Catwoman #37

You’ve seen the scenario before. The villain has our hero backed into a corner. His choices: do something awful or do something worse. Our hero chooses, seemingly staining his soul forever. Then lo and behold! He smugly reveals that he never played by the villain’s twisted rules at all and tricks his way into getting and eating his cake. Superhero comics have done this so often that there’s no longer any suspense in the choice, merely curiosity as to how the hero will get out of the situation.

But then, Selina is no hero, or whether she is up to you to decide. When Nick is caught and exposed as a leak by Roman Sionis (a.k.a. Black Mask), it’s Selina who’s put in a damning position. There isn’t much honor among criminals, but if they have such a thing as a golden rule, it’s snitches get stitches—except at the level of crime Selina’s playing here, the stitches are more like bullets to the head. With the integrity of her first major operation and thus her entire credibly on the line, it’s clear what any self-respecting crime boss would do.

The only wrinkle is Selina doesn’t actually respect herself as a crime boss. It’s a role she plays for a greater good, and only by focusing on that greater good can she drive herself to do what’s necessary in that role. Yet there’s also this enormous pressure on her to do otherwise. Mason and Sionis are certain she’ll make the mistake of trying to save Nick, and Eiko openly expects it, voicing our own expectations when she asks how Selina plans to get Nick out of this mess.

It’s hard not to see all this scrutiny comes from a business dominated by men. No one ever explicitly calls attention to the fact that she’s a woman, but Valentine makes it clear that’s what this situation is all about. The various references to powerful women in history shows a range in the way they gained and kept their power, but they all share a recognition that to defend themselves against the men that would undermine them, they must be equally as ruthless.

[Spoiler alert!] You can see where all this is leading. Selina does make the call to have Nick killed. She’s not a superhero and she’s bitterly aware of her limitations as such: “There are times you can pull a con job and get away clean. This isn’t one of them.” Antonia may understand the necessity of the choice, but it’s also one that violates the bonds between family, the only other source of sanctity in a world of crime. Eiko is appalled by the multiple violations of honor; it’s not just that Selina has besmirched the tenuously good name of Catwoman, but that she purposely allowed Nick to spill the beans and purpose chose to let him take the fall for it.

Even without considering the moral cost of what she’s done,* it’s uncertain whether Selina breaks even after it’s all over. The gun shipment is safe—for now—as is her reputation among the families—for now. But by doing away with Nick, she’s lost a loyal ally and she’s strained if not snapped the loyalty she has from Antonia. Perhaps even worse, the loss of Nick means the loss of an important check on her power. From now on, the only person who can curb the evil of her actions is Selina, and she’s not in a good position to do that. She tries; she swears she’ll make Sionis pay for what she’s forced to do (and there, my friends, is where gang warfare starts) and she pays a rather ambiguous visit to Alvarez, taunting him in public but secretly praying he’ll intervene. But the deed is done, it’s most certainly wrong, and she will always have to live with it. In some ways, that’s more courageous than if she had done the typical superhero thing and fooled her way out.

Brown’s art will always be a bit of a mixed bag for the unevenness of his lines, which distort the characters’ faces in occasionally unsightly ways. But his taste in storytelling is very good in spite of that. Rather than make a graphic moment of Nick’s death, he notes the explosion of gunfire but concentrates on the tragedy of the scene. The end result is a panel that would otherwise be a pretty vision of childhood idyll—the powder of stars in the sky, the tire swing slung over a tree bent towards a lake, the homely, homey summer cottage—but is now stained with blood from a murder of family by family. The visual effectively condemns Selina but also plays out the love between Antonia and Nick and the hopeless of the world they live in.

Some Musings:

* As well as what Batwoman will say when he finds out. Shudder.