ABSTRACT
Character design operates on similar principles whether one is Gotham City’s best cat burglar or a queen sitting for a royal portrait: iconography legitimizes narrative. This essay (expanded from a more informal presentation) discusses some of the ways comics used the iconography and popular narratives of historical women in power – Elizabeth I, Lucrezia Borgia, Caterina Sforza – as archetypes for women characters in the superhero-comic canon. In particular, Selina Kyle’s Catwoman was often placed in a larger legacy of historical women of power, both as a way to explain her ambition, and a way to legitimize her presence. As Catwoman moved through comic book eras (and, eventually, other mediums), her narratives, the cultural politics that surrounded her narratives, and her “statecraft of appearances” often echoed the mythmaking practiced by those historical women in power – relationship to power, relationship to authority and succession, relationship to the past – as Catwoman moves from a comic-book character into a one-woman pop-culture empire.
