Catwoman (Vol. 4), Issue #3 – “No one can find any piece of me here.”

* Part 3 of 6 of the Game storyline *

Welcome to Loneliness & Cheeseburgers Presents: Catwoman (Vol. 4), Issue #3 – “No one can find any piece of me here.”! In the previous installment, Selina Kyle fucks Batman and then gets right up in Bruce Wayne’s face during a Wayne Manor banquet and doesn’t recognize him whatsoever. She successfully takes money from the two warring Russian mob factions and gets off scot-free. Then she returns to Lola’s apartment to find her tied to a chair with a bullet through her brain.

Oh no! Some douchebag named Bone is responsible, and it sounds like Bone wants to have a little chit-chat with the Cat-like woman.

Catwoman (Vol. 4), Issue #3 [January, 2012]
Written by: Judd Winick
“No one can find any piece of me here.”

Catwoman looking like she needs a rabies shot on the cover. Rawr!

Flashback to a few years earlier, right before Selina Kyle started her Felina Style (come on, that was clever). Selina just stole a bunch of jewelry at a private party with the police commissioner and about eighty cops. She asks her not-dead-yet buddy Lola if she can move it, and she says she can! “But, Selina… y’gotta be more careful. There are ways of doing things that will get you everything you want and not get you caught. Or worse.”

“What’s fun about being careful?” Selina responds.

Flash forward to Selina bleeding and crying, courtesy of Mr. Bone. He stares at her with wild eyes. “To say the least, you’ve really pissed me off. Look at my face… do I look like the sort of man you want to piss off?”

Sir, you look like a garbage can is what you look like. Selina stares back silently with her own wild eyes. This craggy motherfucker dishes out his life story: mom and dad were awful, lived with aunt who was worse, grew up in a group home, his stuff got stolen all the time. When he finally made a name for himself, he finally had things of his own: jewelry, art, coins, Funko Pops, celebrity turds, and shitty comic books. “Then you come along…” Boney gets right up in Selina’s crazed face, “…AND STEAL ALL OF MY NICE CRAP!”

On the floor, a foot away, Lola lies dead and still tied to the chair. Before she was tortured and shot, she was kind enough to offer her bookkeeping ledgers. Now Boney is going to go to all of Selina’s “customers” and get his stolen stuff back. If she had stolen money or drugs, things would be different. Who cares, right? Not me! I don’t care! I don’t care at all! I’m shutting this fucking comic and going to bed.

Meow!

Where was I? Boney tells his henchmen to kill Selina and then get rid of both of the bodies. They size her up while she sits there looking feral. Then one of them clocks her in the mug and sends her toppling to the floor. “C’mon, Hot Pants, don’t you got nothin’ to say?”

Her chair cracked, so now she’s able to wrest herself free. She does a couple of fancy backflips and grabs one of the dudes’ guns, holding him and pointing it at his head. “Tell me where your boss went,” she demands while the guy grimaces. The other two henchmen think they’re calling her bluff, but then she shoots both of them right in their kneecaps. Exit wound through the back of the knee. Probably hurts, but what do I know? I’ve only been shot in the face!

She aims the gun at the third guy’s dick. “He’s at the Moffat Building,” he says immediately. “In that club on the top floor.”

Bone’s getting a lapdance AND a personal pole dance AT THE SAME TIME! WHAT A LIFE! Selina knows the Moffat Building, but the club on top of the 40-story building is very exclusive and almost impossible to get into. No worries, though, she’s Catwoman. She can get into anything. She can get into anime.

So she breaks in and cracks a lot of glass and scares the bone out of Bone. She drags the poor sap to the corner of the high-rise roof overlooking the street below. He begs for his life, bargains like a mofo, offers her money, implores her to think twice before she makes more trouble for herself by killing him. She doesn’t care. She whips out a bat and starts really fucking whacking him with it.

“You were right!” she yells. “If this was over drugs! Money! Territory! I’d understand that! But it wasn’t! It wasn’t! You killed her over things! MEANINGLESS! STUPID! THINGS!”

She’s literally about one blow away from killing him when Batman shows up to tell her that’s enough. Play time is over. Mr. White Knight here is going to save poor defenseless Bone. “Back away from him,” he says in his best Christian Bale voice. Like this: grumble grumble rasp.

I know you’re Selina Kyle from 1234 Gotham Ave. and I would never want to smoke a blunt with you.

“How the hell do you always find me?”

“You don’t exactly hide.”

He runs through his whole spiel about how killing Bone won’t solve anything and she’s better than that and yadda yadda jerk me off. “He’ll be dead. He won’t hurt anyone anymore. And I’ll feel better,” she retorts, which is a very persuasive argument. Batman isn’t swayed because he’s a dork. He tells her he wouldn’t be able to forgive her if she kills him. Yawn.

She drops the bat and walks up for a kiss. Then, with Bone behind her back, she uses her trusty cat-o’-nine-tails to whip him off the roof. And then Batman can’t help himself! He throws his grappling hook to save him.

While he does this, Catwoman slips away. She cries in a corner somewhere, feeling sorry for herself. All her lack of carefulness has killed a friend, and now she has to answer for it.

Later, Catwoman returns to Lola’s apartment to collect her bookkeeping books to throw into a fire. “I try to tell myself it’s so she won’t be found out. That she won’t be remembered as a criminal. By my heightened level of denial isn’t so vast that I can’t see the real truth… I’m here to save my own ass.”

Yeah, no shit, idiot. Lola is still on the floor. Selina needs to remove every scrap of anything in the apartment that could possibly tie Lola to her. Pictures, cards, gum wrappers with “SELINA IS MY FRIEND” written on them. As she burns photos of both of them having a great time, she cries. Oh does she cry all right. She cries big time.

She leans down to the corpse and apologizes. Then she kisses her on the cheek. For the first time, she notices footsteps down the hall. She thinks it’s Batman, but then the cops bust into the apartment while she’s bent over her friend.

“Cops. And I’m here. Burning evidence over a dead body. Yeah, this can’t look good.”