the issue.

Detective Comics 759

Detective Comics 759
Aug 2001

Slam Bradley: Trail of the Catwoman - Part 1
by Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart

Slam Bradley is hired by the mayor of Gotham City to find the Catwoman. He visits a pawn shop where she used to fence stolen goods. The owner isn’t very cooperative. He sicks some goons on the PI.

Selina’s Big Score (4)

Selina’s Big Score
by Darwin Cooke

Book Four: Score

The heist does not go well. Everything goes wrong, well, not everything but enough. They make it on to and off of the train with the money. They get on to the boat before they discover that the gig is up. Swifty and Jeff are killed fairly quickly by LePerier. Stark and Selina fight back. Stark kills LePerier but also gets fatally injured.

Selina makes it to the shore. She finds Slam waiting for her. She shoots him when he won’t let her go. He survives what (at first) looks like a pretty serious shot to the shoulder. She buries Stark in the river. End of story.

Once again the art is nice but the scripting left me a bit cold. The chapter opens with what looks like 4 double page spreads. I read this on my iPad. I wonder how those looked in the printed edition where presumably the pages were split by the way the book is printed

On the whole I found the story to be a little disappointing. I was hoping for a little more nuance. I loved Cooke’s DC The New Frontier. I have yet to find another book that he wrote and drew that I like anywhere near as much.

Selina’s Big Score (3)

Selina’s Big Score
by Darwin Cooke

Book Three: Slam

Slam Bradley is looking for Selina Kyle whom he has figured out is Catwoman. His search leads him to Falcone’s penthouse. He gets there just in time to see Chantel die from the beating she received in the previous chapter. He deals with Falcone and his boys, the hard way. He learns enough to know that Selina is planning a heist with Swifty and Stark.

Falcone got enough information out of Chantel to know what Selina and company are planning. He called his business associates in Canada (before Slam caught up to him) and warned them. The Canadians gangsters get the drop on Swifty just as the heist is about to begin.

Slam also drops some information about Selina and Stark and how she double crossed him, while dressed as Catwoman. It’s unclear if Stark knew it was Selina but I’m guessing that if he didn’t know it at the time then he figured it out sometime since then.

Probably my favorite chapter to date. I’m not sure if that means anything or not. I’m thinking it doesn’t because it still feels like Cooke is laying it on a bit thick for my tastes. I’m not talking about the art. I'm referring to the narration and dialogue which don’t leave enough for the reader to figure out for my taste.

Selina’s Big Score (2)

Selina’s Big Score
by Darwin Cooke

Book Two: Stark

This chapter is a bit all over the place. There are a number of locations and two narrators: Stark and Selina. It is all about landing the heist after they recruit one more person.

It opens with a meeting in Miami Beach between Selina and Stark. He narrates this scene. In the middle of it there a flashback to years before in Gotham City. Back then they were a team. They were lovers and he taught her all about breaking and entering. It didn’t work out in the end. In the present Stark is ready to say “no” to the heist but she she asks so nicely that he can’t resist.

Selina returns to Gotham. She pays Swifty a visit. He tells her that someone has been looking for her, a private eye by the name of Slam Bradley. She files the information away and heads to Las Vegas for another meeting with Stark.

They recruit Jeff in Vegas. He’s much younger than Stark, probably younger than Selina. They talk a little shop before parting ways to take care of some errands. Jeff picks up some equipment that conveniently falls off the back of a truck. Selina heads to Gotham to surprise Slam. Stark visits an arms dealer in Death Valley. They rendezvous in Utah where they test the equipment that Jeff acquired. They work out the details of how to get on the train carrying the money they plan to steal and off, without stopping the train.

The chapter ends with a scene back in Gotham. Chantel is visiting Falcone. He has caught on to her thieving ways and beats her up. It is unclear if she survives the beating.

There’s a lot in this chapter. I like the art but I think I would prefer it if the visual storytelling was given a little more room to breathe. So far I don’t love the story.

Selina’s Big Score (1)

Selina's Big Score
by Darwyn Cooke

Book One: Selina

Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman) returns to Gotham City. She’s short on cash and looking to score big. She hooks up with a couple other folks who have a scheme to rob the Falcone family. Her partners in the job are Swifty, Chantel, and Stark. Swifty is a pawn broker who probably has a criminal past. Chantel is the girlfriend of Frank Falcone and the one with the inside information on the location of the money. Stark is a tough guy from Selina’s past.

So far it seems like the prototype for the Parker graphic novels  that Cooke later adapted from prose novels. The first chapter doesn’t feel quite as self-serious as those books. Hopefully the rest of the book will follow suit. For the most part I like it. I thought the moment when Selina recognizes the comment that Chantel makes was a bit too on the nose. She recognizes it as being one that she heard Stark make years before when she first met him. I’m not sure why Cooke is putting such emphasis on this comment. Maybe this is foreshadowing that Chantel (and maybe Stark, too) are going to turn on her? What kind of heist story can it be without at least one double cross?

I can’t argue with the art. It is very likable. I especially like the use of lots of small panels to set the tone and tell the story.