Catwoman (DC Comics) in 2002

Catwoman

(Selina Kyle) (Gisted profile)


Context

  • This gisted entry was an early effort to assemble a Catwoman profile. The stats are based on a specific era, but the biography covers her whole career. I wouldn’t organise the information this way nowadays.
  • This information applies to Selina after she starts psychotherapy with Dr. Leslie Thompkins, after the “death” of Selina Kyle and Catwoman. It stops a few months after the war against Black Mask ends – further events are not factored in.
  • We have started a chronological series with the Catwoman (1940s version) profile.
  • More generally, you should check our guide to our Catwoman character profiles. It show everything in a compact fashion.
  • There are continuity issues when it comes to Selina’s life, and assembling a definite biography is impossible due to those. I’ve favoured the version of events depicted in the Her Sister’s Keeper graphic novel, but this is a personal choice.

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Background

  • Real Name: Selina Kyle.
  • Marital Status: Single.
  • Known Relatives: Magdalene (sister), Simon (brother-in-law, deceased), Unnamed parents (deceased).
  • Group Affiliation: None.
  • Base Of Operations: Gotham’s East End.
  • Height: 5’7” Weight: 125 lbs.
  • Eyes: Mesmerizing green. Hair: Jet black.


Powers and Abilities

Selina Kyle is among the very best thieves, fighters and acrobats in the world. Her agility, sense of balance and reflexes are probably at the highest level that can exist in a human being. Her physical strength is extraordinary for a 125 pounds person – she is able to snap chains and rip off protection grids from walls. Catwoman can credibly fight even martial arts grandmasters such as Batman.

She can routinely pull off the sort of complex theft one can see in the best heist movies – sometimes all by herself, without a crew.

Her combat skills are an eclectic mix, largely relying on her extraordinary speed. Kyle can at that point execute techniques and moves faster than even legendary fighter Ted Grant. Grant, who has always helped Kyle formalise her street-fighting skills, has trained her in Jeet Kune Do – a fast, iconoclastic, pragmatic style that fits Catwoman well.


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Grant has also trained Kyle in featherweight boxing ; other instructors have taught her various styles (particularly various jiu jitsu styles) and she has developed her own style of acrobatic combat.

Catwoman seldom runs into opponents who can challenge her in hand-to-hand combat, even when fighting extraordinary vigilantes and criminals.

Selina’s most apparent asset is her extraordinary beauty. She doesn’t just have a killer body and perfect features – she also has tremendous charm. She excels at social engineering and seduction, and it is common for people interested in women to be quite distracted by her presence.

Her appeal also works on all sorts of felines, from fluffy friendly house cats to cranky black panthers. Cats just like her and trust her.

Though less immediately visible that her flawless curves, her exceptional intelligence is even more of an asset. She processes information very quickly and efficiently, and excels at thinking outside of the litter box. Typical Catwoman plans – even improvised ones – tend to be brilliant, unusual, daring and relying on her ability to predict the actions of her foes.

Gallery of Catwoman costumes

Despite her class and poise, she’s no lady and will ruthlessly exploit the weaknesses of her foes, such as the sense of duty and obligations of police and vigilantes.

A recent (at the time of this writeup) example was to dupe the police into laying siege to the building from which she wanted to steal. Expecting a full-blown situation, the police followed procedure and cut the building’s power, and Catwoman manoeuvred the building’s security into depleting their fuel supply before they could fully realise what was going on.


History

Selina Kyle is a self-made woman. She started life with next to no assets, and emerged from awful squalor and misery to claw her way toward freedom. She and her sister Magdalene are from Gotham’s East End, where they mostly grew up on the street. Their mother died by suicide shortly after Magdalene’s birth, and their father was an abusive alcoholic.

When social workers made their way to them, Mr. Kyle soon lost custody of his daughters. They were taken away to an institution called Sprang Hall. Sprang wasn’t much of an improvement over the street, and little Selina fought viciously and frequently to protect her kid sister from both juveniles and the staff.

When she was about 11, her behaviour led to being sent to another institution, Sea Gate, far from Magdalene.

Sea Gate was even worse, being run by a bitter, corrupt director obsessed with the harshest possible discipline. The director tried to break the deeply rebellious Selina, to no avail, and ended up throwing her in solitary.

Now about 13, Selina discovered that the director was embezzling from Sea Gate and boasted about her findings. To prevent her from talking to the cops she was drugged unconscious, crammed into a burlap sack and thrown into the ocean. The kid survived, though, and blackmailed the director into letting her go and destroying all records about Selina Kyle.

Selina was back on the street. She joined a community of urchins and pickpockets in the East Side, called the Alleytown Gang and run by an old woman called Mama Fortuna. Kyle was already a proficient child thief and street fighter, and honed her skills with the Gang.

However she soon buckled under the ruthless authority of Fortuna. She eventually left despite the amount of money she was making for the gang.

Streetwalker

Out of a gang and about 15, Selina had to resort to prostitution to earn money. For a time she was protected by a slightly older prostitute named Sylvia. At one point, when a car full of men approached them, Sylvia barred Selina from taking these customers as she suspected it would be too dangerous for her protégée.

She was all too right. Sylvia was severely beaten and tortured, as the men knew the police wouldn’t bother. She survived and Selina was safe, but the Sylvia was left traumatized.

A year later, Selina’s father died from alcohol poisoning. Meanwhile, Maggie became a nun in a Gotham convent.

When she was roughly 17, Selina fell in love with Stan, a pimp. Stan often abused and beat her. One such beating left Ms. Kyle badly wounded in a back alley. The nuns from the nearby convent found her, and asked a police detective they knew to help her.

Detective Flannery didn’t get much out of the defiant prostitute, despite being actually willing to work to defend sex workers. Nevertheless, he gave her the address of a teacher and encouraged her to seek training in self-defence.

Wild cat strut

Kyle initially refused to follow the advice of a cop, but her pimp Stan soon gave her a kinky cat suit to service a john. Selina came to suspect that the customer was some sick freak and not a regular S&M customer, and grudgingly decided to check the man recommended by Flannery. Though she was expecting more lousy squalor, this encounter would change her life.

The instructor turned out not to be some cheap loser. It was Ted Grant — undefeated heavyweight boxing champion, world class martial artist, reputed teacher sought out by the best (including billionaire Bruce Wayne) and then retired from being the costumed hero Wildcat.

Grant took a liking to Kyle’s fierce independence. He taught her free of charge. Despite her defiant attitude, Selina soon proved to be one of the most gifted students Grant ever trained.

At that point, it was Selina’s turn to take a younger prostitute under her protection. Her protégée was Holly Robinson aka Holly-Go-Nightly, who was but 13.

Learning to fly

Selina’s early lessons in the martial arts took place as Bruce Wayne came back to Gotham and started working as a vigilante, though he had yet to conceive his Batman identity. Trawling through the streets, the incognito Wayne intervened to prevent a pimp from hitting a kid. The pimp was Stan, and the kid — Holly — stabbed Wayne in the thigh to defend her boss.

As the situation degenerated, Kyle intervened. However Wayne, already a world-class fighter, knocked her out with but one punch. Humiliated, Selina started training much harder with Ted. When a john gave her a cat-of-nine-tails, she demanded that Ted train her in using it as a weapon rather than as a fetish toy.

As she worked with Grant, Selina encountered another older man who served as one of her teachers and mentors. Only known as Stark, the master criminal burst in one night as she was with a john called Tony the Toucan. He killed him as revenge for having double-crossed him.

Kyle and Stark took a liking to each other and eventually became lovers, with Stark agreeing to have Kyle work as his junior partner and teach her. Selina’s relationship with Stark, one of Gotham’s top freelance criminal talent, was her secret and she continued to work as a hooker to protect it.

Selina had her second encounter with Bruce Wayne at that time. She was among the crowd who assembled and witnessed the impressive escape of Batman from the police. Inspired by the primal, seemingly unstoppable Batman, Selina decided to don the cat suit she’d been given as a costumed identity.

I shall become… a cat

She quit her job by giving her pimp a severe beating in the exact side alley where he had previously left her for dead. After she left Stan unconscious, Selina unmasked – but coincidentally ran into her sister just at this point. Selina fled.

Magdalene tried to investigate to find her sister. However, as a nun in the red light district she was less than discreet and Stan decided to use her to get his revenge. He kidnapped her to draw Selina into a trap, and the situation got out of hand. Stan and Magdalene would have fallen to their death, but Batman came from nowhere and saved Maggie’s life.

Shaken by meeting her sister, having killed Stan, and the sheer ferocity she demonstrated while wearing the cat costume, Selina fled again.

Kyle did not intend to ever wear the catsuit again, as it made her unhinged. But another calamity befell her when Holly was beaten by a respected police captain with well-hidden sexual neuroses. Selina put the cat costume on and would likely have killed the cop had Batman not intervened again.

He convinced her not to murder the captain, succeeding in large part due to the obvious chemistry between him and the cat-clad woman.

Sensing that Batman might be one of the very rare men she could trust, Selina flirted with him, kissed him… then sucker-punched him and walked away to make it clear that he had no power over her. Holly recovered, and decided to stay with Maggie at the convent.

Cat power

Selina, now 18, embarked on a solo career as a thief preying on feared East End criminal bosses. However, some of her thefts were attributed to the mysterious Batman.

Out of sheer ego and cattiness Selina — now called Catwoman — took huge risks to steal from Gotham’s senior crime lord the Roman. She then slashed his face with her claws so the thefts would not be claimed to be the work of the Batman. Ironically, she only got out of this caper alive thanks to the intervention of Batman, who was coincidentally present as he was trying to take down the Roman.

Catwoman's purple and green pre-Crisis costume

As Catwoman, Selina later double-crossed Stark during a diamond heist, grabbing the bag while Stark narrowly escaped capture. Stark had to leave Gotham for years, but became a feared nationwide operator, thief and killer. Though Selina genuinely loved Stark, she apparently needed to prove to herself that she wasn’t dependent on him and that he had no power over her.

A very successful thief — especially after she got Stark’s diamonds — the former street kid, small-time thief and hooker established herself as a debutante during her early 20s. Her beauty and poise were the talk of Gotham’s high society.

She even got her paws on Gotham’s most eligible bachelor, Bruce Wayne. However, it was just a fling and did not last long due to their respective secrets. Selina used her society girl act to gather intelligence and case sites, making her even more unstoppable as a thief.

Though Batman was supposedly hounding her, their relationship was ambiguous, and he occasionally assisted her, as was the case when Catwoman was kidnapped by Mister Handsome.

During her early career, Kyle occasionally got sucked back into East End business. Her former protector, the prostitute Sylvia, convinced her to commit a theft along with her so she could retire – since Sylvia considered that Selina owed her. The heist went bad. Catwoman was forced to leave Sylvia to be arrested, and Sylvia blamed Selina for everything that had befallen her since they met.

Partly as a reaction to this, Selina took a new protégé – a streetwalker from Flagstaff nicknamed Arizona. Arizona remained with Selina for a few years to cobble herself a new life. Though living with Kyle was risky (the girl only narrowly survived the bombing of Selina’s apartment), Arizona was successful. She eventually could leave for safer pastures.

Meanwhile, Selina’s sister Margaret had a crisis of faith, left the convent, married a man named Simon and moved to California.

Stray cat strut

Catwoman was at that point a top-notch, confirmed operator and adventurer. She started working internationally, planning and performing major heists. She also often worked as an anti-hero of sorts, acting on her personal sense of justice but always keeping an eye out for number one. Among her numerous adventures, she :

  • Got involved in Santa Priscan intrigues and assassinations.
  • Was blackmailed into working as a special operative for the government.
  • Collaborated with the “Bat Squad” to find an antidote to the Ebola-like virus ravaging Gotham.
  • Played complex games of alliance and revenge against Batman.
  • Stopped a copycat burglar (another former Sea Gate juve).
  • Dated a police detective who turned out to be a serial killer.
  • Allied for a while with the Huntress and acted as something like a vigilante.
  • Etc..

Catwoman black leather costume with goggles

Catwoman was in Gotham City during the earthquake, escaping alive despite being trapped underground for hours. She fought against villains who would have made the situation worse for the beleaguered Gothamites, but also continued her criminal operations.

In Las Vegas, she stole $3M thanks to Wildcat (Ted Grant) then left him to hang. The situation turned ugly and Selina spent most of the loot to locate and rescue Grant. She then gifted him a luxurious all-expenses-paid vacation so her teacher would forgive her.

Catwoman also clashed with the Joker. She defeated him with Batman’s help and made sure he was securely imprisoned – by breaking into the highest security part of the Arkham Asylum and dropping him in his cell.

Stealing New York City

When Gotham became a no man’s land, Selina left for Paris. She eventually came back to the US, and more precisely Manhattan. She blackmailed the CEO of a company into making her the VP, then faked her own murder and framed the CEO for it, thus freeing the position.

She then proceeded to play the stock market, cheating and acquiring insider knowledge to sextuple the worth of the company, then was made CEO on the strength of her results. After having thus stolen an entire company, she decided she would steal an even bigger prize – New York City. She ran for Mayor.

Her campaign went wrong, attracting the attention of assassins such as Gunhawk and Lady Vic. This led to a complex scheme by the Trickster (who successfully manipulated her and made the situation untenable) and increasing heat to a point where her insider trading feats started being traced back to her. Selina was forced to fake her death and disappear.

Woman in chains

Later during the No Man’s Land crisis, Catwoman — who could easily defeat the blockade around Gotham in either direction — again worked with the Bat Squad. This apparently brought bad luck, though.

Catwoman was framed for a theft, and despite Batman’s advice Commissioner Gordon became determined to catch her once and for all. Gordon’s intricate set-up worked, and Catwoman was jailed as Jane Doe with a two-year sentence. Given her long list of enemies, she was placed in solitary. Catwoman started going crazy from the imprisonment, and her mad rush to escape triggered a prison riot.

In the chaos, Selina was bushwhacked by Dr. Harleen Quinzell, who after passing herself as a police negotiator slit her throat and kidnapped her. Using large doses of potent chemicals, she forced Catwoman to commit crimes and defy Gordon. Catwoman eventually beat the drugs and escaped.

Catwoman (Selina Kyle) style and design sheet

While making her comeback by blackmailing Gotham’s Mayor over his narcotics use, Catwoman accidentally ran into Gordon – who right at that point was shot by a third person. Though everybody blamed Catwoman and the Bat Squad hunted her down, she eventually cleared her name.

This was but a respite. She clashed again with her foes Scarecrow and Two-Face, who also manipulated her using chemicals, then was reportedly killed in an explosion by Deadshot, who had been hired by Gotham’s Mayor for payback. The Mayor did not believe that Catwoman was truly dead, and hired investigator Slam Bradley to watch for her return.

Selina’s big score

Meanwhile, Selina started working on a heist job that was both highly lucrative — $24M in cash — and extremely difficult to pull off. A fast, heavily guarded train, 4 cars long, with the cash in 30 bags and no stops between starting point and final destination. She knew that she could not pull the heist off alone, and decided to contact Stark, whom she had not seen in years.

Stark agreed to go along with his old, traitorous flame – both out of nostalgia and for his own reasons. He and a young, brilliant criminal techie named Jeff and an old friend of Selina’s, a fence by the name of Swiftie, helped to perfect the plan for the heist.

The heist was brilliantly executed, but was second-guessed by a French Canadian criminal named Laperier. The ruthless Laperier killed Swifty and Jeff. Stark and Laperier then killed each other.

Losing Stark was very hard on Selina. She realized that the life as a master criminal only provided her with empty thrills while killing off those for whom she cared. Although she professed not to know the meaning of the word “love”, she clung to Stark’s corpse during the whole night before slowly letting it slide into the river as the dawn came. She formed the project to go back to her roots in the East End.

Stark’s death marked the end of the Thrill of Adventure motivation for Selina Kyle.

War for the East End

Meanwhile, Slam Bradley was doing a superb job. He established that Selina Kyle hadn’t been killed in New York, and that the corpse in the coffin was not hers. He then guessed she was actually Catwoman, and was well on his way to tracking her down when she decided to meet him.

However, Bradley had come to empathize with Selina. He admired her guts, class and hard life much more than he respected the Mayor. He decided to burn his findings, and became her friend.

Re-evaluating her life and goals, Selina took the difficult decision to ask Batman for help, and started psychotherapy sessions with Dr. Leslie Thompkins. Kyle originally thought that her unease was caused by the numerous mind-altering drugs she had been subjected to during her career, but her blood work came up normal.

Dr. Thompkins helped her realise that her problems were psychological. Kyle yearned to come back to her roots, to fix her relationship with her sister, to fix the environment she grew up in and to resume being Catwoman. Catwoman reinvented herself as a vigilante for the still-squalid and decaying East End of Gotham City.

The returned Catwoman established herself as the new mistress of the East End. She both put an end to those criminal activities inflicting the worst damage to the locals – including some of the most corrupt police activities – and funnelled stolen money into revitalising the area.

She was reunited with Holly Robinson, who had left the convent and returned to the street – and this time Selina succeeded in turning Holly’s life around as she had done for Arizona. Holly started running the informants and helper networks working for Catwoman, which were largely made up of street urchins, and would even eventually act as Catwoman in Selina’s absence.

However, it soon became evident that the power behind much of East End crime was the psychotic, ultra-violent, sadistic crimelord Black Mask. Black mask became determined to eliminate Catwoman. Furthermore one of his lieutenants was the former prostitute Sylvia, who knew who Catwoman was and could thus target her loved ones.

A gangland war erupted, pitting Black Mask’s forces against Catwoman and her few allies.

The brutal clashes were devastating. Several of Selina’s key projects (such as repairing the cathedral and building a community centre) were firebombed. Magdalene Kyle was left catatonic and traumatised by torture, and her husband murdered.

Holly was nearly killed and underwent some harrowing experiences, including being forced to shoot Sylvia dead to save Selina. Slam Bradley was badly wounded several times, and Black Mask fell to his apparent death.

In the wake of the war for the East End, Selina took Holly on a road trip to help her deal with the trauma of having killed Sylvia. She had Holy trained in self-defence and athletics by Ted Grant. When she returned, Catwoman finished establishing herself as the queen and kingpin of he East End, providing protection at no cost.

However, ambitious criminals then attempted to move in to fill the void left by the Black Mask. The war for the East End resumed. Though not comparable to the manic devastation wrought by Black Mask, those attacks (and in particular a Mafia attempt to take over led by the mercenary Zeiss) are very serious threats.


Description

The lenses of her goggles have unusual reflective properties, like the eyes of a cat. They normally appear yellow, but shift to green for night vision and to red for thermal vision.


Personality

The key themes to keep in mind for Catwoman are :

Freedom

That’s the core theme. Selina is the girl who grew up in squalor and poverty, and built herself into a woman who does whatever she wants, obeys no-one and is constrained by nothing. Catwoman will never ever be caught, restrained, controlled, dependant – or prohibited from doing something. And if she wants to have something, she will have it.

Catwoman black and white drawing by Jim Lee

This passion for freedom is nearly pathological and overrides anything else. If Selina is in love she’d rather hurt the person than have him have any power over her, and in the few instances when she actually was jailed she eventually went hysterical, like a caged wild animal. She will viscerally reject anything that means that she doesn’t get to do what she wants.

Catwoman will always, always make her own rules and then take pleasure in changing them at a whim – since she won’t obey even her own rules.

This has resulted in a variety of roles over the years. From street urchin to sex worker, from sex worker to protector, from protector to thief, and now from thief to protector.

The Catwoman identity is the manifestation of this need for freedom. With the mask and costume Catwoman is even freer than Selina Kyle could ever be. Selina needs to be Catwoman much like Bruce Wayne needs to be Batman, and prolonged periods where she wasn’t Catwoman were harmful to her well-being.

Trust and privacy

A corollary to this need for freedom is that Catwoman trusts very little, and should be trusted by no-one. Being less than self-reliant is anathema to her, making her less free and more vulnerable.

She has a bit of a safe zone with some friends who cannot hurt her (such as Holly or Slam) and whom she can thus trust to an atypical extent. But this may change if Selina ever feels that might get some sort of hold on her. She’s not above hurting others just to show she shouldn’t be trusted – since the trust of another is a denial of her freedom.

Catwoman is also very private, hard to read and unpredictable. Even her closest friend, Holly, can never knows what Selina is really thinking. She’s mysterious and has a certain catlike aloofness when it comes to her privacy. Privacy is something she was denied a lot as a kid, and is indispensable to protect both her freedom and her safety.

Generally, for much of her life, Selina has been a loner. She just doesn’t need company and can function perfectly well living alone, though she has nothing against having friendships… within limits.

Competence

There can be no freedom without strength and intelligence, and Catwoman has those by the shedload. Her strengths have been noted previously. As to her intelligence it could be called ruthlessly efficient. She’s a hardened criminal, a former super-villain, grew up in a violent and harsh environment and can evidence a rather nasty temper.

When pushed — and it may not take that much — Selina can be remarkably devious, manipulative and brutal. Her plans are crafty and cunning, and employ the strengths and weaknesses of her opponents against them.

Her schemes rely on careful casing, preparation and anticipation, since she’s originally a thief specialising in high-ticket items. And, sometimes, they rely on frantic but generally graceful improvisation when things go thoroughly off-script.

Catwoman is certainly not infallible – especially when she clashes with extremely competent people.&emspBut when she’s working in one of her areas of expertise, very little is as it seems, everybody plays a part (even if they don’t know it – especially if they don’t know it) and Catwoman herself is not bound by any moral constraints she doesn’t feel like respecting that day.

Seeking Justice vs. Thrill of Adventure

This era is something of a mid-life crisis — though Catwoman, being a comic book character, looks like she’s at most a very healthy 30. The death of Stark has shocked her out of being a self-centred, venal adrenaline enthusiast and she now needs to do something that matters.

This manifested as a genuine commitment toward protecting ’her people‘ — the dregs of Gotham, the East End — from constant abuse and poverty. This decision was in large part inspired by watching Leslie Thompkins’s work. She derives undeniable satisfaction from it, and it has thus occupied those important years of her life.

Her methods are varied and often exist in very grey areas (especially when she clashed with the thoroughly rotten East Side police precincts), but her goal is genuinely positive. Helping Holly turn her dismal life around is a small-scale example of what Selina wants to do.

Selina’s goals for the East Side are couched in streetwise terms and in establishing herself as, pretty much, a one-woman mob. She’s one of those who know that crime and exploitation will not go away, but establishing her authority as a ’clean’ kingpin is the best way to keep the area working while doing damage control.

And knowing that she’s feared, respected and seen as a positive influence is something that she can appreciate.

However, though her Motivation has changed and the war for the East End has been brutal and harrowing, Selina retains many aspects of her previous drive. These include her sultry sensuality and strong taste for danger and excitement. What Catwoman considers “fun”, however, usually involves high velocities, hails of bullets, split-second planning, outrageous risk-taking and death-defying stunts.

Either that or a four-figures bill for the evening.

Catwoman isn’t quite addicted to adrenaline, but without the rush she grows bored – and what it takes nowadays to excite her is straight out of the tour de force scene in an action blockbuster.

Men

The vast majority of Selina’s interactions with men are deceitful. She relies on her beauty and her mighty charm and wit to manipulate them and get what she actually wants – such as a sack of cash or something pretty and worth tens of thousands.

Catwoman is torn on the subject of love, which is one subject where her love of freedom blends into fear of attachment. To her, actual love is rare, precious and often ill-fated.

She tends to mostly form romantic or friendly relationships with older, classier old-school gentlemen such as Stark, Ted Grant or Slam Bradley. But even then the balance of power may became an issue and result in her clawing at her man.

Though Batman is one of the few great loves of her life, she’s at that point conflicted over their very strong mutual attraction. Neither of them can handle it in an adult, responsible manner given their respective hang-ups and great strength of personality.

Her attraction toward Bruce confuses and angers her and her relationship with him fluctuates between love and violence, though it will occasionally settle around being friends with (considerable) benefits.

As with most things, Selina wants to just take the very best when it comes to men. But relationships are much more complicated than diamonds and rare cat statues, and her own issues may forever prevent her from finding what she wants.


Quotes

“If I wasn’t so mad right now, it would actually have been fun.”

“They may suspect me, but they’ll never see me. They may chase me, but they’ll never catch me. Never, never, ever catch me.”

“A pessimist would say that these guys are blocking my way. I try to be an optimist. They make a good blunt instrument.”

Selina : “It’s too late to leave it alone, Slam… There are people dying on those streets. *My* streets.”
Slam : “You know who you sound like, do you ?”

Batman : “Whose side is she on ?”
Maggie Kyle : “Like you. Her own.”



Game Stats — DC Heroes RPG

Tell me more about the game stats

Catwoman

Dex: 09 Str: 04 Bod: 05 Motivation: Seeking Justice
Int: 09 Wil: 08 Min: 07 Occupation: Vigilante
Inf: 08 Aur: 07 Spi: 07 Resources {or Wealth}: 008
Init: 030 HP: 090

Skills:
Acrobatics (Athletics, dodging, climbing): 10, Animal handling (Felines): 06, Artist (Actress): 07, Charisma: 08, Gadgetry (Identify gadget): 05, Martial artist: 09, Military science (Camouflage, demolition): 07, Thief: 11, Vehicles (Air, Land, Water): 08, Weaponry (Firearms, missile): 06, Weaponry (Melee): 09

Advantages:
Area Knowledge (Gotham City), Attractive, Confident (Holly), Iron nerves, Lightning Reflexes.

Connections:
Street (High), Underworld (Low), Batman (High), Slam Bradley (High), Dr. Leslie Thompkins (High), Various fences (High), Ted Grant (aka Wildcat I, High), Oracle (High – though sometimes she’s depicted as needing to use her Connection with Leslie to request favours from Oracle).

Drawbacks:
MIA toward Batman, Dependents (Maggie, Holly and Karon and their irregulars, Leslie Thompkins, her cats – collectively count as one), Eclipsed (Batman).

Equipment:

  • Cat o’ nine tails [BODY 04, EV 03 (05 w/STR), Stretching: 02, /STR/ 05, Limitation : Stretching doesn’t allow for fine manipulation (-2), /STR/ only for Grappling combat, and cannot be higher than normal STR plus one AP (-2). Nowadays she tends to use her Cat o’nine tails for roofs-running rather than a swingline].
  • Her costume includes GLOVE CLAWS [BODY 06, EV 02 (05 w/STR), Cling: 01], BOOT BLADES [BODY 06, EV 02 (05 w/STR), Cling: 01 – Note that the gloves and the boot blades allow her to reach a total of Cling: 02] and a COWL [BODY 03, Shade: 01, Thermal vision: 06, Ultra-vision: 06, Note : includes a cell phone].
  • Catwoman will routinely use specialized tools when she has to break in somewhere – explosives, K.O. gas spray, numerous electronic gadgets, rocket rail-sleds, parachute, rebreather, magnetic clamps, etc. None of those are Gadgets in the game sense – these are commercially available (if rare and restricted) pieces of equipment she usually uses once and disposes of.
  • Selina occasionally carried a powerful, contact Stun Gun inside one of her boots [BODY 04, Lightning (No Range): 09, Ammo: 01]. This last-recourse weapon is meant to take out superhumans. Selina seldom uses it given the downsides (having to make contact for several seconds, inability to regulate the output, etc.).

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Chiefly based on Catwoman v2 comics and the Selina’s Big Score graphic novel (DCU).

Helper(s): www.thebraveandthebold.com provided a base for some of the history — though all the texts were later rewritten with v1.2, part of the biographical information remains theirs. DC Heroes 3rd edition for stats reference- these stats are an evolution on official stats rather than being done from (cat) scratch. Frank Murdock for suggesting edits to the v1.1 texts when I burned out. Two banners from rapsheet.co.uk.