Back in April, I said that it looked like Ann Nocenti’s Catwoman run was coming to a close, as she brought resolution to several different storylines and brought back previous characters to see them off in a sense. Flash-forward to July and it turns out, I was right! Catwoman will indeed be getting a brand new creative team coming this October, just in time for it to start tying into Batman Eternal. Until then, we still got two more issues of Nocenti. How does her last big arc come to an end? Is it good?
Catwoman #33 (DC Comics)
Catwoman is getting all pissy after Roulette fixed the race and wants revenge. She enlists her BFFs Telsa and Gwen to help with it as well. The first thing to do is to actually find out where she is hiding. Also, time to figure out the answer to that murder case that has been building up in the background that somehow ties in and comes back to the Race of Thieves storyline. So much fun….
You ruined that perfectly good computer screen, you jerk!
Let’s not mince words here: this issue was bad. It was boring, uninteresting, and visually horrific all at once. Just wow. The plot was absolutely terrible from start to finish, contradicting itself and having the characters act like morons constantly. Catwoman’s big plan to deal with Roulette is terrible and won’t work at all due to her own incompetence (she revealed herself to Roulette and revealed her plan to her! You don’t think Roulette is going to figure out a way around that and punish you horribly?). The entire cold case storyline really ends up accomplishing very little to point where the only thing it contributed to the plot could easily be rewritten to work around it. Just a whole lot of nothing here in terms of a story.
Then there are the characters. Everyone but Roulette and Catwoman are unremarkable and barely have any real depth to them other than contrived “twists.” Roulette herself only starts having a real personality or resemblance of one now, but it ends up making her less threatening and more confusing (If she is so OCD, where was this before in the previous issues?). Catomwan herself is also terrible here. She’s completely unlikeable, mentally tortures a woman for petty revenge (how dare she rig a race for being the world’s greatest thief when you originally didn’t want to be a thief anymore at the beginning of this arc), feels inconsistent at times, and more. Catwoman has been portrayed completely horribly throughout this run and this only continues it.
Roulette needs glasses stat!
The pacing and story structure are okay, but the story jumps around a lot at points and there are some awkward transitions. The dialogue is either stilted, dry, forgettable, or makes the characters look horrible. It all really depends on who is talking at the time. The ending itself… just ends. No real proper buildup or conclusion, it just abruptly ends at on a moment that wants to sound deep but really isn’t. Just nothing here in the writing will be able to salvage this comic.
The artwork is pretty bad as well. With three different artists working on the book, it leads to a lot of inconsistencies in how the characters and the world look. Sometimes the artwork feels like it even changes styles on the same page at points. The layouts are average to awful, where scenes just flow poorly into one another with little rhyme or reason. It gets worse during the action scenes with abrupt cuts and no sense of impact in any of the moves. There are also little minor things, like when Roulette supposedly gets a bruise but it looks more like a shadow/bunch of squiggly lines. It’s just awful looking, through and through.
Oh hey, Selina still has her anime hairstyle.
Is It Good?
Catwoman #33 is awful, pure and simple. The writing has continued to degrade more to where it all culminated in a lackluster and quite poorly put together ending. Catwoman herself remained an unlikeable jerk throughout and the rest of the cast wasn’t any better. Top it all off with terrible looking artwork and you have quite possibly the worst comic DC has produced in years. It’s going to a bright and happy day once the book changes teams this October.
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