Prez, we hardly knew ye.
Catwoman quietly vanished from the scene in 2016 even as DC Rebirth started to shine a new spotlight on many iconic characters. Tom King and Mikel Janin are beginning to reverse that trend with their current Batman story arc, but there's certainly a dearth of new Selina Kyle stories that needs to be addressed. That's a void Catwoman: Election Night #1 absolutely fails to fill.
The main story in Election Night attempts to put a Gotham-flavored spin on the current US Presidential race, with Penguin filling in for Donald Trump and a woman tied to Selina's past serving as the Hillary Clinton character. And just in case readers can't pick up on the blatantly obvious allegory, Penguin spouts lines like "Make Gotham great again!" and rambles about building a wall around Gotham. That's the degree of subtlety readers can expect from this painfully clunky and hamfisted story. Worse, it never feels like the script has anything meaningful to say about the Presidential race or the state of American politics in general.
Election Night fails to offer any clever political satire, but it's not particularly successful when it comes to showcasing Catwoman, either. The dialogue is stilted, and many of the scenes rehash beats we've seen in countless Catwoman tales of the past. even the efforts to explore Selina's childhood living in an orphanage do little to spark an emotional reaction.
Not that the art is much help in that regard. Shane Davis renders most of the story (with a few scattered pages handled by Igor Vitorino), and while his Jim Lee-esque style is perfectly fine for the more action-oriented scenes, the dialogue-driven scenes often feel stiff and lifeless. Vitorino's cramped panel structure in the final few pages is also a problem, making an already rushed conclusion that much more hurried and unsatisfying.
It would be easy enough for readers to ignore this forgettable, misguided comic if not for the fact that it also includes a backup story which serves as the finale to Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell's Prez. It's a shame that DC didn't follow through on their pledge to publish a second Prez mini-series, and the fact that fans have to pay $4.99 to read a 12-page finale is like rubbing salt in the wound.
This story is certainly entertaining, if not exactly the definitive conclusion to Beth's story readers might be hoping for. It really reads like a condensed, standalone issue from the larger series. But this story does counteract the main Catwoman tale by illustrating exactly how to satirize modern American politics. It explores the many hoops Beth has to jump through in trying to accomplish anything with an obstinate Congress weighing her down. Along the way, Russell and Caldwell spoof American gun culture and the ruling elite's prudish fear of sex and birth control. It's funny, brilliantly illustrated and a reminder that Prez deserved a much larger audience than it found last year.
The Verdict
This issue is nothing if not a study in contrasts and an example of both the right and wrong way to handle political satire in comics. The main Catwoman feature is a dull, lifeless, painfully unsubtle slog, while the Prez backup is a great throwback to a series that deserved much more love. Unfortunately, that backup alone can't justify the price of admission here.
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