When I read Will Pfeifer was taking over Catwoman, after Ed Brubaker left, I felt all right. I think I already knew Pete Woods was doing the art and Pete Woods is great, and I had just read Pfeifer’s H-E-R-O series, which had some really good stuff in it. Then, after making the announcement, DC made us wait four issues until Pfeifer and Woods took over. In the mean time, Scott Morse wrote three issues and Andersen Gabrych wrote an issue. Both Morse and Gabrych did a great job, so good, I couldn’t figure why one of them wasn’t taking over the series.
Then something bad happened... DC released some preview pages. Beautiful Woods art, but there was all this internal narration from Catwoman, with a lot of underlines. Every sentence ended with an underline for emphasis, some sentences even had two words underlined. As a reasonable human being, I panicked.
Now, I just looked and, no, the underlines do not go away, nor does the style in which Pfeifer uses them change. But I wasn’t noticing them, really. Maybe it was a little forced, but since I already knew they were there and knew that they shouldn’t be there, I didn’t pay any attention to them and... well, I could say that the six issue-story, The One You Love, blew me away, but it didn’t. It reassured me. It soothed me. Even if the title was all wrong and put the reader in the wrong place....
Catwoman, under Ed Brubaker and the original art teams, was the best mainstream book coming out for the first twenty-four issues or so. Even after the art team changed (and now that I’ve read Six from Sirius, I know what Paul Gulacy can do some I’m really pissed), it had some good issues. Will Pfeifer’s Catwoman is completely different, except, obviously, that it’s not.
Pfeifer does not continue Brubaker’s character work, which Scott Morse did, instead he takes the situation and introduces his own flavor to it. It’s some of the same, self-referntial flavor that he mixed into H-E-R-O, only less so... Pfeifer doesn’t overdo it, just let’s the characters laugh at each other some of the time, which is important with people running around in capes. He creates a comfy series, really, really fast. By the end of the second issue, I was already happy with it, just because he’d fit so many scenes into the first couple issues.
The oddest thing about Pfeifer’s first story is that it does pick up from Brubaker’s run. It picks up something I hardly remembered. I really should have just done the underline thing the whole way through. Underlines do not work. They mean newspaper or something in Turabian citation, not emphasis. Anyway, it’s a good comic.
