The story of Catwoman’s daughter

I know, it’s Christmas today. Everyone’s full of joy and ham and football and Jesus, and then I come along to end your holiday season with this total bummer of an article today. I apologize, but we have to cover this before our big Catwoman finale on Monday and Wednesday. Plus, it’s a great story. From various pages of Catwoman #53-72, written by Will Pfeifer and drawn by David Lopez, today I’ll attempt to explain the whole Catwoman’s daughter thing.  It begins as you’d expect all pregnancies would:

Luckily, DC enacted their One Year Later event at this same time (where every comic automatically shifted one year forward) so we didn’t have to get twelve issues of a visibly pregnant Catwoman whipping bad guys or awkwardly jumping across rooftops.  The baby, named Helena, just popped into the story — and the father?  Dead.  It’s all hers.

So how in nineteen issues of comics did we get from this joy seen above, from Catwoman giving up crimefighting, devoting herself to motherhood, and becoming a role model for her infant child, to this childless, fiery, vengeful vigilante we saw last article?  Well, you know that superhero life.  It involves lots of this:

The child doesn’t die.  Don’t worry about that.  But how much longer in the series until she does? If DC would kill off poor Aquababy, they’d wipe out Catbaby faster than you could ask, “Who’s Aquababy?”  In the DC universe, our characters narrowly avoid death practically every ten to twenty pages.  And babies?  Very few of them know martial arts or other methods of defending themselves. But I want to take this moment as a “what if?”  If Catwoman and Batman could get their crap together and actually function as two people in a healthy relationship, it’s not foolish to think that canon (not even alternative universe) Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle could have a happy nuclear family.  Did you laugh as I wrote those last words?  I know.  Catwoman knows.  Batman knows everything.   But still, it’s nice to dream.

Batman even fakes Catwoman and her child’s death.  Because while I’m no expert on child-rearing, it’s better if supervillains don’t attempt to kidnap or maim the child you’re raising.  Spoiler alert: Catwoman’s not satisfied.  How could she?  It’s not as if the bad guys won’t find out about her one day.  And it turns out bad guys are really good at holding grudges.  Plus, best case scenario for the child of a superhero?  That kid also becomes a superhero, dodging gunfire and fireballs for a few years until killed off in a major event to bring pain to their more famous parent’s dramatic life.

Batman places the kid up for adoption.  Helena gets adopted.  We never hear from her again.  And thus I bum out your Christmas spirit after a night of drinking eggnog lattes and dancing around the Christmas tree (I don’t actually know what people do on Christmas). In summary, don’t have children. I think that’s the message of this arc.

Oh, and because of the DC universe reboot and de-aging of Catwoman from the (probably) mid-30s she is here to a sleeker 23 years old, this story never happened.  Except in your heart, of course.

Next time, we’ll raise your spirits with a story of Catwoman’s life ruined once more by a new thief out to claim his stake in Gotham.  Then I’ll find a story about puppies and sunshine and flowers, I promise.