
Phil Noto's artistic response to a mind-blowingly offensive Catwoman image by Greg Horn (below), drawn by Noto for comics writers Gail Simone (Secret Six) and Marjorie Liu (X-23).

Apr 11th 2011 By: Laura Hudson


This is a good thing dammit! Real guys like this! Only the un-laid sissy-men would think this is bad. The "guys" who think this is offensive need to get some for real.
May 15 2012 at 11:03 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI think some of you are overanalysing here. This a classic pornography type pose from recent years. The guy has been watching way too much clearly. She is not licking milk and batman is not holding his carton. Do you catch my drift? It is about as sexist as it gets. Horn, appropriately named, will no doubt try to justify the logic behind it by saying that catwoman is using the sexual tension to manipulate batman, but that doesn't explain why she has the body of small girl and the breasts of a plasticly enhanced pornostar. And why does Batman look on undisturbed as if this something they do on a regular basis. I wouldn't be surprised if the exact pose isn't stolen from a Sasha Gray film. Not art, Just visual wankage. Crap cheesy colouring too. This is to graphic art, what blow up dolls are to sculpture.
May 16 2011 at 9:54 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyI personally think this is horribly offensive and should be stripped from shelves, dumpsters and the internet before it can cause anyone's retinas further harm.
Assuming we're talking on a stylistic and artistic level, that is. "She-cat" could be posing naked and BlackBatman could be in an assless leather SS uniform for all I care.
Oh, please. The outrage over this illustration assumes that we don't know who these characters are. Batman, badass that he is, is possibly the LEAST sexual character ever drawn. He has a one-track mind, and never, ever gets side-tracked by sex. Catwoman, on the other hand, never shy, knows this about him and enjoys trying to provoke him. No one is being "submissive" in this picture; anyone who's not busy trying to project his or her own agenda onto these characters should be able to tell by the look on her face.
April 17 2011 at 4:32 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down ReplyOffensive? Very much so.
Catwoman? Not one bit. That is She-Cat. The photo says that itself in the newspaper. "She-Cat strikes again".
The manner of this is all wrong.
If they incorporated some tongue-in-cheek cheesecake elements into this, it would be perfectly fine, because we would understand that the characters themselves are involved in some cheeky roleplay. The angle at which Batman stands in relation to Catwoman overpowers her rather violently. His grim expression coupled with alleyway setting also robs the image of any playfulness and normailises the sexualisation of women, and particularly in submissive contexts.
I believe that an artist such as Terry Dodson, Adam Hughes or J. Scott Campbell could have pulled this off, because they understand that this kind of subject should be portrayed in an all-in-good-fun, Bettie Page-style, sub-dom harmless relationship.
Also, this picture is incongruous with the relationship of the characters. As far as I know, Dick Grayson and Selina Kyle have never had that intimate a relationship.
You will find a possible source for Greg Horn's Catwoman image here: http://www.jamesart.com/kitty.html -- it's an erotic sculpture by Mike James. The site is NSFW, so beware. I'm not going to outright accuse him of stealing an image, but the similarities stretch the bounds of coincidence.
April 13 2011 at 8:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplySomeone buy that man a book on perspective.
April 13 2011 at 2:40 PM Report abuse Permalink +1 rate up rate down Reply1. Yes, a great deal of comics art is similarly offensive. That art is also reprehensible and has little bearing on whether or not we find this particular image offensive or not, save to contribute to a body of evidence supporting a culture in certain comics toxic towards women.
2. Yes, the anger this picture has created is insignificant—unless you have ever encountered difficulty or hardship in your life because of people who see this kind of thing as trivial. Then it's deeply, overwhelmingly painful.
3. It doesn't matter how "realistic" in terms of representing real women this picture is. It doesn't matter how true to the character this picture is. Those are separate issues. The fact is, this picture is offensive because it publicly promotes unproductive gender roles. Women acting submissive in a private context do not promote unproductive gender roles. Oversexualized female characters far away from a sexual context do.
I've never understood the fury over this pic, other then the fury at the terrible art of course, it's not canon...not from a comic. If an artist wants to draw it he can do whatever he wants, google catwoman and you'll find much worse.
The anger created by this pic is just silly comic fans writing on silly forums on the internet, no big deal.

A countdown of the must-read books of the year.
37 Comments