Catwoman #29 // Review
Poison Ivy is in a tank somewhere in Gotham City. Lucius Fox is responsible. Selina Kyle has been contacted by a police detective she knows. She's reluctant to help him, but a pair of wings catches her in a police photograph, and she's off on an adventure in Catwoman #29. Writer Ram V engages Kyle in an engaging bit of mystery moodily brought to the page by artist Fernando Blanco and colorist Jordie Bellaire. Gotham looks good in V, Blanco, and Bellaire's hands amidst a mild flurry of new mystery. The story might be traipsing around in familiar territory for Catwoman, but it's still a fun, little excursion into the shadows of Gotham City.
A man takes a call in a palatial residence in Gotham. He's in his bathrobe. What he doesn't know is that there's a room in his house filled with the freshly dead, and there's a mysterious figure wielding twin blades who is ready to add to the kill count. Elsewhere, Detective Hadley shows Selina Kyle pictures that prompt her to head off in search of Edward Nygma. There's a group of people who evidently want him dead, and she wants to know why. He's annoying as ever, though. If he doesn't cooperate, she might have to kill him herself.
V has a very stylish way through a very well-worn kind of mystery. The elements swishing around in the course of this issue aren't anything particularly new or fresh or original, but Ram V manages to catch many of them in just the right way to make them all seem perfectly interesting. Kyle is an infinitely cool protagonist, but there's an earthbound shrewdness to her coolness that keeps her from seeming too aloof to feel close to. In Ram V's script, Selina Kyle is kept just far enough away from the reader emotionally to be interesting without being so immersed in stylish hardboiled detective-ing that the reader loses interest on an emotional level.
Bellaire's treatment of action is interesting. Ram V may be holding the story's style at a distance, but he's giving Bellaire more than enough of it to embrace in images and iconography on the page. Bellaire manages a rather tight balance between moody atmosphere, moodier drama, and bone-jarring action. The pacing isn't perfect. The action might feel a bit stiff in places, but there's a firm emotional foundation in every moment of action. This is quite an accomplishment on Bellaire's part, given the fact that V doesn't give the artist a whole lot of room to establish the emotional grounding of any one character.
Kyle's swift ascent into a very luxurious lifestyle in her particular corner of Gotham comes across a bit too swiftly. She's lounging on a rooftop pool…already a crime queen in Gotham, having only just arrived back a few months ago. Ram V could have spent a little bit more time charting her course to the top, but the story this issue has a lot of interesting angles that are more than satisfying as Catwoman gets pulled into a fun little mystery.
Grade: B
