Anne Hathaway as Catwoman in Dark Knight Rises.
(2 of 4)
The Cat/woman/thief archetype had been around for a while before Catwoman: Ann Nocenti, who will begin writing the Catwoman comic-book series in September, cites the "cool but sinister black shape" of Irma Vep, the catsuited thief from Louis Feuillade's 1915 movie serial Les Vampires. Catwoman made her first appearance a year after Batman, in a 1940 story drawn by Bob Kane (Batman's nominal creator) and written by Bill Finger (who's generally acknowledged to have done most of the heavy lifting). She was just "the Cat" at first--and her alter ego wouldn't be identified as Selina Kyle for a decade--but she was clearly Catwoman: when Batman busts her (and threatens to spank her), she cozies up to him and suggests that maybe they could join forces. He lets her get away, and not for the last time.
Since then, Catwoman's look and personality have mutated along with each era's ideal of forbidden desire, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. In 1940 she was a film noir femme fatale. In 1967 she was Eartha Kitt's seething mod babe. In sex-averse 1987, she was the icy dominatrix of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's graphic novel Batman: Year One (a major inspiration for Nolan's Batman Begins). In 1992 she could have strolled out of the pages of Madonna's infamous book Sex, which appeared the same year as Pfeiffer's loopy kitten with a whip. In 2001, after the dotcom bubble burst, she was artist Darwyn Cooke and writer Ed Brubaker's sleek, pragmatic defender of the defenseless. (It took half a century as a supporting character before Catwoman became a protagonist in her own right--her monthly comic-book series includes almost 200 issues so far.) Let's just forget about the 2004 movie starring Halle Berry.
People imprint on Catwoman if she is done right. Cooke, who designed the costume she has worn in comics for the past decade (flexible leather, aviator helmet and goggles, sensible boots), had his Catwoman conversion experience in the mid-'60s, thanks to the actress who played her on the first two seasons of the TV show Batman. "You talk about the times in your life where you discover your sexuality--well, Julie Newmar helped me figure out mine," Cooke says. "I was a child, but I was completely spellbound by her. We're talking that 6-to-12 area, where you don't know what's going on, but things are happening in your lap. Julie Newmar--that was it."
But if Catwoman is done wrong--if she's represented in a way that doesn't match the desires of the moment--she looks ridiculous rather than spellbinding. Last month, Guillem March's cover art for a forthcoming issue of Catwoman, which depicted Selina in an anatomically ludicrous boobs-and-butt pose, became the object of widespread derision online. The comics world riposted with a string of parodies; on her Twitter account, cartoonist Kate Beaton posted a Catwoman with an impossibly contorted spine and buttocks like a camel's humps, declaring, "It's OK if you're titillated Batman, I'm meant to be a sexy character."