The pile as always ebbs and contacts as more is taken away but more is added. And yet, somehow, it is looking a little thinner than before. Will we see it defeated in our lifetimes? Eh, maybe? Even still, there’s always going to be at least a few series I’m neglecting to read until their runs are over, so there’s always going to be more. Like Catwoman: Lonely City by Cliff Chiang, a book that I had last looked at back when we still cared about Covid variants and the future actually looked like it wasn’t going to be some kind of continual nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, urban renewal. Gotham is a city with a variety of problems over the years in the form of slums, crumbling infrastructure, under-funded social services, and the villains who take advantage of all the latter. But with a new mayor in the form of a reformed Harvey Dent looking to wipe away any remnant of Gotham’s past in favor of whatever he considers progress, things are actively grim. This is what Selina Kyle comes into as she’s released from prison for murdering Batman on Fool’s Night over a decade ago. But she couldn’t have done it, not with one of his last words sitting in her head: Orpheus. Recruiting as few remaining friendly faces from the Gotham under ground that have gone even further underground, she plots a heist to break into the one spot in the city no one else has ever been able to break into: the Batcave.

Due to the nature of these Black Label books from DC, Lonely City consists of four forty-seven page issues. Between that and the size of the issues themselves, this allows for a massive amount of story per issue and only demonstrates the pacing expertise of an artist like Chiang. Taken all together, the four issues feel like two seasons of a prestige crime show as each issue tackles multiple characters, backstories, stages of the heist, and major plot revelations. And yet the work is all so condensed to the point that you don’t notice the book isn’t slowing down at any point and that, after the end of the first issue, you’ve only gotten to the end of the first issue. Each issue is a complete arc in itself that brings us closer to the final heist but also closer to the closure that Selina has been trying to get for ten years despite the mounting guilt and regret that hold her down.

There’s a point in Catwoman: Lonely City #2 where Selina and Edward Nygma are catching up in a hotel bar. It’s a two-page spread—twenty-two panels—but you see the whole history between them unfolding as they reminisce. The moment is there and gone, but it’s so dense with their characterization that you’d want to sit nearby and just absorb the conversation. We see the time tick by panel by panel, but it doesn’t feel like any time is going by at all. 

Get excited. Get prestige.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.