Silver St. Cloud
32 years ago - Silver St. Cloud is born.
18 years ago - 14-year-old Silver St. Cloud goes to finishing school.
14 years ago - 18-year-old Silver St. Cloud goes to college to study design.
10 years ago - 22-year-old Silver St. Cloud graduates & moves to Gotham City.
9 years ago - 23-year-old Silver St. Cloud meets Bruce Wayne, and begins their romance.
6 years ago - 26-year-old Silver St. Cloud discovers Bruce Wayne's secret identity. She ends their relationship and moves to Paris.
1 year ago - 31-year-old Silver St. Cloud reconnects with Bruce Wayne when he saves the people held captive on her private island.
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Silver St. Cloud's Comic HistorySteve Englehart didn't have a very long run on Dectective Comics; only eight issues in 1977 with penciler Marshall Rogers, but it just happened to establish a tone and style for the world of Batman that is incredibly cool, with stories like The Laughing Fish and the Deadshot Ricochet. It's remembered as a high point of the era, so much so that they were invited back to do a sequel series of sorts to their orignal run in the six issue miniseries Batman: Dark Detective in 2005. Part of what Englehart did in his run was introduce an entirely new love interest into the Batman mythology in the enigmatic Silver St. Cloud.
Silver wasn't a holdover from an earlier era; she was a modern character in a time when the comics were attempting to depict the exploits of a more adult character. To do that, Englehart deliberately wanted to show that Bruce was actually having an adult relationship, Silver was meant to be a modern woman, working her own career with her own connections to the world of Gotham, and who was just as much a creature of the night as Bruce. Even her name was meant to be evocative of the night, referencing silver clouds in front of the moon. |
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Because she was introduced with the intention of making her a smart, equal partner to Bruce, her first appearance included some small indication that she might have some inkling about the fact that he and Batman are the same person. As the story went on, even as she was happily falling in love with Bruce, she continued to make those connections. The difference this time is that she wasn't a fifties-era cartoon character trying to prove herself right, she was being written as an actual person who was actually having to deal with those feelings. In the end, when her suspicions were confirmed, she could only break it off with Bruce, leaving Gotham completely.
Silver has returned to Bruce's world a few times, notably as the fiancée of State Senator Evan Gregory in Englehart's sequel series Dark Detective, and she's always proven to be a strange tender spot for Bruce. Silver's role in the larger Batman mythology might be unique. She has a a very small number of canonical appearances, but based entirely on the subtle, well-crafted story she came from, she continues to have a very special spot in the story of Batman. |
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Our Silver St. Cloud StorySilver is a real enigma among Batman's major canonical love interests. She isn't exactly built to drive her own story, but rather is one writer's attempt at creating the ideal romantic counterpart to Bruce, and he just happened to have done an amazing job at it. They just fit together in a way where she complements all of his complexity, and I would even suggest that part of the reason she wound up leaving the comic so quickly, outside of the short duration of of Englehart's run, was that she almost did her job TOO well. She was rapidly decoding the strangeness of Bruce Wayne.
For our timeline, we didn't do much to reinvent the wheel, we just included Silver in his life. She's a young, wealthy woman in Gotham who meets him socially, with whom he begins a romance. While Julie Madison was only able to see the surface lie of Bruce Wayne before she left him, and Vicki always saw him as a puzzle to be solved, Silver is the one who manages to see, without judgement, the parts of himself he hides from the world. She has to leave, however, because once she understands what being Batman means to him, and what it will inevitably do to him, she simply can't remain with him to see it happen. Silver really represents the one time Bruce may have had a shot at putting it all behind him and living a normal life. Which he of course can't ever do. |
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