Crossover events tend to make for bad comic books (with a handful of exceptions), but the latest Catwoman story, Backwards Masking, isn’t one of those exceptions. In fact, it mixes the lameness of crossover plotting with the pure evil of a corporately mandated story point. For fifty issues, through the brilliant first twenty-five and the solid subsequent twenty-five, Catwoman has been an antihero. She defends her bad neighborhood and her friends. Except, we discover in issue fifty, she wasn’t good on purpose, it was because the superheroes brainwashed her. In DC comic books, superheroes forcibly brainwash the bad guys--the superheroes doing it, oddly enough, were the ones an entire generation grew up watching Saturday mornings in the 1980s. Writer Pfeifer said in an interview the brainwash plot point came straight from the top. Comic books take the creativity hit worse than film. In film, the studio rarely interferes with good filmmakers. In comic books, guys who couldn’t get a job writing take-out menus dictate what is and is not quality drama. Currently, DC’s populated with morons at its top levels... Republican morons actually.
I like Pfeifer well enough, but Catwoman’s greatest current strength is Pete Woods on the art (this story was, however, his last). DC ran through two writers after Brubaker left, Scott Morse and Andersen Gabrych, and I can’t say Pfeifer’s particularly better than either of them. They were both damn good. But I like Pfeifer on this book... I can’t imagine anyone, however, making this story work. It forgets all of Brubaker’s work on the characters and concentrates on some vague preconceptions of the character herself. Again, since Pfeifer’s good, the story isn’t an abomination or anything, it’s just lame. Instead of giving the reader a good ending, we get a tie-in to the crossover. I have to wonder why crossovers aren’t more prevalent in network television and I think it’s because it would never occur to the people producing the programs. By and large, those producers know something about dramatic storytelling. Judging horses doesn’t make you a good FEMA director.
So, in four and a half years, Catwoman has gone from being the finest character study coming out from either of the big companies to being the finest example of what’s wrong with corporate-run comic books. Boo, hiss.
On the other hand, DC has their ace in the hole. The next issue of Catwoman will be set a year later from this one, which might give the series a necessary boost. Or it might not. It’s all on Pfeifer now and Backwards Masking is particularly discouraging.
