December 1965: Catwoman Out of the Bag

You frequently see it reported that, because DC was gun shy about the Comics Code, the Caped Crusader’s archenemy Catwoman didn’t appear from Detective Comics 211 in 1954 until Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane 70 in 1966.

But that’s actually not true — here she is in Batman 176, a reprint giant from December 1965.

The issue republishes Catwoman's Grasshopper Chase, a Batman Sunday newspaper story from 1946.

DC Comics was initially a little leery about reprinting 1940s’ comic book material because somebody there considered it “crude,” but the newspaper strips were produced for an audience of both children and adults, and were of a relatively high quality.

This issue appeared on the newsstands in October 1965, just three months before the Batman TV series would premiere and bring Catwoman back front and center.

 In his memoir The Boy Who Loved Comics, Michael Uslan explained, “It was that same very engine of creative destruction, the Comics Code Authority, that forced DC to retire from comics for years any Bat-villains who seemed too gruesome or menacing, including Two Face and the Scarecrow. It also meant the demise of Catwoman, because she was all the bad things comic book characters were now not allowed to be: a female in a major role; a possessor of no fewer than two exaggerated body parts; a sexy, stacked, bad girl who carried a whip and wore a dress slit up to what my dad would refer to as ‘her pupic,’ suggesting a topic that would give Dr. Wertham overheated conundrums... erotic S&M.”

Uslan noted that, while working at DC in the 1970s, he read a copy of their in-house comic book code, circa 1947, which specifically discouraged the use of females in prominent roles.

“Catwoman was doomed for a generation,” Uslan said. “Any sneak peaks we were given later in the 60s either was some watered-down new thing, or they would use a reprint in an annual of an old syndicated comic strip because comic strips were considered more generally acceptable to family fare than comic books were at that time.”