Catwoman #0

Crap. With Judd Winick having written Green Arrow Zero, I thought I had an Ann Nocenti free month. But it looks like she and Judd did a little swapping this month. Kinky.

But how the hell did switching up writers make the back-up Catwoman crew (or main crew now? Bye Guillem?) forget how to draw Selina?

Black hair? Check. Green eyes? Check. Random facial features? Check. It's Selina Kyle! Maybe.

Maybe she looks funky because she's so much younger than in the regular series, this being a Zero issue and all. Anyway, she has a job with the Mayor's Office and she's just moved up to a new position. Her one and only duty is to make sure that no guest ever shows up at a political function wearing the same dress as the mayor's wife. If they do, she has to hustle them into a back room with a huge wardrobe and redress them. She probably has one other duty which is not to steal all of the clothing. I'm not sure this job is going to work out for her.

I guess her actual other duty is to gossip since she's not even paying attention to the not stealing part.

Speaking of stealing, her coworker mentions the word and it sends Selina into a flashback where she was caught stealing a pearl necklace by some tough asshole who throws her into an alley. One of the pearls somehow detaches itself from the necklace and bounces down the alley to her where she stuffs it between her breasts. She's also lying in a pile of mannequin parts when a mysterious stranger approaches and offers her a place in the "Second Chance" program that the Mayor's Office runs to help street kids. She hisses and scratches just like any other stray cat approached in an alley would.

I know I can usually tell a bastard child by the way they're lying amidst old mannequins in filthy back alleys.

There's so much going on here I feel like I should break out the bullet points. Selina in an alley with pearls compares her to Batman's beginning. Lying in a pile of faceless mannequins reaffirms her status as a nobody and invisible. The pearl between her tits is an allusion to being titty fucked. The mysterious stranger that magically appears to offer her help shows she's strong and independent and doesn't need help from anyone. And alleys are where you tend to find stray cats. If the Batman comparison is going to continue to play out, my guess is I'll turn the page and a stray cat will wander up to Selina for her inspiration to be Catwoman.

Except the scene changes when I turn the page. Back at the office and returning to one year prior to the alley scene, Selina has convinced her coworker to use his clearance to search the "Second Chance" database for signs of her brother. Apparently after spouting off at the mystery guy, she chose to enter the program. And she claims to have a brother that did as well although I think that's just Selina trying to track down some other guy that was in the program with her. But then they stumble on a mystery!

Oh noes! The Second Chance Program should really be called Second Chance Reprogram! And wasn't that server crash convenient?!

Long before even the one year ago alley scene, Selina was living in a place called Oliver's Group Home. You don't think someone would investigate a place named so blatantly after a story about a home for orphans and runaways that are used to steal shit for the people running the place? Because, oh, look at this? The same thing is going on here! Selina and her fellow foster kids in Oliver's home are sent out to burgle places and then give up all the loot to the director. Except Selina hides a tiny diamond in her mouth and then shoves it in her teddy bear for safe keeping. After this, I'm pretty sure she's going to be kidnapped by a crazy woman and her crocodiles and need to be rescued by a stuttering male mouse and his accent heavy female mouse companion.

And then back to the Mayor's Office to the brainwashed Selina Kyle whose Second Chance Programming is beginning to fall apart on this day with all these key words and reminders bringing back her past. The man that brought her into the program has returned to speak with her.

Why would she try to scratch him? That's so odd! Like an animal or something.

Back to the flashback where he offers Selina the job with the Second Chance Program. Selina had just left a con where she failed to convince the person that she was what she was pretending to be. So now that she meets this guy on the street offering her a job to get to the top, she's going to make sure she's more convincing at pretending to be a person interested in a normal job so she can steal the place blind. Maybe.

Because that's not too suspicious. Some strange guy in a suit hanging out in alleys offering jobs in the public eye to street kids pulled directly out of alleys. Nope. No ulterior motives here!

The mystery man that pulled Selina off the street and has now taken her up to the top floor of the mayor's office building explains what happened earlier with the server crash.

That's pretty amazing technology to have the system crash because she looked at a monitor with her file on it. Seeing as how the file was being accessed on a coworker's terminal with his access and login.

Selina tells him that she saw she has a Russian name but she didn't catch what it was because I'm assuming it was in Cyrillic. The man that rescued her says he's been trying to protect her and she needs to forget she ever saw that name. But how can she forget what she's seen?

Oh. That'll work!

Selina survives the fall by crashing through an awning and then being licked by a bunch of stray cats. Later she returns to the awning which the cheap ass owners sewed up in the shape of the human hole she made instead of purchasing a new one.

Yeah, this makes sense.

This gives Selina an idea and she tears the awning apart and takes the human shaped piece to make an outfit out of it. Because that's exactly how clothing patterns work. In cartoons. Oh, and I guess in comic books!

Selina takes her new cat costume and breaks into the Second Chance Program place to recover files and computers so she can solve the mystery of her Russian self. What she finds out when she takes the computers to the news guy she tried to con (or date? I don't know) earlier is that there is no trace of Selina Kyle or the Second Chance Program. And he's a news reporter and he's never heard of the Second Chance Program. So Selina Kyle who was not Selina Kyle at the time but some Russian person was recruited by some mystery man who reprogrammed her and changed her name to Selina Kyle and tried to turn her into a completely new person. But she broke programming and looked at her files and crashed the system and had to be killed. And now none of that time exists anywhere but in Catwoman's mind. And since she's still reprogrammed, she only knows herself as Selina Kyle who now doesn't exist at all.

Catwoman #0 Rating: So Catwoman's big origin is that her origin is a mystery. Thanks, Ann Nocenti! I'm glad that's all cleared up!