Out of the Closet


The new Batwoman. Cross Silver Age design with Batman Beyond colors and personality from Will and Grace.

Recently, DC has just revealed the all-new, controversial Batwoman, who will be appearing in the weekly series 52 (which chronicles the missing year that passed after the company's monumental Infinite Crisis and just before the One Year Later issues. Batwoman first appeared in the final issue of IC, but only recently has there been solid info on her.
This new Batwoman's secret identity is one Kathy Kane, a lesbian woman who apparently has ties or past links to both disgraced police officer Renee Montoya and Bruce Wayne. According to DC's Executive Editor Dan Didio, they wanted to refresh the Batwoman character, giving her an all-new ideology, personality, backstory and treatment that's in line with the radical changes brought about by Infinite Crisis. "Blame Superboy Prime," is the catch phrase. This new Bat Family member is a member of high society as well as being gay, and will have been operating in Gotham in the year that Batman left for his sabbatical after IC. The character's costume was designed by none other than Alex Ross, who gave nods to both the Silver Age Batwoman design and the black-and-red color scheme from Batman Beyond.

So what will Batwoman's sexual orientation do to affect her storylines? Will we see her getting intimate with Gotham's femme fatales? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It should make for some new ways of approaching interactions between characters. The new Batwoman will be making her debut in July's 52 #11.

As for me, I'm curious about the character but I'm still quite pissed by the fact that Cassandra Cain has been transmorgified into a "Lady Shiva Junior" as head of the League of Assassins in the Robin title. Well, according to Didio's teasing remark, there may be a future yet for Cassie as Batgirl... maybe. Grrr. Whatever. We'll see what happens in the colorful world of comics in the next several weeks.