She's not Catwoman. No, she's Tarpé Mills' Miss Fury, from the Golden Age comic strip of the same name.
Those partial panels are all from Sunday strips form the mid-to-late-40s, and were all scanned from the Trina Robbins-edited Miss Fury: Sensational Sundays 1944-1949 (IDW;2011), which I just started reading.
Miss Fury is really the heiress Marla Drake, who disguised herself using a panther skin her African explorer uncle gave her. Though not in the images above, the panther skin costume sometimes includes a tail, as you can see in this comic book cover from 1942:
Miss Fury debuted in 1941.Batman's villainess Selina "Catwoman" Kyle appeared a year earlier in 1940's Batman #1, but at the time she was an un-costumed jewel thief called simply "The Cat."
When she first donned a costume, it was merely a furry cat's head mask topping off a dress.
My question is, when did Catwoman first start wearing a Miss Fury-like cat-suit? As far as I can tell from the comics I've read, she didn't start dressing similarly to Miss Fury—in a dark, skintight catsuit with a cowl and ears—until 1987's Batman story arc "Batman: Year One"
and the 1989 Catwoman miniseries that expanded on the post-Crisis origin story Frank Miller's "Year One" suggested
She kept that suit until about 1992-1993, when she got a new, purple costume with thigh-high boots and a hole in the back of the cowl to allow her regrown, long hair to flow behind her. The 1992 film Batman Returns outfitted her in a black, Fury-esque catsuit, albeit one with very visible white stitching zigzagging it.
When Batman: The Animated Series began, its Catwoman started in a gray costume similar to a more highly accessorized version of the late-80s, early-90s costume. When the characters were all redesigned for the show's 1997 fourth season, however, in which the was retitled The New Batman Adventures, the animated Catwoman resembled Fury exactly:
In retrospect, it's fairly obvious that Miss Fury had a strong influence on Catwoman as the more popular character evolved, eventually quite heavily influencing her design. I'm curious as to when exactly Catwoman started dressing...Fury-esque, I guess.
As far as I can tell, it didn't seem like she ditched the purple dress with green cape ensemble for an actual cat-suit until the late-80s, but then, the Bronze Age of Bat-comics is pretty much a black hole to me. Can anyone date a skintight Catwoman costume with a cowl to any earlier than the "Batman: Year One" story arc...?
3 comments:
Yeah outside of the live-action 60s tv series, no cowl. There was a green version of the Julie Newmar costume, with a mask (not a full head mask --designed by Infantino?), followed by the go-go era (late 60s-early70s), followed by a return to the classic full dress costume which she wore right through the 80s until David Mazzuchelli/Frank Miller returned to the 60s tv-style catsuit in Year 1.
I found this page: http://blog.newsarama.com/2011/01/21/agent-of-s-t-y-l-e-gotham-chic-with-catwoman/
But the images aren't loading for me.
I ent looking for, and found, this page from the big tabloid "Secret Origins of the Super-Villains" I had as a kid. No Emma Peel outfit with cowl there.
Here is a more complete overview.
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