Will Pfeifer got a lot of slack with Catwoman. He had the impossible job of following up Ed Brubaker, the unfortunate situation of following two great fill-in writers (Scott Morse and Andersen Gabrych), and a major change (DC’s "One Year Later") relatively soon into his run. As it stands--following the first "One Year Later" arc, The Replacements--Pfeifer’s Catwoman is not an abject failure, but it’s way too close. One of the most annoying faults--Pfeifer’s love for underlining verbs in his narrative exposition--has been around since it started and, even though numerous reviews have commented on it, Pfeifer hasn’t lost it. Like usual, I forced myself to stop puzzling over them, and I can’t even remember them in the last of the five issues, which I just finished.
Besides Pfeifer’s inability to recognize when his writing is good (when the good guys are talking to each other, not themselves), he’s also made the main character unforgivably stupid. She picks an entirely obscure, self-referential alias and is shocked when the bad guys find her out. And Pfeifer’s bad guys are awful. The stupidest part of The Replacements is Pfeifer’s film references. He’s been watching a bunch of behind the scenes featurettes or something. Almost every issue there’s some setting from a movie, or some setting referencing a movie. The ‘Kurosawa’ sign is lame, but the ‘Hudsucker Industries’ one had me wanting to burn the image from my memory with a branding iron. Pfeifer’s bad guy is called the Film Freak and he has a long, idiotic monologue about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which makes no sense in the end--the idea Pfeifer’s getting at is apparently beyond his reach--and later credits the three dramatic acts to screenplays. I suppose this reference would be fine if Pfefier expected the reader to think the Film Freak was a film idiot, not just a psycho--the character references Robert McKee, who knows where the three act structure comes from, so why wouldn’t the Film Freak if he’d read McKee? There’s a mistake in an early issue regarding Detective Story, which just shows off the dilettante nature of the film references, but then it gets worse and worse.
The only aspect of Pfeifer’s writing worse than his narration, worse than his bad guys (I won’t even get into the supervillain who talks to himself for a whole issue to catch the reader up on current events), is his police dialogue. I cannot describe how awful Pfeifer’s police scenes are--but there was a show called “Night Heat” in the 1980s and it had far better dialogue. “Monk” offers a more realistic look at police officers than Pfeifer. He’s also about thirty years behind in his prison culture knowledge, which isn’t bad, just ignorant (and telling).
Catwoman also lost Pete Woods, who was on the book with Pfeifer before ‘One Year Later,’ but David Lopez does a fine enough job with the costumed parts. When he’s drawing Catwoman out of costume, it doesn’t look right and I kept missing Paul Gulacy and I never thought I’d make that statement.
I’m debating whether or not to make some comment about a litter box and I wish I didn’t have to blame it all on Pfeifer, who’s done some really good work in the past (H-E-R-O in particular), but it is all his fault. There’s nothing wrong with the story in Catwoman competent writing couldn’t make good.
