Someone is killing off members of Selena Kyle’s old criminal team which, naturally, she isn’t going to stand for. Her journey to discover who’s behind the murders initially led her to Europe, where she spent some time confronting various leaders of the Belov crime family — her old employers — to determine if they’re the ones killing her friends. Now, in Catwoman #74, she’s continuing her hunt in Japan.
Writer Torunn Grønbekk has clearly put a lot of work into plotting out this current Catwoman arc since she took over with issue #69. There’s been a lot happening — most of which relates back to a previously unknown element of Selena’s past — and Catwoman #74 is no different. The desire to tell an ambitious, globe-trotting crime epic like this is admirable, but there’re unfortunately far too many hurdles the reader must jump for this to be a worthwhile experience for anybody except the most die-hard of Catwoman fans.
The biggest problem is that all of this plotting has come at the expense of giving Selena any kind of emotionally satisfying arc. She does, at the very least, have a concrete goal, but the reader simply won’t care about it because Selena herself doesn’t seem to care about it. The issue opens with another member of her old team dying, yet Selena gives no indication that this bothers her in the slightest.
DC
If this were a story about Selena hiding her emotions and detaching from reality to avoid being hurt, this choice would work. This simply isn’t the case, though. Selena’s lack of emotional involvement in her own story feels more like an oversight than anything else. It feels like she’s simply going through the motions. We don’t understand what any of this means to Selena on a deep, personal level, which in turn will repel readers from investing emotionally in the story.
Of course, we’ve all read enough surface-level superhero comics to know that they can have their own pulpy appeal. There’s nothing wrong with a breezy, brainless story now and again. Alas, Catwoman #74 doesn’t even provide that, as its plot is far too complicated to be enjoyed.
First, you’re going to have to keep track of the many members of the Belov crime family and their associates — members with frustratingly alliterate names like Alexandar, Anton, and Adam. All of these men look and feel so similar that it borders on parody. It’s been a problem throughout this run, and it continues to be one here. Selena’s relationship with these characters is the same every time — they’re bad men and she has to rough them up. It never gets deeper than that; never changes.
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Then, you’ll have to figure out what, exactly, Selena’s plan is. In broad strokes, she’s here to figure out who’s been killing her old team, but the specifics of what she’s actually doing in Tokyo this issue are borderline impossible to parse. There’s something about blowing up a data center and a key to a safe or maybe two keys to the same safe and luring Character A to Location B by pretending that… oh, what’s the point.
There is, of course, a logic to all of these events when analyzed with a close enough eye, but everything else about the issue resists such a close examination. There are no insights into Catwoman to be gleaned from a thorough reading; it’s all just meaningless plot.
At least the artwork is pretty nice. There’s some lovely dark and muted coloring by Patricio Depeche, and Marianna Ignazzi’s art is crisp, clean, and expressive — if a little light on detail at times. In a plot as muddy as this one, it’s a small blessing that we’re given artwork that is able to clearly convey what’s happening in the moment — even if our overall understanding of the grander narrative is lacking.
Catwoman #74 is, in a word, boring. The story fails to emotionally involve Selena in any of its convoluted plot beats and the end result is an issue that fails to make a case for its existence. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where this arc provides any kind of satisfying conclusion given how little Selena seems to care about what’s been happening, but the issue is at least nice to look at.
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