Catwoman

23 years ago - Holly Robinson is born to a runaway in Gotham's East End.

18 years ago - 5-year-old Holly is saved from a corrupt cop by her neighbor, Selina Kyle.

16 years ago - 7-year-old Holly's mother is given free housing by Selina Kyle when she buys their building before moving to her downtown penthouse.

14 years ago - 9-year-old Holly's mother moves them from the building in East End into her drug dealer boyfriend's home.

12 years ago - 11-year-old Holly’s mother dies of a drug overdose. She runs away from her mother’s boyfriend, living on the streets of Gotham, but regularly using Selina Kyle’s building to crash.

9 years ago - 14-year-old Holly overdoses, but is nursed through it in a homeless shelter by Karon, who starts to help her fight her addiction.

8 years ago - 15-year-old Holly discovers that Selina Kyle has moved back into her building. She's invited to stay, becoming Selina's roommate & confidant, regularly training with her, and with Ted Grant.

7 years ago - 16-year-old Holly is threatened by one of the East End street gangs to join them or else. Slam Bradley puts a stop to it, getting them all arrested and taking the gang apart. She & Karon start dating.

5 years ago - 18-year-old Holly is kidnapped & beaten by Roman Sionis's men and threatened with torture, but is able to fight back and escape, saving Slam Bradley, bringing him to Ted Grant's gym. Karon learns that Selina Kyle is Catwoman and that Holly works for her. Karon tells Holly that if they are going to be together she needs to know everything, and for Holly to listen when told she's going too far. Holly starts to work with Ted, occasionally donning her own Wildcat persona.

3 years ago - 20-year-old Holly becomes a new Catwoman when Selina Kyle has her daughter Helena Kyle, and moves to the Université Notre Dame Des Ombres. Slam Bradley & Ted Grant help her. Karon understands that it is helping her, so she supports her despite worrying about her safety. During No Man's Land she helps keep the people forced to stay behind in the East End safe.

1 year ago - 22-year-old Holly goes on a mission to push Oswald Cobblepot's thugs out of the East End when they beat up Karon trying to expand their territory.

Holly Robinson is one of those characters that grows up organically as a part of DC's ongoing continuity; she was invented for a very particular role in a very particular story, but in doing so just wound up becoming integral to the larger story, and opportunities for her to evolve just kept happening. There were clearly some missteps, but she wound up achieving a moment of real potential, something that really could have helped move the whole story of DC into its future...

DC couldn't follow through on this idea, and while it's disappointing, we do get it. Sometimes you are just beholden to a status quo. Thankfully, we're NOT, so we get to take that potential to its logical conclusion. We hope you like it!

Holly Robinson's Comic History

Holly Robinson first appeared in the immediate aftermath of the Crisis of Infinite Earths in the 1987 story Batman: Year One by Frank Miller. Miller had just come off his incredibly successful Dark Knight Returns, and was being handed this important story, setting up the entire mythology of Batman coming out of the crisis. Year One is a really great, foundational comic, but it does play pretty fast and loose with some pretty adult content. The new version of Selina Kyle is a prostitute, which is kind of disturbingly common for women written by Miller, but we also meet Holly, a young girl for Selina to look out for. Holly is in a similar profession, and while this makes the story very edgy and gritty, I really struggle with being okay with this as a foundational part of Batman's backstory.

Mindy Newell's four-issue miniseries Catwoman from 1989 served as a direct follow-up to Year One, taking place at the same time and featuring recreations of a lot of the same story beats and panels. Holly plays the same role, but is depicted more as an innocent Selina has to protect, an innocent voice Selina seems to use as her own conscience. She's hurt by the bad guy in the final issue, spurring Selina to act, but as it ends she's been moved to live in a convent with Selina's sister. The intention was, I imagine, to give her something akin to a happy ending.

It is very tricky to find non-creepy art of Holly from Batman: Year One

Since both of these stories are meant to be flashbacks to the early years of Batman and Catwoman's careers, it does set us up to learn what modern-day Holly looks like, and we get an attempt to tell that story in a feature in Action Comics Weekly in '89. We discover that she'd left the convent and married a rich guy who lived in New Jersey. Immediately, this causes problems because Gotham is supposed to be in Jersey, but it gets worse; during the course of this story Holly is actually killed in an explosion set by her husband. This particular period of Action Comics functioning as a weekly anthology series was kind of notorious for setting up some content that wound up being problematic later on, and while this was technically Holly's canon story for a good long while, I can't find any references to her death elsewhere, so it clearly wasn't a take people liked.

Catwoman's timeline was slightly updated in the 1994 Zero Hour event, but we didn't really see the new fate of Holly until the start of Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke's 2002 Catwoman series. One of the first things to happen is the return of Holly, who reveals that she'd left the convent years ago and moved out west (completely bypassing the Action Comics Weekly story) only to have come back to Gotham in the last few years. She was immediately a featured character, serving as Selina's roommate and confidant, creating a new dynamic for both characters that felt absolutely vital to the new series. You absolutely HAVE to have Holly if you're going to do Selina.

The 2006 company wide timeskip One Year Later was pretty universally damaging to almost every series, but Catwoman happens to be the few that managed to use it creatively. Selina becomes a mom, and with her out of the spotlight, Holly steps up and becomes the new Catwoman. It's a really intoxicating idea, passing on the legacy of one of the longest-running female characters in DC, but it also allowed some of her adventures to play very differently. Selina was such a badass, and could confidently dive into practically any situation confident that she'd come out on top. Holly, by contrast, was much newer to all of this. She was constantly in over her head, always unsure if she could handle what was happening..

This dynamic would have been so cool to see evolve, but unfortunately the comic needed to return to the status quo. Selina gave away her daughter (which is NEVER good. Everybody stop making fictional characters do this), and returned to the Catwoman mantle, while Holly essentially had to leave Gotham entirely. She was being set up to be featured alongside Harley Quinn for the year-long maxi-series Countdown, which wound up really not landing.

Holly has made a few appearances here and there in the post-52 era, but she's never again been a major part of the story of Catwoman and certainly not treated as the legacy of the character, which is a shame.

Our Catwoman Story

This is one of those times where we get to really lean into our central thesis here; finding what feels like the CORRECT version of these characters and stories. We get to make Holly a part of Selina's earlier life (while removing and particularly Frank Miller-esque unpleasantness), and just set her up to become her confidant and roommate as envisioned by Brubacker and Cooke. This is such a great dynamic and there's just no reason this can't be the status quo the whole time.

This might be more controversial, but we really do stand by it; We want Holly to be Catwoman. We actually have her go by Wildcat briefly as she's training with Ted Grant, but we think that it's actually vital for Selina's development to actively hand over her mantle to Holly, and we love the idea of what Holly-as-Catwoman will look like in the long term.

Catwoman's Future

There is just so much that can be done with this version of Catwoman as we move into the future. Just imagining all the ways she can make this mantle her own. Holly is a much scrappier character than Selina; They're both cat-like, but Holly is more of an alley cat, and that distinction would be so much fun for creators to lean into. For my fellow cyberpunk fans, I can't help but make comparisons to the character Y.T. from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, so much so that I really want her to start being more gadget-focused. If you can come up with a way for Catwoman to have a harpoon grapple and 'liquid knuckles' and an all-terrain skateboard, I'm all for it.

In the meantime, Holly has already been Catwoman for a few years in out timeline. These are in the years after No Man's Land, when the larger Batman Family is playing a larger role in Gotham, and Batman himself is soon going to meet his son Damian. She gets to be part of this evolving new landscape of Gotham characters, perhaps even becoming more involved in the Neo-Gotham stories of Batwing. If you're going to allow the world of these characters to evolve, then this is exactly what that evolving world should look like.

Related Characters

Karon