Lorendiac
10-11-2005, 08:30 PM
I often see threads begin on one forum or another with questions along these general lines:
"Have Batman and Catwoman ever dated before the last couple of years?"
"When did she first find out his secret identity?"
"Has Bruce ever proposed marriage to her?"
"Didn't I hear somewhere that they used to have a kid?"
"Didn't she used to be a prostitute?"
And so on, and so forth.
Those questions are much easier to ask than to answer. Several of them look as if they should only require a very simple, straightforward answer of "Yes" or "No." But appearances are deceiving: With all the retcons DC has done over the years, it is never that simple! : )
Any fair answer to those questions would have to start out with all sorts of nitpicking counterquestions and qualifiers, along the following lines.
"That depends. Are you asking about Pre-Crisis or Post-Crisis? If Pre-Crisis, is it the Earth-2 Batman/Catwoman romance you want to know about, or the Earth-1 version? If you're asking about the Post-Crisis continuity regarding the Pre-Crisis Earth-1 stories about their romance, and/or about her past history of prostitution, do you want to know about the Immediately Post-Crisis continuity on those subjects, or the later Post-Post-Crisis continuity on that same subjects, or the Post-Crisis-But-Probably-Out-Of-Continuity version that only exists in Jeph Loeb's own little world? And you do understand that anything and everything that you vividly remember seeing in the movie with Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer means absolutely nothing as regards the comic book continuity . . . er, don't you?"
So: Similar to my previous work on a Timeline of First Appearances for each and every Supergirl, Super-Girl, Superwoman, Power Girl, or Kara who has ever been connected with the tangled subject of "Superman continuity," Pre- or Post-Crisis, I am now trying to put together a shorter Timeline of key moments in the various Batman/Catwoman Romances over the past 65 years! I have no intention of trying to list every single issue that showed them flirting, fighting, hugging, kissing, dating, getting married, or whatever . . . but I do want to hit enough of the highlights to show you how their various romances have progressed and later been retconned to make room for the Next Batman/Catwoman Romance as a Daring New Idea! (And I'm going easy on you! I won't even mention any of the Elseworlds stories that have fooled around with the idea of a Batman/Catwoman romance!) : )
THE TIMELINE OF THE VARIOUS BATMAN/CATWOMAN ROMANCES
1940. Batman #1. First appearance of a female thief known as "The Cat," although she does not actually wear a cat-costume. She is, however, an expert in disguising herself, and is also quite flirtatious with Batman. She is detected and apprehended - but at the very end of the story, she gets away from the custody of the Dynamic Duo. Robin (Dick Grayson) indignantly accuses Batman of having deliberately given her the opportunity. Batman's quasi-denial is less than convincing. Bear in mind that for roughly the next 15 years or more, at a guess, all references to Batman and Catwoman in comics published at the time will by definition refer to the Earth-2, or Golden Age (GA) versions of those characters.
1940. Batman #2. She starts calling herself Catwoman. Over the years she will wear many different costumes, some of which have very little, if anything, in the way of a feline motif.
1950. Batman #62. Catwoman takes a nasty bump on the head and claims that it knocked some sense into her. Years earlier, she was a honest young airline stewardess, and then she took a previous head injury that apparently blanked out her previous memories of her law-abiding, ethical life and turned her into the laughing thief, The Cat (later Catwoman). Now
the subsequent blow to the head has essentially hit a "reset" button and she remembers her days as a stewardess but nothing about any subsequent criminal career as The Cat, later Catwoman. When Batman explains her own recent biography to her, she feels just terrible about it.
1954. Detective Comics #203. Catwoman reverts back to her criminal self. [NOTE: Even before Crisis, this particular development had been implicitly retconned away into oblivion by things we later learned about how the romance between Earth-2's Bruce and Selina had progressed.]
Somewhere around this time, we have:
The Transition from Earth-2 to Earth-1 Continuity in the regular monthly titles
Sometime around the mid-to-late 1950s (I think), the Golden Age versions of Batman and Robin cease to appear in the regular titles being published each month. Instead, we are now seeing the Earth-1 versions (although we only learn this later, after the 1961 story "Flash of Two Worlds" in Flash #123, which introduced the distinction between Earth-1 and Earth-2 continuity when the JLA Flash of Earth-1 came face to face with the JSA Flash of Earth-2. This story was followed by lots of other stuff in the next several years that further developed the idea and sometimes made it a bit clearer which things had happened in one or the other of the Earths instead of on both. To complicate the issue, many of the stories that had happened to Batman and Robin on Earth-2 in the Golden Age also seem to have happened, almost exactly the same way, to their younger Earth-1 counterparts and were occasionally referred to in later comics.
For instance, when Steve Englehart was doing a brief run on "Detective Comics" (with Marshall Rogers illustrating) in the 1970s, in stories collected in the TPB "Batman: Strange Apparitions," he dusted off two villains who had only previously appeared in stories way back in the 1940s - a decade which was definitely "Golden Age, Earth-2" material by anyone's standards. But Englehart wanted to revive the names of Hugo Strange and Deadshot, so he did. Apparently, therefore, Earth-1 Batman had tangled with the Earth-1 counterparts of those Golden Age characters in stories which had been remarkably identical to the events experienced by their Earth-2 equivalents in the comics of the 1940s.
In the meantime, stories published about Batman and/or Catwoman from this era until around late 1986 presumably depict the adventures of the Earth-1, Silver Age (SA), Pre-Crisis versions of those characters except when we are specifically told it's the Earth-2 versions in a particular story. And until 1979, their relationship will be much as it had been in the 1940s - Batman the good guy trying to arrest her; Catwoman the bad girl trying to pull off various crimes, but also sometimes showing a flirtatious interest in Batman.
1977. DC Super-Stars #17. First appearance of Helena Wayne, also known as the Huntress of Earth-2. Helena is the daughter of Bruce Wayne and his wife, Selina. As far as I know, this story was the one that first informed us that way back in the 1950s, the GA versions of Batman and Catwoman had finally admitted they were crazy about each other, and had gotten married.
1979. Batman #308. Selina Kyle, as herself, no costume, meets Bruce Wayne and assures him she has reformed. I don't know how she avoided going to prison (or had she in fact served time already, behind the scenes or something?). In other stories over the next several years, she will sometimes put on the costume again, but usually for laudable purposes such as helping Batman apprehend vicious criminals - or even capturing a few on her own in stories without his help.
For a while after this, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle date occasionally. She knows that he knows she used to be Catwoman (it was a matter of public record), but he probably thinks she doesn't know that he is Batman.
1982. Brave and the Bold #197. Written by Alan Brennert. Rather extravagantly titled "The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne." It is not his life story; it is actually an autobiographical account of a single case he worked which the Earth-2 Bruce Wayne worked on back in the 1950s. This Bruce Wayne describes how he finally ended up admitting he had fallen in love with the Catwoman of Earth-2, with the result that they married after she got out of prison. They apparently had roughly two decades of marital bliss before she died (and he had also already died in a previous story, not long after the framing sequence of this story is set), and they had raised one child, Helena Wayne, who became the Earth-2 Huntress (this had already been established "in continuity" in the 1970s, but Helena's superhero career was not mentioned in this story).
As a side note on a retcon: It is established in this story that Selina ultimately admitted to Batman that her double case of amnesia ("I became Catwoman because I had amnesia, and now I'm quitting because I've got amnesia about all the stunts I pulled when I was Catwoman!") had been a total sham. She had simply gotten sick and tired of wasting several years of her life being on the wrong side in a game of cops-and-robbers and decided to turn herself in and let the legal system do whatever seemed necessary so she could "rehabilitate" herself. The amnesia was a cover story that seemed like a good idea at the time, or words to that effect. (Batman, for his part, had evidently suspected as much all along, but had decided that if she was willing to give up a life of crime and throw herself on the mercy of the court and take whatever a judge said she had coming, then Batman would be a gentleman and not further humiliate her by publicly calling her a liar about the whole "amnesia" defense.)
"Have Batman and Catwoman ever dated before the last couple of years?"
"When did she first find out his secret identity?"
"Has Bruce ever proposed marriage to her?"
"Didn't I hear somewhere that they used to have a kid?"
"Didn't she used to be a prostitute?"
And so on, and so forth.
Those questions are much easier to ask than to answer. Several of them look as if they should only require a very simple, straightforward answer of "Yes" or "No." But appearances are deceiving: With all the retcons DC has done over the years, it is never that simple! : )
Any fair answer to those questions would have to start out with all sorts of nitpicking counterquestions and qualifiers, along the following lines.
"That depends. Are you asking about Pre-Crisis or Post-Crisis? If Pre-Crisis, is it the Earth-2 Batman/Catwoman romance you want to know about, or the Earth-1 version? If you're asking about the Post-Crisis continuity regarding the Pre-Crisis Earth-1 stories about their romance, and/or about her past history of prostitution, do you want to know about the Immediately Post-Crisis continuity on those subjects, or the later Post-Post-Crisis continuity on that same subjects, or the Post-Crisis-But-Probably-Out-Of-Continuity version that only exists in Jeph Loeb's own little world? And you do understand that anything and everything that you vividly remember seeing in the movie with Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer means absolutely nothing as regards the comic book continuity . . . er, don't you?"
So: Similar to my previous work on a Timeline of First Appearances for each and every Supergirl, Super-Girl, Superwoman, Power Girl, or Kara who has ever been connected with the tangled subject of "Superman continuity," Pre- or Post-Crisis, I am now trying to put together a shorter Timeline of key moments in the various Batman/Catwoman Romances over the past 65 years! I have no intention of trying to list every single issue that showed them flirting, fighting, hugging, kissing, dating, getting married, or whatever . . . but I do want to hit enough of the highlights to show you how their various romances have progressed and later been retconned to make room for the Next Batman/Catwoman Romance as a Daring New Idea! (And I'm going easy on you! I won't even mention any of the Elseworlds stories that have fooled around with the idea of a Batman/Catwoman romance!) : )
THE TIMELINE OF THE VARIOUS BATMAN/CATWOMAN ROMANCES
1940. Batman #1. First appearance of a female thief known as "The Cat," although she does not actually wear a cat-costume. She is, however, an expert in disguising herself, and is also quite flirtatious with Batman. She is detected and apprehended - but at the very end of the story, she gets away from the custody of the Dynamic Duo. Robin (Dick Grayson) indignantly accuses Batman of having deliberately given her the opportunity. Batman's quasi-denial is less than convincing. Bear in mind that for roughly the next 15 years or more, at a guess, all references to Batman and Catwoman in comics published at the time will by definition refer to the Earth-2, or Golden Age (GA) versions of those characters.
1940. Batman #2. She starts calling herself Catwoman. Over the years she will wear many different costumes, some of which have very little, if anything, in the way of a feline motif.
1950. Batman #62. Catwoman takes a nasty bump on the head and claims that it knocked some sense into her. Years earlier, she was a honest young airline stewardess, and then she took a previous head injury that apparently blanked out her previous memories of her law-abiding, ethical life and turned her into the laughing thief, The Cat (later Catwoman). Now
the subsequent blow to the head has essentially hit a "reset" button and she remembers her days as a stewardess but nothing about any subsequent criminal career as The Cat, later Catwoman. When Batman explains her own recent biography to her, she feels just terrible about it.
1954. Detective Comics #203. Catwoman reverts back to her criminal self. [NOTE: Even before Crisis, this particular development had been implicitly retconned away into oblivion by things we later learned about how the romance between Earth-2's Bruce and Selina had progressed.]
Somewhere around this time, we have:
The Transition from Earth-2 to Earth-1 Continuity in the regular monthly titles
Sometime around the mid-to-late 1950s (I think), the Golden Age versions of Batman and Robin cease to appear in the regular titles being published each month. Instead, we are now seeing the Earth-1 versions (although we only learn this later, after the 1961 story "Flash of Two Worlds" in Flash #123, which introduced the distinction between Earth-1 and Earth-2 continuity when the JLA Flash of Earth-1 came face to face with the JSA Flash of Earth-2. This story was followed by lots of other stuff in the next several years that further developed the idea and sometimes made it a bit clearer which things had happened in one or the other of the Earths instead of on both. To complicate the issue, many of the stories that had happened to Batman and Robin on Earth-2 in the Golden Age also seem to have happened, almost exactly the same way, to their younger Earth-1 counterparts and were occasionally referred to in later comics.
For instance, when Steve Englehart was doing a brief run on "Detective Comics" (with Marshall Rogers illustrating) in the 1970s, in stories collected in the TPB "Batman: Strange Apparitions," he dusted off two villains who had only previously appeared in stories way back in the 1940s - a decade which was definitely "Golden Age, Earth-2" material by anyone's standards. But Englehart wanted to revive the names of Hugo Strange and Deadshot, so he did. Apparently, therefore, Earth-1 Batman had tangled with the Earth-1 counterparts of those Golden Age characters in stories which had been remarkably identical to the events experienced by their Earth-2 equivalents in the comics of the 1940s.
In the meantime, stories published about Batman and/or Catwoman from this era until around late 1986 presumably depict the adventures of the Earth-1, Silver Age (SA), Pre-Crisis versions of those characters except when we are specifically told it's the Earth-2 versions in a particular story. And until 1979, their relationship will be much as it had been in the 1940s - Batman the good guy trying to arrest her; Catwoman the bad girl trying to pull off various crimes, but also sometimes showing a flirtatious interest in Batman.
1977. DC Super-Stars #17. First appearance of Helena Wayne, also known as the Huntress of Earth-2. Helena is the daughter of Bruce Wayne and his wife, Selina. As far as I know, this story was the one that first informed us that way back in the 1950s, the GA versions of Batman and Catwoman had finally admitted they were crazy about each other, and had gotten married.
1979. Batman #308. Selina Kyle, as herself, no costume, meets Bruce Wayne and assures him she has reformed. I don't know how she avoided going to prison (or had she in fact served time already, behind the scenes or something?). In other stories over the next several years, she will sometimes put on the costume again, but usually for laudable purposes such as helping Batman apprehend vicious criminals - or even capturing a few on her own in stories without his help.
For a while after this, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle date occasionally. She knows that he knows she used to be Catwoman (it was a matter of public record), but he probably thinks she doesn't know that he is Batman.
1982. Brave and the Bold #197. Written by Alan Brennert. Rather extravagantly titled "The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne." It is not his life story; it is actually an autobiographical account of a single case he worked which the Earth-2 Bruce Wayne worked on back in the 1950s. This Bruce Wayne describes how he finally ended up admitting he had fallen in love with the Catwoman of Earth-2, with the result that they married after she got out of prison. They apparently had roughly two decades of marital bliss before she died (and he had also already died in a previous story, not long after the framing sequence of this story is set), and they had raised one child, Helena Wayne, who became the Earth-2 Huntress (this had already been established "in continuity" in the 1970s, but Helena's superhero career was not mentioned in this story).
As a side note on a retcon: It is established in this story that Selina ultimately admitted to Batman that her double case of amnesia ("I became Catwoman because I had amnesia, and now I'm quitting because I've got amnesia about all the stunts I pulled when I was Catwoman!") had been a total sham. She had simply gotten sick and tired of wasting several years of her life being on the wrong side in a game of cops-and-robbers and decided to turn herself in and let the legal system do whatever seemed necessary so she could "rehabilitate" herself. The amnesia was a cover story that seemed like a good idea at the time, or words to that effect. (Batman, for his part, had evidently suspected as much all along, but had decided that if she was willing to give up a life of crime and throw herself on the mercy of the court and take whatever a judge said she had coming, then Batman would be a gentleman and not further humiliate her by publicly calling her a liar about the whole "amnesia" defense.)