Batman: One Bad Day: Catwoman: No Small Scores written by G. Willow Wilson, art by Jamie McKelvie, and letters by Clayton Cowles
Selina Kyle's latest burglary scheme is for a highly valuable pendant--a bird freed from a cage that was created after World War II by a world-renowned French jeweler. An auction house is starting bids at twenty thousand dollars. The pendant is even more valuable to Selina since it was her mother's. Her mom sold it to a pawnbroker who said it was a fake even though mom said it was given to her by her French mother. They only got two hundred dollars for it, barely enough for rent. So the heist has a little revenge in it too, though Selina thinks of it as getting back what's rightfully hers.
Like in The Riddler One Bad Day book, it's Selina that has the "One Bad Day," where the heist does not work out the way she wants to. Unlike The Riddler book, this story doesn't turn totally dark and pessimistic. The plot has some nice twists and pathos to it with a much brighter color pallette (though that is not much of an achievement).
Catwoman has often been an ambiguous figure--sometimes a straight-up villain, sometimes an ally to Batman, often a mixture of both. Her varying character is used to good advantage in the story, which is told from her perspective. The writer gives her a believable voice and the artist treats her with class, i.e. not like a sex object. She does have a bit of romantic distraction with Batman (naturally, he has to show up) but the scene does not have the tacky, exploitative depiction that happens with a lot of female comic book characters (or even in the Batman/Catwoman back catalog).
Recommended--this is among the better Catwoman stories I've read.
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