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CATWOMAN'S
FEELING MEAN
GREEN ARROW HITS THE SCENE
DETECTIVE
COMICS #521
(DECEMBER
1982)
"Cat
Tale"
(Part 1 of 2)
(16 pages)
Cover
pencils - Jim Aparo
Cover inks - Jim Aparo
Story - Gerry
Conway
Art - Irv
Novick
Inks - Sal Trapani
Colours - Adrienne
Roy
Lettering - Ben Oda
Editor - Len
Wein
Second
feature - Green Arrow, "The High
Tech Highwayman!" (7 pages)
Letters page - The Batcave (1 page)
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SYNOPSIS
Whilst leaving her office
late at night Vicki Vale is attacked by an outraged
Catwoman who is still livid with jealousy because Vicki
is seeing Bruce Wayne, and she slashes away at her rival
until the scene is virtually splattered with blood...
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| Somewhere
in Gotham Selina Kyle awakes once more
from a nightmare she has had for nights -
with her as Catwoman viciously attacking
Vicki Vale. Selina decides not to give up
Bruce in real life just like that, and
then calls Wayne Manor. The absence of Bruce
Wayne, however, leads Selina to believe
that he is with Vicki, and Alfred is in
no position to tell her the truth, i.e.
that Bruce Wayne is out on duty as the
Batman.
In that
guise, Bruce Wayne has just caught up
with a gang he has been trailing to an
abandoned Gotham subway station. Evading
massive gunshot fire, the Darknight
Detective takes out the gang members one
by one and frees their victim, a young
woman taken as hostage.
Elsewhere,
Vicki Vale awakens in her bed only to
find Catwoman hovering over her,
threatening and warning her for the
second time after an initial phone call
(which, as editor Len Wein
reminds readers, happened two weeks
earlier in real time, in Batman
#354) to leave Bruce Wayne to her.
Still
shaking after Catwoman has left, Vicki
Vale nevertheless feels that these are
more like cries for help than real
threats, and decides that she must talk
to Bruce about this soon.
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| And this is
precisely what Vicki does - the next day she
meets Bruce Wayne for lunch. He is somewhat
disturbed by the Catwoman's moves but assures
Vicki that she is the one close to his heart. |
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Their
subsequent kiss in public, however, does not go
unnoticed by Catwoman, who swears that she will
fight for what is hers... to the death... (continued
in Batman
#355)
REVIEW &
ANALYSIS
Even a
long
streak of excellent stories and issues comes to
an end one day, and for writer Gerry Conway the
dip came with Detective Comics #521. The
story pitting Vicki Vale and Selina Kyle /
Catwoman against each other in a tug of war over
Bruce Wayne is both lacklustre and over the top
at the same time - which makes for a highly
unbalanced and contorted overall effect. On top
of this, the Batman scenes appear almost as
inserts, and his fight with what appears to be a
street gang rather a bit heavy on firearms feels
completely unmotivated and detached.
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| And as is so often the case,
when things start to go wrong they usually do so
on all levels. Conway might just have gotten away
with his "cat tale" if the artwork
would have pulled readers into the story.
Unfortunately, the complete opposite was the
case. |
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| Irv Novick (1916 -
2004) had produced very solid and
atmospheric runs on Batman in
the late 1960s and 1970s, but his artwork
for Detective Comics #521 looks
and feels as if drawn on a string of very
bad days. Indeed, there are so many
things that just don't sit right with the
art in this issue that probably even the
best of stories would have been let down
by it. Being the first
segment of a two part story this didn't
bode well for the upcoming conclusion in Batman
#355. But if Detective Comics
#521 had been a negative surprise for
readers (given the sustained high quality
output from Conway over a whole string of
previous issues), they would at least be
more than pleasantly surprised by the
conclusion to this "cat tale".
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| READ AT
YOUR OWN
RISK - Highly
artificial and overinflated story which never
gets off the ground, and the artwork - albeit by
a great Batman artist from the1960s/1970s -
leaves a lot to be desired. |
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| Batman truly takes a back
seat in Detective Comics #521 - not only
in his own feature, where a crazed Catwoman takes
center stage, but also on the cover, where he is
present only through a Batsignal-like symbol on a
wall in the background, whilst the limelight
belongs to the new secondary feature: the Green
Arrow. Pushing out Bat-Girl as the
regular backup feature in Detective Comics
(a role she had first assumed in issue #400 in
June 1970), Green Arrow would occupy this slot
from Detective Comics #521 (December
1982) up until Detective Comics #567
(October 1986). When the end came for Green
Arrow's run, the back-up feature itself was
dropped from the pages of Detective Comics.
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| Created by Morton Weisinger
and designed by George Papp, Green Arrow first appeared
in More Fun Comics #73 in November 1941. Always a
B list character of the DC Universe, the originally very
Batmanesque archer was famously made into a vigilante
with a social conscience by Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams
in the early 1970s when he co-starred with Green Lantern
in their shared title. |
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The Green Arrow
backup feature starts off on established
maps: Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) is a
newspaper journalist who turns into Green
Arrow when the need so arises.
"The
High Tech Highwayman" basically
involves cybercrime and as such is no
doubt a very early example of this form
of law-breaking in comic books.
Unfortunately,
as pointed out in a lengthy letter in Detective
Comics #525, writer Joey Cavalieri
and editor Len Wein got a couple of
things wrong in that department, such as
confusing and mixing up hardware and
software at times. But fair enough - that
probably wasn't detected by very many
readers back in 1982...
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TRIVIA
Detective
Comics #521 was published in three variants
for the North American market: a newsstand
edition (with barcode and price indication for
the US, UK and Canada) a direct market edition
(with no barcode), and a Canadian newsstand
edition (with barcode and 75 Canadian cents price
only).
A cover
lacking Batman is an unlikely candidate for a
foreign market reprint, and yet the Green Arrow
cover of Detective Comics #521 was used
for Super-Heróis
#18, published in February 1984 by Agência
Portuguesa de Revistas for the Portugese market
and which included both the Batman and the Green
Arrow features from Detective Comics
#521. The Batman "cat tale" was also
translated into German and published by Egmont
Ehapa in Batman Taschenbuch #21 in 1984
for the German, Swiss and Austrian market, and by
Semic in 1983 in Superserien #13 for
Norwegian readers.
The
Batman main feature has not been reprinted in a
collected edition since its original publication.
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