Batwoman

34 years ago - Kate Kane is born, the daughter of Gabrielle & Jacob Kane.

29 years ago - 5-year-old Kate & her mother Gabrielle Kane are both held hostage during a terrorist attack. Kate's father Jacob Kane is able to save her, but Gabi is killed. Jacob takes a commission heading up an anti-terrorism task force.

21 years ago - 13-year-old Kate meets Renee Montoya

20 years ago - 14-year-old Kate's father Jacob Kane leaves the Special Forces and becomes an Interpol investigator.

18 years ago - 16-year-old Kate kisses Renee Montoya, who ends their friendship out of fear.

16 years ago - 18-year-old Kate is accepted to West Point. She excels, performing near the top of her class.

12 years ago - 22-year-old Kate graduates West Point, and becomes a wartime investigator for the army's Criminal Investigation Division.

9 years ago - 25-year-old Kate's father Jacob Kane is killed while on an investigation into an international criminal organization for Interpol. Kate leaves the CID and becomes an Interpol investigator in order to take over his investigation, following his trail around the world.

6 years ago - 28-year-old Kate, following her father's investigation, tracks a series of high profile assassinations across the globe. She discovers the killer's ties to the League of Assassins, and works with Batman to stop him, ultimately saving Batman's life. She continues to unravel the connections between the League and her father.

4 years ago - 30-year-old Kate finds proof that the League of Assassins is responsible for her father's assassination. When told to stop her investigation, she resigns her Interpol commission and becomes an independent operative, working to dismantle their organization.

2 years ago - 32-year-old Kate arrests Dr. Ebenezer Darrk, former member of the League of Assassins. Before handing him over to the authorities, she uses him to learn more about the League, making herself a target of the organization.

now - 34-year-old Kate tracks, catches, and interrogates Malcolm Merlyn, learning everything he knows about the League of Assassins and handing him over to interpol. She is captured by the League and imprisoned alongside Bruce Wayne.

soon - Kate bonds with Bruce Wayne while held captive by the League of Assassins. When Tim Drake & Damian Wayne find them, and can only free one of them, Bruce insists they take her. In Gotham, after reconnecting with Renee Montoya, she joins Tim, Damian, Dick Grayson, Barbara Gordon, Stephanie Brown, Cassandra Cain, and Luke Fox, leading their immediate assault on the League's castle to free Bruce. She is given the Batwoman mantle by Barbara and assumes the role, continuing to travel internationally, now acting as a solo operative of the Bat Family.

Batwoman wasn't an original part of our concept of a refined DC timeline. She's always felt peripheral, like an idea that could work if it spent more time in the oven, but her absolute best stories, despite being some fantastic comics, didn't really work to connect her to the rest of the world. Instead they focused on building her, and her own story, which is awesome, but doesn't really make her feel necessary in the telling of the larger Batman mythos.

But I don't think it really feels correct to NOT include her. She's clearly part of the Batman narrative tapestry, and if she hasn't felt adequately connected, then that just means it falls to us to do that. Please feel free to reach out and let us know what you think!

Batwoman's Comic History

The original Batwoman was Kathy Kane, a character introduced in Detective Comics #233 in 1956. She was practically a direct response to the introduction of the Comic Code and accusations of homosexuality in Batman and Robin. She's a creation of Bob Kane without Bill Finger, and I think it's interesting that her look skews closer to his original ideas for Batman before Finger gave him his iconic design. She was only tangentially bat-themed; her gimmicks were mostly disguised as makeup products her jewelry. She eventually got a sidekick of her own in her niece Betty Kane, the original Batgirl.

Both of these characters were largely removed from the Batman mythos by editor Julius Schwartz as he purged the extended supporting casts of the older carry-over Golden Age heroes as they were adapted to new Silver Age DC in the mid-sixties. They did still get mentioned periodically, so they did still exist (Betty actually appeared in the Teen Titans West), but of course by the 80s there were essentially purged from continuity completely... at least until Grant Morrison's mission to make ALL Batman content canon no matter how weird led to the reintroduction of Kathy Kane and the reveal that she had been an undercover secret agent the whole time, and had faked her death. Comics!

Fast-forwarding to the mid 2000s; when the atmosphere at DC seemed centered on restoring older iconic versions of characters (an environment that would eventually lead to the return of characters like Hal Jordan and Barry Allen). Despite the fact that there was a very cool new Batgirl, there seemed to be a push to restore the idea of a redheaded female Bat-character. (I'm sure it was completely unstated, but I imagine the fact that the current Batgirl at the time was not white probably played a factor). The new version of Batwoman; Kate Kane, as opposed to Kathy, debuted in the post Infinite Crisis series 52 in 2006. She was sort of concept-first, arriving without much of a story of her own, like she was there more to fill a quota.

This was corrected in a big way in 2011 when Batwoman was one of the launch titles of the new 52, in a series by the award-winning duo J.H. Williams III & W. Haden Blackman, who crafted a very deliberately design-forward, painterly character that has gone on to define the character in practically all her appearances since. This take has been the focus in her appearances both in animation and in her own tv series.

Our Batwoman Story

We're left in kind of a tight place with Batwoman, because anything you do with her operates under the shadow of the Williams / Blackman series, which is undeniably great. They built a really compelling character and a fantastic visual language, and any version of Batwoman you see is kind of beholden to their vision.

The problem there is that the character they created really had very little to do with the Bat family, or even the persona of Batwoman. It's GREAT, but its so incidentally and even tangentially Bat-related. I want to keep what we CAN, but there's a lot that needs to be reframed in order to make her feel like a part of the Bat family.

We need a connection with Bruce beyond just being his cousin, since a) Bruce shouldn't have living relatives and b) that's a terrible reason for them to be connected. It needs to be something earned by EXPERIENCE, not circumstance. Beyond that, we need to bond her with the rest of the Bat Family, in a way that establishes her as a trusted authority figure. It might not mean it literally, but assuming the Batwoman mantle, when a whole series of Batgirls have previously existed, includes an implied shift in power dynamics, and if you don't include some degree of interaction between her and Barbara, then their dynamic is always going to feel strained.

To that end, we're first focusing on what her career looks like BEFORE she ever becomes Batwoman. She needs to be a character that can just step naturally into the role as a leader but also a perpetual outsider in the Batman family. We made her a longtime Interpol agent and independent operative with a long history of tracking the League of Assassins. I imagine her as the sort of character who wins encounters not with greater skill, but with greater audacity, choosing tactics that drastically upend the stakes in her favor.

Then, we made her a fellow prisoner of the League along with Bruce. Let them bond that way, all their secrets laid bare to each other. When she's freed, she leads the entire Bat family, stepping up with her tactical brilliance and audacity, earning their respect. Her accepting the mantle of Batwoman specifically comes from an invitation by Barbara, showing that she deserves to be part of them... especially when she chooses not to kill Merlyn, the man that killed her father (a deliberate reference to Dick Grayson not killing Boss Zucco). We imagine Bruce handing her a batarang and asking her "what are you going to do now?"

Also... as a quick aside... Kate's story traditionally includes being kicked out of the army because of Don't Ask Don't Tell, which is a policy that ended in 2011. This means it's already been gone from real life for more than 15 years, and that time gap is only going to get wider as the sliding timeline keeps chugging away. I appreciate what including this idea did for her character, but at this point I think it's sort of an artifact of another time, and doesn't really serve the story anymore. Kate should be openly queer, have openly served, and be openly awesome.

Kate & Renee Montoya

A big part of the controversy involving Kate Kane's solo series was the exit of creators Williams & Blackman, specifically because DC wasn't letting them depict the marriage of Kate to her partner, Maggie Sawyer. This was more because DC at the time wasn't letting ANY superhero get married, but they should have known how bad those optics were. I point this out because I know how potentially problematic it is for me to say this: I actually don't think Kate and Maggie should be together.

This is specifically because Maggie is a Superman character, while Kate already had a fantastically complex, messy history with Gotham's OTHER incredible queer detective, Renee Montoya. I love these two, just a couple absolute train wrecks being train wrecks together. Our take on Kate is a world-traveling operative, and Renee is staying on as part of the GCPD, but I still think this is the core romance for both of these characters.

Batwoman's Costume

The original Batwoman costume is a Alex Ross design, and it shows; it's an extremely bold design with really sold use of color. Its not really her superhero costume that we need to examine, as it's pretty iconic. It's more the visual of Kate herself, as developed by J.H. Williams III. he created an absolutely iconic look for for, with distinct pale skin, tattoos, and short cropped hair, a sort of punk-psychobilly-goth vibe while simultaneously very upscale and classy, all in service of the series fantastic singular visual language.

Similar to Kate's story in their series, however... that look doesn't exactly serve the character as it relates to Batwoman. Her personal style is great, the tattoos are cool... but the pale skin is a conflicting visual in a narrative that already includes several villainous characters with the same feature, and the fact that her iconic, look-defining hair is a wig is... It's possibly logistically functional, but its just narratively messy.

I do think the character should maintain the same shock of red hair, but I think that should just be her hair. I like the idea that it's usually tied back and away... but with the her unique cowl she doesn't have to do that, It gets to blow free creating the iconic look with the colors of her costume. (one imagines that this MIGHT have been a design Barbara had done for herself before she was injured.) Also, I think she is probably just as likely to act completely out of costume a lot of the time, donning her Batwoman persona specifically when she knows things are going to get tactical, as opposed to maintaining any sort of secret identity.

Batwoman's Future

We actually leave our timeline before Kate ever even shows up. At the close of the timeline, she's a prisoner of the League of Assassins for being so disruptive of their operation as an Interpol agent, and then as an independent operative. This is one of the rare times when we're going to describe something that WILL happen, sometime in the near future. Kate will be rescued by Tim & Damian, and will work with the entire Bat Family to rescue Bruce, proving her tactical brilliance and earning the approval of all of them, but most importantly Dick & Barbara.

Kate's longstanding career as a globetrotting, problem-solving agent actually sets her up perfectly for what her career as Batwoman will look like. She's uniquely set up as a perfect character to put out into the world, exposing her to all sorts of international stories, working with heroes from all over the world. She could even confront supernatural threats that you just might not see in most Gotham stories. I actually imagine she could even have a travel companion that works as her tech expert and tactical support... maybe this would be a good place for a character like Harper Row?

Kate is such a unique, singular character. If we can get all the conflicting ideas in her character to all work together in service of the concepts at play here, she can be SO dynamic, giving us a unique experience that feels like part of the Bat Family while still being completely her own thing.

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