Catwoman #38 // Review
Writer Ram V pays homage to a classic contemporary Hollywood crime drama in Catwoman #38. The story is beautifully brought to the page by Home Sick Pilots artist/colorist Caspar Wijngaard. It's a fun and stylish wrap-up on Catwoman's current plot arc that finds the title character slinking off into the shadows of Gotham City, having tied up all of the loose ends that the writer had been working with since he started writing the series not too long ago. It doesn't feel terribly original, but it's fun to see Selina Kyle cast in one of the more iconic roles in crime cinema from the past couple of decades.
Selina Kyle is NOT Keyser Söze, but she's going to give Gotham City police detectives quite a little runaround as she has turned herself in. They're interrogating her...trying to get her to reveal what she knows about events tied in with the recent mega-Batman crossover event. She's going to give them answers. They're honest answers, but that doesn't mean that they're not misleading. She's going to have a good time with it. And then she's going to head off to another part of Gotham to hang out with writer Tini Howard in 2022.
Ram V's "An Unusual Suspect" is a fun little closer for the British author. His run has been a bit weird and strained in places. The pacing has occasionally been weird. And then there was that whole Catwoman annual that he wrote that didn't actually feature Catwoman...but Ram V makes up for his shortcomings with an enjoyable DC Universe homage to Christopher McQuarrie and Bryan Singer's 1995 classic. V translates The Usual Suspects into the DC universe with some cleverly inventive twists of narration. It's a pity that more of Ram V's writing hadn't been quite as playful and enjoyable as his final issue of the series.
A complex drama would be kind of difficult for any artist to bring to the page, but Wingard's style is perfectly suited to it. Wijngaard's clean-lined neon pastels put a stylish stamp on the final issue of the current arc. Kyle looks positively gorgeous as she sits in an interrogation room at GCPD. WIjngaard makes Selina look younger and more slyly innocent than she's looked for much of the rest of the current arc. She's been through hell, and now she's ready to bow out of her current position in Alleytown with a little conceptual game of cat-and-mouse with GCPD. Drama looks particularly sharp with Wijngaard's distinctive style.
Next month, Selina tumbles from Villa Hermosa with Joëlle Jones to Alleytown with Ram V and into the open arms of Tini Howard, who makes her DC Comics debut with her run on the series. She's out of Alleytown and into the business of stealing from the biggest criminals in the second-largest city in the DC Universe's U.S. It's a new writer. It's a new artist. Hell... it's even a new logo. Catwoman moves on from an intermittently satisfying current arc in January of 2022.
