Catwoman #33

HOLY GOD IN HEAVEN WHEN IS ANN NOCENTI GOING TO RETIRE?!

Let's just get this over with, shall we?

Yet Another List of Ann Nocenti's Bullshit

1. Catwoman begins the issue upset with Roulette because her Race of Thieves was garbage. Also because it was fixed. And even though Catwoman should have won enough money to retire for the rest of her life and never write another shitty comic book ever again because she bet on a 100 to 1 long shot and won, Catwoman still insists on ruining Roulette's life. Why? Because she fixed a race, dammit! She held a contest and broke trust with the contestants by rigging it? It was a contest for thieves! If there's is one thing I know about thieves, there is no honor amongst them! It's like their main commandment! Thou shalt not have honor! Who is Catwoman to come around and change that?! She knew the contest wasn't going to be fair from the beginning and now she's more pissed off than she's ever been in her life because she found out it was true?! She used the fixing of the race to her advantage!

Catwoman is really pissing me off right now!

2. Catwoman ruins a computer monitor because, like a cat, she can't tell reality from images on a screen and she thinks she just defeated Question Mark Face.

3. Did any of this ever even happen?! Roulette never gained Catwoman's trust! Catwoman never thought she was going crazy! Catwoman hasn't given up any information unless Roulette's entire plan was to throw a fake Race of Thieves so that Catwoman would solve the mystery of the old dead Countess. Although why would Roulette specifically target Catwoman for that plan since Catwoman has never been known for her ability to solve cold cases up until now? And how the fuck did Alice Tesla figure all of this out simply because there were gaslights at the beginning of the race?!

Scenes from Ann Nocenti's Catwoman

Alice Tesla mentions a thing and then defines that thing. She defines it across several short, staccato sentences. Catwoman looks off into the distance and mentions the thing that Alice first mentioned but in different terms. Alice Tesla agrees and then adds a bit of information that doesn't have anything to do with anything else. Catwoman smirks. She says a thing. She says the thing a different way. She comes to a conclusion that's a half-processed idiom.

End Scene!

3. As in...the length of a National Hockey League season!? If I suddenly found myself pregnant and didn't want to cause a scandal, I think I'd take a trip that lasted shorter or longer than nine months. You think she would have waited until she was starting to show before leaving for her trip? Maybe she did but then, like a moron, stayed on an extra three or four months after giving up the baby to a strange Transylvanian Countess.

4. Selina asks Gillbrite a question which he answers by answering another question and then continues to string together sentences with no actual relation to each other.

5. Who says that? People say that? I don't think anybody says that. Also some kid is playing frisbee with a wolf. Also also Gillbrite didn't fucking unleash anything! He found some more information about an old case. I don't think it's going to threaten the Omniverse.

I know just because I've never heard a saying that it doesn't mean the saying doesn't exist! I first learned the phrase "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" when I played Infocom's Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head Or Tail Of It. Not a week later, I was in Las Vegas playing Paigow. An old man sitting next to me picks up his cards, chuckles, shows them to me, and says, "You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear!" That old guy became my best friend for the next few hours.

6. Catwoman confronts Hunt Stone about his plan to use her for whatever he used her for. I guess since he didn't know how to manipulate the World's Greatest Detective, the next best person to manipulate was the World's Greatest Detective's Fuck Buddy. Hopefully somebody will explain how the Race of Thieves became the front for getting Catwoman to solve a cold case that Hunt Stone didn't actually want solved.

7. Why are we four issues into the Race of Thieves and nobody has commented on the fact that Hunt Stone's head is on fire?

8. Luckily Catwoman and Hunt Stone have a battle in which they summarize the essential bits of the story instead of concentrating on the punching and the biting. I think it calls for another Scene!

Scenes from Ann Nocenti's Catwoman

"I know what you seek, Hunt!" mrowled Catwoman accusatorily!

"You know what a cunt sees?" questioned Hunt confusitationally.

"When you heard about the dig under the Viceroy Manor, you panicked," explained Catwoman to the readers that weren't quite sure why Hunt would care about any of this since he was just a descendant of the servant that was willed all of Viceroy's money and what did a centuries old murder have to do with any of that? Especially when Viceroy Manor was loaded with riches that the servant didn't get that the Viceroy's children and children's descendants could have claimed. It seemed like a lot of bother for nothing. The Race of Thieves was a stupid idea but it would have been better if it wasn't just the cover for some paranoid asshat that was afraid that his great grandfather would suddenly be accused of murder even though there was no evidence for it at all.

"Do you want I should explain how the whole Race of Thieves came about so that we could, um, I don't know. Tamper with evidence, I guess? Is that the best connection I have between the Race of Thieves and hiring somebody to crack the cold case and then bury the evidence that he finds so that...wait, why did I do that again?" stumbled Hunt Mason. Unless his name was something else. "Anyway, if only you had arrived moments earlier, you would have had me dead to rights. But for what, I don't know. Burning evidence that proves that the original coroner's report and investigation were true? Why would that matter? What's going on here? Where am I?"

"You were busy burning the evidence that would have exonerated, not implicated, your fine stonemason. You were the rightful heir of the Viceroy fortune all along. You had nothing to fear from the crime scene," explains away Catwoman as if the rest of the story somehow made sense and Ann Nocenti didn't just realize that it's all stupid crap.

"Oh woes me! Or something! I should have read the report before burning it! And I should have never done anything at all! Mother always said my paranoia would get the best of me! Unless she didn't ever say that and it was just the paranoia talking," fainted Hunt Thompson. "Why is my head on fire?" he finished.

End Scene!

9. So that the Gotham Police Department doesn't charge him with tampering with the evidence of a two hundred year old crime scene, Hunt Stone gives up some information about Roulette to Catwoman. As if the Gotham Police would care! And anyway, Catwoman did more tampering with evidence than Hunt Mason did! She stole love letters and tramped around the crime scene on stealthy kitty paws! All Hunt Mason did was burn some evidence reports which were sent to him by a private investigator which means they were his reports anyway!

10. I have a theory! Ann Nocenti is a multi-dimensional creature that can't exist in linear time so she's just guessing at the way stories are told and people act! Reality makes as much sense to her as her comic book plots make to us!

11. Hunt Stone tells Catwoman what Roulette does in a day. Luckily for Catwoman, Roulette is an "extreme OCD Neurotic" which means the details Stone gave Catwoman will help Catwoman take revenge on Roulette any day of the week!

12. Roulette is an odd name and fixation for somebody with extreme OCD. How do people with OCD fare with devices that give out random iterations of things?

13. Roulette's Narration Box symbol is a pair of dice. Because that makes little sense. Pure Nocenti! Even if it is the fault of the artists and/or letterers.

14. Catwoman's first act of revenge is to add ten pounds to Roulette's bench press. Maniacal!

15. Catwoman's second act of revenge is to throw a mechanical octopus in the pool that almost drowns Roulette. The purpose is to make Roulette think that she imagined whatever it was that almost drowned her in the same way that Data imagined that Octopus in Goonies. The problem with this act of revenge meant to make her question her sanity is that the art tells a different story where Roulette would have to be a fucking stupid jizzbag to not realize she actually was attacked by some mechanical contraption.

16. Roulette refers to the bench press machine as a "death trap" because she couldn't finish her last rep. Lawsuits for everyone!

17. Catwoman puts on a chauffeur's cap. The perfect disguise!

18. Catwoman ruins one of Roulette's business deals with a plan that rivals the extra weight trick and the perfect disguise! She sends a couple of thugs to Roulette's business meeting and have them say, "We're, uh, duh, uh, wit' Rolo or sometin'?" The Chinese casino owner shouts, "No deal!"

19. Finally Catwoman shows up to punch Roulette in the face and declare herself the winner of the Race of Thieves! She can haz trophy?

Well, she is an "extreme OCD neurotic." I suppose she'd be okay with that as long as every day was exactly the same.

20. At the end, Selina remembers all the other characters in the story and how she defeated them. She says of Hunter S. Mason: "Any time I want, I can put you in jail." What? Why?! I already pointed out why you can't! So he hired Roulette to run a contest. Big deal! And he hired a private investigator to investigate a two hundred year old murder and then burned the file that contained everything the private investigator learned. You broke more laws by stealing those letters, you Froot Loop Dingus!

Catwoman #33 Rating: -2 Ranking. I know I already have this comic book ranked at 52 out of 52 but it's so bad that it needs to be ranked even lower. It is now 54 out of 52! And there aren't even currently 52 books in The New 52! This book is a stinker! It's also one of my favorite to write about!