[Note for the Second Draft: Just over a year ago, I wrote and posted the First Draft of this. Now I'm offering the Second, with some of the old stuff expanded and revised, as well as some new entries at the bottom of the Timeline to try to outline some recent changes in Selina's life. Also, many of the stories on this Timeline have been reprinted in one TPB or another over the years, and I've added comments on which TPBs those would be in particular cases, in order to make it easier for you to track down copies if you're really interested.]
On one forum or another, I often see people asking questions such as the following:
"Have Batman and Catwoman ever dated before the last couple of years?"
"When did she first learn his secret identity?"
"Has Bruce ever proposed marriage to her?"
"Didn't I hear somewhere that they used to have a kid?"
"Didn't she used to be a prostitute?"
And so on, and so forth.
Those questions are much easier to ask than to answer. Several of them look as if they should only require a very simple, straightforward answer such as "Yes" or "No" or "it all began in such-and-such an issue." But appearances are deceiving: With all the retcons DC has done over the years, it is never that simple!
Any fair answer to those questions would have to start out with all sorts of nitpicking counterquestions and qualifiers, along the following lines.
"That depends. Are you asking about Pre-Crisis or Post-Crisis? If Pre-Crisis, is it the Earth-2 Batman/Catwoman romance you want to know about, or the Earth-1 version? If you're asking about the Post-Crisis continuity, then do you want to know about the Immediately Post-Crisis continuity on such subjects as a possible history of prostitution and whether or not Bruce and Selina's Pre-Crisis romantic moments were still in canon, or would you rather skip ahead to hearing about the later Post-Post-Crisis continuity on those same subjects, or the Post-Crisis-But-Probably-Out-Of-Continuity version that contradicted all previous material and probably only happened in Jeph Loeb's own little world? And you do understand that anything and everything that you vividly remember seeing in the movie with Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer means absolutely nothing as regards the comic book continuity . . . er, don't you?"
So: in keeping with my habit of trying to organize a complicated mess into a Timeline that shows crucial stories arranged by publication dates, I offer this Timeline of key moments in the various Batman/Catwoman Romances since they first met 66 years ago! I have no intention of trying to list every single issue that showed them flirting, fighting, hugging, kissing, or whatever . . . but I do want to hit enough of the highlights to show you how their various romances have progressed, sometimes being retconned to make room for the next one! (And I'm going easy on you! I won't even mention any of the Elseworlds stories that have fooled around with the idea of a Batman/Catwoman romance!)
THE TIMELINE OF THE VARIOUS BATMAN/CATWOMAN ROMANCES
1940. Batman #1. Written by Bill Finger. (Reprinted in the TPB "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, Volume 2.")
First appearance of a female thief known as "The Cat," although she does not actually wear a cat-costume. She is, however, an expert in disguising herself, and is also quite flirtatious with Batman. She is detected and apprehended - but at the very end of the story, she gets away from the custody of the Dynamic Duo. Robin (Dick Grayson) indignantly accuses Batman of having deliberately given her the opportunity. Batman's quasi-denial is less than convincing. Bear in mind that for roughly the next 15 years or more, at a guess, all references to Batman and Catwoman in comics published at the time will by definition refer to the Earth-2, or Golden Age (GA) versions of those characters.
1940. Batman #2. Written by Bill Finger.
She's back! Now she starts calling herself the Cat-Woman. (The hyphen later vanished, as did the hyphen in "The Bat-Man" that was present in the earliest days of his career.) Over the years she will wear many different costumes, some of which have very little, if anything, in the way of a feline motif.
1950. Batman #62. Written by Bill Finger.
Catwoman takes a nasty bump on the head and claims that it knocked some sense into her. Years earlier, she was a honest young airline stewardess, and then she took a previous head injury that apparently blanked out her previous memories of her law-abiding, ethical life and turned her into the laughing thief, The Cat (later Catwoman). Now the subsequent blow to the head has essentially hit a "reset" button and she remembers her days as a stewardess but nothing about any subsequent criminal career as The Cat, later Catwoman. When Batman explains her own recent biography to her, she feels just terrible about it.
1954. Detective Comics #203. Written by Edmond Hamilton.
Catwoman reverts back to her criminal self. [NOTE: Even before Crisis, this particular development had been implicitly retconned away into oblivion by things we later learned about how the romance between Earth-2's Bruce and Selina had progressed.]
Somewhere around this time, we have:
The Transition from Earth-2 to Earth-1 Continuity in the regular monthly titles
Sometime around the mid-to-late 1950s (I think), the Golden Age versions of Batman and Robin cease to appear in the regular titles being published each month. Instead, we are now seeing the Earth-1 versions (although we only learn this later, after the 1961 story "Flash of Two Worlds" in Flash #123, which introduced the distinction between Earth-1 and Earth-2 continuity when the JLA Flash of Earth-1 came face to face with the JSA Flash of Earth-2. This story was followed by lots of other stuff in the next several years that further developed the idea and sometimes made it a bit clearer which things had happened in one or the other of the Earths instead of on both. To complicate the issue, many of the stories that had happened to Batman and Robin on Earth-2 in the Golden Age also seem to have happened, almost exactly the same way, to their younger Earth-1 counterparts and were occasionally referred to in later comics.
For instance, when Steve Englehart was doing a brief run on "Detective Comics" (with Marshall Rogers illustrating) in the 1970s, in stories collected in the TPB "Batman: Strange Apparitions," he dusted off two villains who had only previously appeared in stories way back in the 1940s - a decade which was definitely "Golden Age, Earth-2" material by anyone's standards. But Englehart wanted to revive the names of Hugo Strange and Deadshot, so he did. Apparently, therefore, Earth-1 Batman had tangled with the Earth-1 counterparts of those Golden Age characters in stories which had been remarkably identical to the events experienced by their Earth-2 equivalents in the comics of the 1940s.
In the meantime, stories published about Batman and/or Catwoman from this era until around late 1986 presumably depict the adventures of the Earth-1, Silver Age (SA), Pre-Crisis versions of those characters except when we are specifically told it's the Earth-2 versions in a particular story. And until 1979, their relationship will be much as it had been in the 1940s - Batman the good guy trying to arrest her; Catwoman the bad girl trying to pull off various crimes, but also sometimes showing a flirtatious interest in Batman.
1977. DC Super-Stars #17. Written by Paul Levitz. (Scheduled to be reprinted soon in the TPB "Huntress: The Darknight Daughter," release date December 6, 2006, according to Amazon.com.)
First appearance of Helena Wayne, also known as the Huntress of Earth-2. Helena is the daughter of Bruce Wayne and his wife, Selina. As far as I know, this story was the one that first informed us that way back in the 1950s, the GA versions of Batman and Catwoman had finally admitted they were crazy about each other, and had gotten married. Unfortunately, this is also the story that establishes that the Earth-2 Selina died.
1979. Adventure Comics #462. Written by Paul Levitz.
Bruce Wayne, the Golden Age/Earth-2 "original version" of Batman, dies in the line of duty.
1979. Batman #308. Written by Len Wein.
Selina Kyle, as herself, no costume, meets Bruce Wayne and assures him she has reformed. I don't know how she avoided going to prison (or had she in fact served time already, behind the scenes or something?). In other stories over the next several years, she will sometimes put on the costume again, but usually for laudable purposes such as helping Batman apprehend vicious criminals - or even capturing a few on her own in stories without his help.
For a while after this, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle date occasionally. She knows that he knows she used to be Catwoman (it was a matter of public record), but he probably thinks she doesn't know that he is Batman.
1982. Brave and the Bold #197. Written by Alan Brennert. (Reprinted in the TPB "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told.")
This story is rather extravagantly titled "The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne." Set in the Earth-2 universe. It is not supposed to be a complete life story; it is merely an autobiographical account of a single case which the Earth-2 Batman worked on back in the 1950s. Narrated by the hero; he describes how he finally ended up admitting he had fallen in love with the Catwoman of Earth-2, with the result that they married after she got out of prison. They apparently had roughly two decades of marital bliss before she died (and he had also already died in a previous story, not long after the framing sequence of this story is set), and they had raised one child, Helena Wayne, who became the Earth-2 Huntress (this had already been established "in continuity" in the 1970s, but Helena's superhero career was never mentioned in this story).
As a side note on a retcon: It is established in this story that Selina ultimately admitted to Batman that her double case of amnesia ("I became Catwoman because I had amnesia, and now I'm quitting because I've got amnesia about all the stunts I pulled when I was Catwoman!") had been a total sham. She had simply gotten sick and tired of wasting several years of her life being on the wrong side in a game of cops-and-robbers and decided to turn herself in and let the legal system do whatever seemed necessary so she could "rehabilitate" herself. The amnesia was a cover story that seemed like a good idea at the time, or words to that effect. (Batman, for his part, had evidently suspected as much all along, but had decided that if she was willing to give up a life of crime and throw herself on the mercy of the court and take whatever a judge said she had coming, then Batman would be a gentleman and not further humiliate her by publicly calling her a liar about the whole "amnesia" defense.)
1983. Batman #355. Written by Gerry Conway. (Reprinted in the TPB "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, Volume 2.")
Catwoman has temporarily gone a bit insane because (as established in one or two previous stories) her relationship with Bruce had broken up some time earlier, but recently she came back to Gotham thinking of renewing it - and found he was dating Vicki Vale nowadays. Catwoman ends up fighting Batman and saying she hates him, but after stunning him with a knee to the jaw and pondering a fatal attack on the throat, she blinks and says in horror, Bruce . . . I almost killed you. I was that close.
Batman responds manfully, Not so close. Youve got a strong knee but Ive got a stronger jaw.
Then they talk a bit more and he suggests this has been a catharsis for her. They end up hugging each other as he apologizes for past mistakes, but its not a particularly romantic hug; the narrative caption makes it clear that theyre just saying goodbye.
Comments in a later letter column in the "Batman" title, reacting to this story, told me that this was the first time "in continuity" that the Earth-1 Catwoman had ever explicitly demonstrated that she knew darn well who Batman really was under that mask. There had never been any previous scene onstage, in any comic set on Earth-1, where they had ever discussed it, not even after she reformed and their civilian identities started dating -- so apparently she had just figured it out on her own, somewhere along the line. I don't believe we ever found out just how long she had known.
1983. Detective Comics #526. Written by Gerry Conway.
The 500th consecutive appearance of Batman in the "Detective Comics" title since his debut in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Many of his "classic" enemies (and also some deservedly obscure ones!) get involved one way or another. The story begins with a scene where the Joker has invited all sorts of old Batman villains to come to a deserted theater for a strategy conference. Joker apparently was way behind the times regarding Catwoman's current attitude toward the law (and toward Batman particularly); he had invited her too. She sneaks in, eavesdrops on the rest of them long enough to get the gist - they'll gang up on Batman and hopefully kill him - and then quietly slides out to go to the Batcave and warn him. Talia, daughter of Ra's al Ghul, also received an invitation and also leaves in a hurry when she sees which way the wind is blowing. Selina and Talia both end up fighting as Bruce's allies throughout the remainder of the story, and then Selina Kyle basically vanishes into comic book limbo for awhile.
1985. Detective Comics #557. Written by Doug Moench.
Batman is hovering by Selinas hospital bed, where she is bandaged and unconscious after being struck by lightning in a previous story. After she wakes up, he claims hes finally realized how in love with her he is. Hes also realized (he says) that he didnt really love Nocturna at all. (I am not going to recap the history of the turbulent love triangle of Nocturna, Batman, and the Thief of Night for you. It would be a very long story! Just take it for granted that Batman felt fascinated by Nocturna, despite the fact that he first met her when she was an unabashed thief, and even at this point she wasnt nearly as reformed as Catwoman sincerely was.)
Selina seems to barely have the strength to talk, but she expresses skepticism, saying, You loved me when I was dangerous, Batman . . . and you think you love me now . . . only because you know its wrong to love someone still as dangerous as Nocturna.
Despite which, later on they started dating again for awhile. (Not in this issue, though.)
1985. Crisis on Infinite Earths #12. Written by Marv Wolfman. (Collected in the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" TPB.)
Helena Wayne, the Huntress, daughter of the Earth-2 versions of Bruce and Selina, dies in battle. (At the same time as the Earth-2 Robin and a young hero named Kole, who had just recently become associated with the New Teen Titans of Earth-1.)
After the Crisis winds down, the Earth-2 versions of the Batman Family characters no longer exist and never did exist in the revised history of the Post-Crisis Earth of the DCU. Although at first a bunch of the heroes who had participated in these events were supposed to have the option of remembering things about the Pre-Crisis Multiverse that the run-of-the-mill citizens of the DCU didn't (but that idea, too, eventually faded away into limbo).
This erasure naturally includes the Golden Age Batman (who was already dead), the Golden Age Catwoman (who was already dead), and their daughter, the Huntress of the late 70s and early 80s.
However: not until late 1986 do the regular Batman titles get severely affected by any fallout from "Crisis on Infinite Earths," apparently because someone decided it would be a nice gesture to let Doug Moench finish a long run on both "Batman" and "Detective Comics" with a grand finale in the nice round number of "Batman #400," around late 1986, after he had been the sole writer on both titles for about three and a half years. (Mathematically, if he had written exactly the same stories as consecutive monthly installments of a single series, it would have been a very respectable seven-year run.) Toward the end of Moench's run, he had Batman and Catwoman getting together again - with her helping out in his crimefighting endeavors, since she was still reformed at the time - after she had previously spent a few years largely out of sight and out of mind in the Bat-titles.
1986. Detective Comics #'s 569-570. Written by Mike W. Barr.
In this two-part story, the Joker somehow persuades Dr. Moon to use brain-altering devices to "restore" Catwoman to her previous unscrupulous criminal self. Batman is unable to save her from that fate, and she leaves in a hurry while he is pleading with her to come back and let him help her recover her own, more law-abiding, modern memories and personality.
Best guess on my part: This story was written as a "bridge" to move the long-reformed, in-love-with-Bruce Catwoman -- as she had been portrayed in his titles, off and on over the last several years -- over into a grimmer-and-grittier "unrepentant Bad Girl" mode for the Post-Crisis era, but without doing anything so awkward as totally "rebooting" her by throwing away all of the old Catwoman continuity from stories set on the Pre-Crisis Earth-1. What I once called a "Reverse-Change" in my discussion of all the different types of Retcons. In the Reverse-Change, you don't actually "erase" an old story or set of stories that made changes in a character's lifestyle . . . you just push all the pawns on the chessboard back more-or-less to where everything was before, as if those "Changes" that had seemed so "Significant and Permanent" at the time they happened were really just a very shallow and temporary thing that made absolutely no lasting impact on the key character's lifestyle in the long run. New fans coming along may never know that those previous "changes" had ever happened.
I don't know if Barr came up with the idea for this Reverse-Change story on his own, and then sold it to an editor, or if an editor decided it was time to find a way to "turn back the clock" on Catwoman and shove her right back into her classic "shameless thief who doesn't date Bruce Wayne" frame of mind and ordered Barr to find a way to make it semi-plausible that this huge psychological shift had happened in the proverbial blink of an eye. Either way, however, this seems to have become the Post-Crisis version of the Batman/Catwoman relationship for awhile. "Sure, they used to date seriously, just as longtime fans remember from the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s in the Pre-Crisis, Earth-1 stories - but it doesn't matter anymore! Ancient history! She's reverted back to her criminal lifestyle!" However, eventually there must have been another big shift in editorial policy, as we shall see later on.
On one forum or another, I often see people asking questions such as the following:
"Have Batman and Catwoman ever dated before the last couple of years?"
"When did she first learn his secret identity?"
"Has Bruce ever proposed marriage to her?"
"Didn't I hear somewhere that they used to have a kid?"
"Didn't she used to be a prostitute?"
And so on, and so forth.
Those questions are much easier to ask than to answer. Several of them look as if they should only require a very simple, straightforward answer such as "Yes" or "No" or "it all began in such-and-such an issue." But appearances are deceiving: With all the retcons DC has done over the years, it is never that simple!
Any fair answer to those questions would have to start out with all sorts of nitpicking counterquestions and qualifiers, along the following lines.
"That depends. Are you asking about Pre-Crisis or Post-Crisis? If Pre-Crisis, is it the Earth-2 Batman/Catwoman romance you want to know about, or the Earth-1 version? If you're asking about the Post-Crisis continuity, then do you want to know about the Immediately Post-Crisis continuity on such subjects as a possible history of prostitution and whether or not Bruce and Selina's Pre-Crisis romantic moments were still in canon, or would you rather skip ahead to hearing about the later Post-Post-Crisis continuity on those same subjects, or the Post-Crisis-But-Probably-Out-Of-Continuity version that contradicted all previous material and probably only happened in Jeph Loeb's own little world? And you do understand that anything and everything that you vividly remember seeing in the movie with Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer means absolutely nothing as regards the comic book continuity . . . er, don't you?"
So: in keeping with my habit of trying to organize a complicated mess into a Timeline that shows crucial stories arranged by publication dates, I offer this Timeline of key moments in the various Batman/Catwoman Romances since they first met 66 years ago! I have no intention of trying to list every single issue that showed them flirting, fighting, hugging, kissing, or whatever . . . but I do want to hit enough of the highlights to show you how their various romances have progressed, sometimes being retconned to make room for the next one! (And I'm going easy on you! I won't even mention any of the Elseworlds stories that have fooled around with the idea of a Batman/Catwoman romance!)
THE TIMELINE OF THE VARIOUS BATMAN/CATWOMAN ROMANCES
1940. Batman #1. Written by Bill Finger. (Reprinted in the TPB "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, Volume 2.")
First appearance of a female thief known as "The Cat," although she does not actually wear a cat-costume. She is, however, an expert in disguising herself, and is also quite flirtatious with Batman. She is detected and apprehended - but at the very end of the story, she gets away from the custody of the Dynamic Duo. Robin (Dick Grayson) indignantly accuses Batman of having deliberately given her the opportunity. Batman's quasi-denial is less than convincing. Bear in mind that for roughly the next 15 years or more, at a guess, all references to Batman and Catwoman in comics published at the time will by definition refer to the Earth-2, or Golden Age (GA) versions of those characters.
1940. Batman #2. Written by Bill Finger.
She's back! Now she starts calling herself the Cat-Woman. (The hyphen later vanished, as did the hyphen in "The Bat-Man" that was present in the earliest days of his career.) Over the years she will wear many different costumes, some of which have very little, if anything, in the way of a feline motif.
1950. Batman #62. Written by Bill Finger.
Catwoman takes a nasty bump on the head and claims that it knocked some sense into her. Years earlier, she was a honest young airline stewardess, and then she took a previous head injury that apparently blanked out her previous memories of her law-abiding, ethical life and turned her into the laughing thief, The Cat (later Catwoman). Now the subsequent blow to the head has essentially hit a "reset" button and she remembers her days as a stewardess but nothing about any subsequent criminal career as The Cat, later Catwoman. When Batman explains her own recent biography to her, she feels just terrible about it.
1954. Detective Comics #203. Written by Edmond Hamilton.
Catwoman reverts back to her criminal self. [NOTE: Even before Crisis, this particular development had been implicitly retconned away into oblivion by things we later learned about how the romance between Earth-2's Bruce and Selina had progressed.]
Somewhere around this time, we have:
The Transition from Earth-2 to Earth-1 Continuity in the regular monthly titles
Sometime around the mid-to-late 1950s (I think), the Golden Age versions of Batman and Robin cease to appear in the regular titles being published each month. Instead, we are now seeing the Earth-1 versions (although we only learn this later, after the 1961 story "Flash of Two Worlds" in Flash #123, which introduced the distinction between Earth-1 and Earth-2 continuity when the JLA Flash of Earth-1 came face to face with the JSA Flash of Earth-2. This story was followed by lots of other stuff in the next several years that further developed the idea and sometimes made it a bit clearer which things had happened in one or the other of the Earths instead of on both. To complicate the issue, many of the stories that had happened to Batman and Robin on Earth-2 in the Golden Age also seem to have happened, almost exactly the same way, to their younger Earth-1 counterparts and were occasionally referred to in later comics.
For instance, when Steve Englehart was doing a brief run on "Detective Comics" (with Marshall Rogers illustrating) in the 1970s, in stories collected in the TPB "Batman: Strange Apparitions," he dusted off two villains who had only previously appeared in stories way back in the 1940s - a decade which was definitely "Golden Age, Earth-2" material by anyone's standards. But Englehart wanted to revive the names of Hugo Strange and Deadshot, so he did. Apparently, therefore, Earth-1 Batman had tangled with the Earth-1 counterparts of those Golden Age characters in stories which had been remarkably identical to the events experienced by their Earth-2 equivalents in the comics of the 1940s.
In the meantime, stories published about Batman and/or Catwoman from this era until around late 1986 presumably depict the adventures of the Earth-1, Silver Age (SA), Pre-Crisis versions of those characters except when we are specifically told it's the Earth-2 versions in a particular story. And until 1979, their relationship will be much as it had been in the 1940s - Batman the good guy trying to arrest her; Catwoman the bad girl trying to pull off various crimes, but also sometimes showing a flirtatious interest in Batman.
1977. DC Super-Stars #17. Written by Paul Levitz. (Scheduled to be reprinted soon in the TPB "Huntress: The Darknight Daughter," release date December 6, 2006, according to Amazon.com.)
First appearance of Helena Wayne, also known as the Huntress of Earth-2. Helena is the daughter of Bruce Wayne and his wife, Selina. As far as I know, this story was the one that first informed us that way back in the 1950s, the GA versions of Batman and Catwoman had finally admitted they were crazy about each other, and had gotten married. Unfortunately, this is also the story that establishes that the Earth-2 Selina died.
1979. Adventure Comics #462. Written by Paul Levitz.
Bruce Wayne, the Golden Age/Earth-2 "original version" of Batman, dies in the line of duty.
1979. Batman #308. Written by Len Wein.
Selina Kyle, as herself, no costume, meets Bruce Wayne and assures him she has reformed. I don't know how she avoided going to prison (or had she in fact served time already, behind the scenes or something?). In other stories over the next several years, she will sometimes put on the costume again, but usually for laudable purposes such as helping Batman apprehend vicious criminals - or even capturing a few on her own in stories without his help.
For a while after this, Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle date occasionally. She knows that he knows she used to be Catwoman (it was a matter of public record), but he probably thinks she doesn't know that he is Batman.
1982. Brave and the Bold #197. Written by Alan Brennert. (Reprinted in the TPB "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told.")
This story is rather extravagantly titled "The Autobiography of Bruce Wayne." Set in the Earth-2 universe. It is not supposed to be a complete life story; it is merely an autobiographical account of a single case which the Earth-2 Batman worked on back in the 1950s. Narrated by the hero; he describes how he finally ended up admitting he had fallen in love with the Catwoman of Earth-2, with the result that they married after she got out of prison. They apparently had roughly two decades of marital bliss before she died (and he had also already died in a previous story, not long after the framing sequence of this story is set), and they had raised one child, Helena Wayne, who became the Earth-2 Huntress (this had already been established "in continuity" in the 1970s, but Helena's superhero career was never mentioned in this story).
As a side note on a retcon: It is established in this story that Selina ultimately admitted to Batman that her double case of amnesia ("I became Catwoman because I had amnesia, and now I'm quitting because I've got amnesia about all the stunts I pulled when I was Catwoman!") had been a total sham. She had simply gotten sick and tired of wasting several years of her life being on the wrong side in a game of cops-and-robbers and decided to turn herself in and let the legal system do whatever seemed necessary so she could "rehabilitate" herself. The amnesia was a cover story that seemed like a good idea at the time, or words to that effect. (Batman, for his part, had evidently suspected as much all along, but had decided that if she was willing to give up a life of crime and throw herself on the mercy of the court and take whatever a judge said she had coming, then Batman would be a gentleman and not further humiliate her by publicly calling her a liar about the whole "amnesia" defense.)
1983. Batman #355. Written by Gerry Conway. (Reprinted in the TPB "The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told, Volume 2.")
Catwoman has temporarily gone a bit insane because (as established in one or two previous stories) her relationship with Bruce had broken up some time earlier, but recently she came back to Gotham thinking of renewing it - and found he was dating Vicki Vale nowadays. Catwoman ends up fighting Batman and saying she hates him, but after stunning him with a knee to the jaw and pondering a fatal attack on the throat, she blinks and says in horror, Bruce . . . I almost killed you. I was that close.
Batman responds manfully, Not so close. Youve got a strong knee but Ive got a stronger jaw.
Then they talk a bit more and he suggests this has been a catharsis for her. They end up hugging each other as he apologizes for past mistakes, but its not a particularly romantic hug; the narrative caption makes it clear that theyre just saying goodbye.
Comments in a later letter column in the "Batman" title, reacting to this story, told me that this was the first time "in continuity" that the Earth-1 Catwoman had ever explicitly demonstrated that she knew darn well who Batman really was under that mask. There had never been any previous scene onstage, in any comic set on Earth-1, where they had ever discussed it, not even after she reformed and their civilian identities started dating -- so apparently she had just figured it out on her own, somewhere along the line. I don't believe we ever found out just how long she had known.
1983. Detective Comics #526. Written by Gerry Conway.
The 500th consecutive appearance of Batman in the "Detective Comics" title since his debut in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Many of his "classic" enemies (and also some deservedly obscure ones!) get involved one way or another. The story begins with a scene where the Joker has invited all sorts of old Batman villains to come to a deserted theater for a strategy conference. Joker apparently was way behind the times regarding Catwoman's current attitude toward the law (and toward Batman particularly); he had invited her too. She sneaks in, eavesdrops on the rest of them long enough to get the gist - they'll gang up on Batman and hopefully kill him - and then quietly slides out to go to the Batcave and warn him. Talia, daughter of Ra's al Ghul, also received an invitation and also leaves in a hurry when she sees which way the wind is blowing. Selina and Talia both end up fighting as Bruce's allies throughout the remainder of the story, and then Selina Kyle basically vanishes into comic book limbo for awhile.
1985. Detective Comics #557. Written by Doug Moench.
Batman is hovering by Selinas hospital bed, where she is bandaged and unconscious after being struck by lightning in a previous story. After she wakes up, he claims hes finally realized how in love with her he is. Hes also realized (he says) that he didnt really love Nocturna at all. (I am not going to recap the history of the turbulent love triangle of Nocturna, Batman, and the Thief of Night for you. It would be a very long story! Just take it for granted that Batman felt fascinated by Nocturna, despite the fact that he first met her when she was an unabashed thief, and even at this point she wasnt nearly as reformed as Catwoman sincerely was.)
Selina seems to barely have the strength to talk, but she expresses skepticism, saying, You loved me when I was dangerous, Batman . . . and you think you love me now . . . only because you know its wrong to love someone still as dangerous as Nocturna.
Despite which, later on they started dating again for awhile. (Not in this issue, though.)
1985. Crisis on Infinite Earths #12. Written by Marv Wolfman. (Collected in the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" TPB.)
Helena Wayne, the Huntress, daughter of the Earth-2 versions of Bruce and Selina, dies in battle. (At the same time as the Earth-2 Robin and a young hero named Kole, who had just recently become associated with the New Teen Titans of Earth-1.)
After the Crisis winds down, the Earth-2 versions of the Batman Family characters no longer exist and never did exist in the revised history of the Post-Crisis Earth of the DCU. Although at first a bunch of the heroes who had participated in these events were supposed to have the option of remembering things about the Pre-Crisis Multiverse that the run-of-the-mill citizens of the DCU didn't (but that idea, too, eventually faded away into limbo).
This erasure naturally includes the Golden Age Batman (who was already dead), the Golden Age Catwoman (who was already dead), and their daughter, the Huntress of the late 70s and early 80s.
However: not until late 1986 do the regular Batman titles get severely affected by any fallout from "Crisis on Infinite Earths," apparently because someone decided it would be a nice gesture to let Doug Moench finish a long run on both "Batman" and "Detective Comics" with a grand finale in the nice round number of "Batman #400," around late 1986, after he had been the sole writer on both titles for about three and a half years. (Mathematically, if he had written exactly the same stories as consecutive monthly installments of a single series, it would have been a very respectable seven-year run.) Toward the end of Moench's run, he had Batman and Catwoman getting together again - with her helping out in his crimefighting endeavors, since she was still reformed at the time - after she had previously spent a few years largely out of sight and out of mind in the Bat-titles.
1986. Detective Comics #'s 569-570. Written by Mike W. Barr.
In this two-part story, the Joker somehow persuades Dr. Moon to use brain-altering devices to "restore" Catwoman to her previous unscrupulous criminal self. Batman is unable to save her from that fate, and she leaves in a hurry while he is pleading with her to come back and let him help her recover her own, more law-abiding, modern memories and personality.
Best guess on my part: This story was written as a "bridge" to move the long-reformed, in-love-with-Bruce Catwoman -- as she had been portrayed in his titles, off and on over the last several years -- over into a grimmer-and-grittier "unrepentant Bad Girl" mode for the Post-Crisis era, but without doing anything so awkward as totally "rebooting" her by throwing away all of the old Catwoman continuity from stories set on the Pre-Crisis Earth-1. What I once called a "Reverse-Change" in my discussion of all the different types of Retcons. In the Reverse-Change, you don't actually "erase" an old story or set of stories that made changes in a character's lifestyle . . . you just push all the pawns on the chessboard back more-or-less to where everything was before, as if those "Changes" that had seemed so "Significant and Permanent" at the time they happened were really just a very shallow and temporary thing that made absolutely no lasting impact on the key character's lifestyle in the long run. New fans coming along may never know that those previous "changes" had ever happened.
I don't know if Barr came up with the idea for this Reverse-Change story on his own, and then sold it to an editor, or if an editor decided it was time to find a way to "turn back the clock" on Catwoman and shove her right back into her classic "shameless thief who doesn't date Bruce Wayne" frame of mind and ordered Barr to find a way to make it semi-plausible that this huge psychological shift had happened in the proverbial blink of an eye. Either way, however, this seems to have become the Post-Crisis version of the Batman/Catwoman relationship for awhile. "Sure, they used to date seriously, just as longtime fans remember from the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s in the Pre-Crisis, Earth-1 stories - but it doesn't matter anymore! Ancient history! She's reverted back to her criminal lifestyle!" However, eventually there must have been another big shift in editorial policy, as we shall see later on.