Cat Grant

34 years ago - Cat Grant is born in Midway City

16 years ago - 18-year-old Cat moves to LA.

14 years ago - 20-year-old Cat marries tech millionaire Joe Morgan. She starts building her style brand, Catco.

13 years ago - 21-year-old Cat has her son, Adam

10 years ago - 24-year-old Cat, unable to take her husband's drunken abusiveness, takes a job in Metropolis as the head of the Daily Planet's Entertainment & Arts division. She flirts with Clark Kent. She & Lois Lane do not like each other.

9 years ago - 25-year-old Cat's ex-husband Joe Morgan sues her for child endangerment, citing the attack on Metropolis by General Zod, seeking full custody of Adam.

8 years ago - 26-year-old Cat's ex-husband Joe Morgan has their son Adam kidnapped before the judge in their custody battle can make a ruling. Lois Lane tracks him all the way to his Swiss villa and exposes his career as an international smuggler. Cat is awarded full custody and 45 million when their prenup is voided. She returns to LA, rededicating herself to Catco.

7 years ago - 27-year-old Cat launches Cat Magazine. Alex DeWitt is one of her staff photographers.

4 years ago - 30-year-old Cat attends Lois Lane & Clark Kent's wedding.

1 year ago - 33-year-old Cat opens Catco offices in Dakota City. Frieda Goren is one of their interns.

You probably actually see Cat Grant appearing more often in adaptations of Superman's story than you actually do in the comics. I remember her most as being played by Tracy Scoggins of Dynasty, Remington Steel, & Babylon 5 fame on the tv series Lois & Clark, but she's shown up on practically every adaptation of the Daily Planet because she brings with her a certain amount of ridiculous workplace drama, which really livens up the place. It's a superficial sort of livening up, but sometimes that's exactly what we need.

Cat Grant's Comic History

One of the very first things to happen to Clark Kent, as the Superman continuity was rebooted Post-Crisis, was a rediculous meet-cute, stumbling over Cat Grant as they struggle to get into an elevator before officially being introduced in Perry's office. This happens in Adventures of Superman #424 by Marv Wolfman & Jerry Ordway in 1987, a new series picking up the numbering of the classic Superman comic which was being replaced by John Byrne's Superman vol 2. Adventures of Superman functioned as a sort of support series, and as such we got more stories involving the supporting cast.

Cat, and all her blonde bombshell flirtatiousness, was obviously meant to contrast with Lois, who at the time was being depicted as very business & career-focused, which in the late 80s looked pretty severe. Cat flirted openly with Clark, who wasn't exactly unflattered; he was single and unattached at the time. They dated briefly, but as it came out that she was coming out of a divorce with her alcoholic ex, and trying to stay sober herself, Clark soon seemed more focused on helping her get her life together. Boy Scout, right?

The Superman comics of the '80s and '90s were a big deal, with writers' teams taking annual retreats to build overarching plans for the various series. This meant that even the supporting characters tended to have pretty solid arcs. The utility of having a vampish blonde in the Daily Planet bullpen to flirt with Clark and make Lois jealous aside, Cat actually went on to feature in a few stories of her own, going undercover at GBS news, exposing their owner as a serial sexual harasser, becoming a regular television anchor and a pretty damn good reporter, even covering the death of Superman. When her son became a victim of the serial killer version of Toyman, unfortunately, It became very hard for her character to move forward, understandably stuck in what looked a lot like a grief spiral.

Later versions of Cat have all seemed to revert more to her earlier characterization, making her a shameless flirt, but not always in the most flattering way. She's sometimes depicted a little crass, and often as the butt of a breast implant joke. The new 52 found ways to make her a little more likable, joining Clark in his own online news venture competing with the Planet. Of course, everything about the character changed completely after her depiction in the CBS Supergirl series.

Our Cat Grant Story

Cat Grant was only a featured character in the first season of Supergirl on CBS, but she really made an impression. Calista Flockhart played an entirely new take on Cat, having created her own style and media brand in a new city. When the show was picked up in its second season by the CW they moved production to Vancouver, so Calista elected not to stay, but the entire series basically operated from under the shadow of the tough, no-nonsense mogul who owned every part of her femininity and weaponized it gloriously. It's enough to make us need to slow WAY down and work backward to understand exactly how we can get this character in our timeline.

First, we really do think the MOST important thing about Cat is to get those few years in which she works at the Planet and is in direct competition with Lois. We've elected to keep a long period in our timeline when Lois just doesn't know Clark is Superman because that's the lore... and having distractions like Cat really helps that make sense. We do really like the drama involving her son, but rather than making it a dark serial killer story, we elected to tie it into the drama with her ex and use it as a chance for Lois to flex her best-reporter-in-the-world muscles.

From there, she has the money to build Catco into the huge brand it has become. Our Supergirl is still a freshman in college and too young to go work for Cat, but we've already found several other young women characters who are finding their story in the world of Cat, and that's just awesome.

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