DCAU #234: The Truth About Cats and Gods

IN THIS ONE... Wonder Woman and Catwoman fight a cat god made flesh.

CREDITS: Written by Steve Vance; art by John Delaney and Ron Boyd.

REVIEW: The series might have better ended with #18's JLA issue than this odd team-up, but it's not a bad story, and the production team have some fun with the cancellation on the splash page, with its billboards about "Kaput: the Movie" and such. It's too bad, really, but for our purposes, the book was always going to be in contradiction with the developing DCAU, especially once Justice League makes it to our screens.

So we have a cat-god story that starts with the bold theft of Wonder Woman's lasso so a crook can get an archaeologist to spill the beans about the necessary summoning ritual, and that leads to Diana using the lasso to destroy the god's sense of self, exposing the human avatar's fragility underneath, and asking a pointed question about Catwoman's own true self.

Fair action, a few cool images, both characters well scripted. I wouldn't call it memorable, exactly, but it does the job. It just doesn't feel like a finale, is all.

IN THE MAINSTREAM COMICS: This is the New Batman Adventures' Catwoman, but the faux-DCAU Wonder Woman of Adventures in the DCU.

REREADABILITY: Medium - Solid enough, but somewhat unremarkable.

Comments

Andrew said…

Looking back at the series as a whole, I don't think expanding the scope of the DCAU was ever it's real goal. Rather, it was about introducing fans of the Batman and Superman shows (and their tie-in comics, of course) to the wider DC Comics universe, in a way that might appeal to them more than the mainline books would on their own. On that level, it works . . . okay. John Ostrander's Martian Manhunter and Len Kaminski's Creeper were both running stories quite a bit darker and weirder than what were presented here, and it had been years since Blue Beetle and Booster Gold had their wacky hijinks published on a regular basis. The rest of it? Nobody's terribly out of character, and there were certainly worse books at the time.

September 7, 2016 at 8:43 PM