Warning: The Gotham War is a direct sequel to events in Knight Terrors, so Late Arrival Spoilers for that comic may be unmarked on this page.
Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War is a Fall 2023 Crossover between Batman (Chip Zdarsky) and Catwoman (2018). It is part of the Dawn of DC publishing initiative.
In the aftermath of his trip through the Multiverse thanks to Failsafe and the events of Knight Terrors, Batman finally succumbs to his exhaustion. When he wakes up, he finds Gotham a completely different place - violent crime is down 75 percent as villains such as Joker and Riddler have no henchmen to pull around for their plans. The source of this: Selina Kyle, having taken these desolate criminals and turn them into cat burglars with rules. The Bat-Family is divided on this, but when a criminal is killed, Batman is determined to stop this, Bat-Family be damned.
Story
- Knight Terrors: Batman #2 (Prelude)
- Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War - Battle Lines #1
- Batman #137
- Catwoman #57
- Batman #138
- Catwoman #58
- Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War - Red Hood #1-2
- Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War - Scorched Earth #1
Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War provides examples of:
- Bad Boss: A point towards Selina's program is that the other crime bosses of Gotham are unstable and abusive, so their job satisfaction with her is a lot higher.
- Batman himself is proving to be this, his Zur-En-Arrh personality considering the Batfamily as soldiers for his crusade rather than family and willing to fight them if they go against him.
- Bittersweet Ending: Vandal Savage's plan is stopped, but Catwoman seemingly perishes (but not really). Bruce uses this moment to break away from the greater Bat-Family and try to leave Gotham, begging Dick to let the others leave if they want to. However, one of Catwoman's trained goons accidentally stumbles into some of Bruce's Bat-Gear, making the connection.
- Brainwashing for the Greater Good: Batman kidnaps Jason and uses similar techniques that he used to program his backup personality to give him a fear response in stressful situations. It's in this way he hopes to prevent Jason from being active anymore, suggesting he move to Metropolis and live a quiet life.
- Crossover: The Batman books' crossover event for 2023 — though not an official Bat Family Crossover due to primarily taking place across the pages of Batman and Catwoman (with a pair of tie-in mini-series).
- Conflict Killer: Whatever fight Catwoman and Batman are on a trajectory towards about the efficacy of the latters plan is being complicated by Vandal's machinations entering the mix. Once he makes himself known and begins moving his plans along, Batman concludes they need to set aside their differences and come together to stop him.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: In Batman #137, the Bat-Family confronts Batman over his actions. He’s easily able to take them down save for Nightwing.
- The Darkness Gazes Back: Bruce confronts his Zur-En-Arrh personality in a dark mindscape, and the darkness has glowing eyes appear that Zur-En-Arrh denies are there when Bruce questions them.
- Didn't Think This Through:
- Selina's operation is intended to cut down on violence by having her followers steal without directly confronting their victims; "No score is worth your life, or anyone else's," as she says. However, there's no apparent consideration that it would still be possible for her thieves to end up on the wrong end of a gun, whether by police, the victims themselves, or, since the targets are the rich, by armed security. Especially in Gotham. None of the Batfamily even point this out when Selina informs them of what's going on. At the end of the first part of the story, one of Selina's followers is killed in a botched burglary.
- Batman, implicitly under the influence of Zur-En-Arrh, brainwashes Jason to have an acute fear response to high stress situations, in an attempt to force him out of the vigilante life. Much like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, this results in Jason being too paralyzed with fear to even move when endangered, risking his life even more.
- Evil Power Vacuum: Inverted and played with. With Batman's eight-week absence, Selina is able to recruit henchmen in this new line of work, depriving others of their help. Commissioner Montoya actually welcomes this as she believes Batman has been such a deterrent in fixing up Gotham instead of the help they need, criticizing her former boss Gordon's old habit of letting Batman handle things. Played straight in Batman #137, as Professor Pyg has gathered other villains to take back what they lost.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Much of the conflict is hinged on the fact that both Catwoman and Batman have their own logical points, but the results of putting their plans into action leave much to be desired;
- Selina's operation amounts to creating a protection ring of henchmen from other crime families to push them out and control Gotham's underworld with consent from law enforcement. On the surface, it's portrayed as effectively expanding Batman's inclination to look the other way for Selina to her cronies, and supposedly has worked out well for eight whole weeks during Batman's absence. More importantly, as far as both Selina and Renee Montoya are concerned, it got visible results in dropping violent crime in Gotham compared to Batman's decades of crusading. Essentially, despite Batman's objections, her plan worked...at least, initially. It soon becomes visible that even without Batman or law enforcement in the equation, the plan was never going to be indefinitely sustainable due to the simple fact the other crime bosses weren't going to simply let Catwoman take all their henchmen and territory without reprisal. More importantly, her operation was already undermined from the start due to being an unknowing pawn of Vandal Savage who used her as a method to clear out the criminal underworld so he can take over Gotham himself
- Batman is inherently opposed to allowing Selina's operation on principle, saying that allowing criminals to have free reign for any reason goes against his whole mission and that this operation would still lead to the same kind of tragedy he's lived through. And the very first day he is back, he's proven right when one of Selina's men is shot to death by a startled home owner. Subsequent revelations that not only are her henchmen were willing to take more violent measures than she allowed them but that her operation includes violent supervillains like the members of Victim Syndicate also make it clear that Selina's operation was never as clean as she wanted and that he would have had to intervene sooner or later. The problem with Batman is that he is very much Not Himself, due to his subconscious being under the influence of his Zurr-En-Arrh personality, and under his encouragement is taking such extreme methods to curb Selina's operation that the Bat family is acting to stop him due to how much collateral damage he's causing. Making matters worse is that Zurr-En-Arrh is using this as an opportunity to mold Bruce into his preferred kind of Batman, preying on Bruce's guilt over taking his sidekicks in as well as convincing him their "betrayal" in allowing Selina's operation to go on is a sign he should cut them out of his life and go back to being the loner crusader vigilante he used to be.
- The Batfamily themselves are split between whether they believe in Selina's plan or not, with Damien vocally opposed to it and the majority remaining as fence sitters due to the seeming effectiveness of her operation in cutting down violent crime. Jason Todd himself is working both sides at the same time, helping Selina in training and protecting her henchmen while effectively operating as a mole in her operation, and makes it clear that between Batman and Catwoman he has faith in neither of them. He not only lectures Batman on being a bigger control freak than usual, he also bluntly lectures Selina on how her plan can't work since her henchmen aren't poor people looking to feed their families but hardened criminals who worked for monsters like Professor Pyg and Joker, and that she has no way of enforcing their loyalty beyond a vague honor system. He outright states that he's only working with her so that when her scheme falls, he'll be there to clean up at ground zero. Nevertheless, the Batfamily is primarily positioned to oppose Batman here because they can tell something is wrong with him due to his radical shift in personality and sudden hostility to them. The big question they've not answered is how they plan to deal with Selina, if they plan to do anything to her at all.
- Heroic BSoD: Damian is left broken when he realizes Bruce just upped and left him behind, despite standing beside him earlier, effectively leaving him behind to be taken by the authorities had Dick and Tim not escaped their own binds.
- Heroic Sacrifice: When the meteor starts heading towards Earth because of Vandal Savage's actions, with Barbara unable to contact the wider heroic community for help, the only way to stop it is for Jason to take the Batplane up to crash into the meteor, preventing the impact by breaking it into smaller fragments.
- Hope Spot: At the end of Battle Lines, Bruce realizes how Selina's operation has actually lead to a decrease in crime around Gotham and almost seems to change his mind on opposing it. Then he finds one of Selina's thieves killed in a botched robbery, the sight of which enrages him enough to allow Zur-En-Arrh to sink his hooks in to him and convince him that Selina must be stopped.
- Hypocrite: The conflict is Batman refusing to compromise with criminals but he's working with the Riddler, even if he justifies it to himself by turning him in later, and the only reason Ed reached out to him is because he wants his henchmen back.
- Internal Reveal: The Bat-Family learns of Bruce's artificial hand in Battle Lines.
- Insult Friendly Fire: Selina's attempts to justify her plan to Batman and the Batfamily by claiming the rich essentially deserve to be robbed immediately triggers a visceral response from infamous wealthy orphan Bruce Wayne.
Catwoman: If you attack my people, all you're doing is increasing the kind of crimes you're so desperate to stop: the violent ones! We're just allowing the rich to be robbed. They can afford it. Hell, half of them never even earned their ludicrous wealth. They can give some up for -
Batman: My parents were "rich"!
- Knight Templar: The Zur-En-Arrh personality is a "pure Batman" who doesn't care about his allies past being soldiers providing the means to his ends and willing to give up on being Bruce entirely.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Dick flies into a magnificent anger when he finds out Bruce kidnapped Jason and injected in him a solution that fears him with fear whenever his adrenaline kicks up, pummeling Batman and only stops from going further when Tim pulls him off.
- Oh, Crap!: Bruce flies into a panic when he learns someone bought Wayne Manor. It gets worse when it turns out to be Vandal Savage.
- The Reveal:
- Marquise, Selina's second-in-command, is revealed to be Scandal Savage, Vandal Savage's daughter, making her return since the New 52.
- The real mover and shaker of the war between Batman and Catwoman is Vandal Savage himself, who seeks to reclaim various diamonds that came from the meteor that granted him his immortality, intending on granting a chosen few immortality while putting the henchmen back in the hands of the criminals and under their thumb away from the training Selena wanted to give them.
- Sanity Slippage: Bruce has been fighting for control of his mind since he unleashed Zur-En-Arrh back during the Failsafe incident. It seems that the criminal who dies ends up leading the other side to come back into play again. Catwoman #57 shows that Batman is further losing himself as he laments to his parents' grave that he lost their home and their money but he refuses to lose the Bat-Family and Batman #138 clearly shows that Zur-En-Arrh is whispering to him in his mind.
- Time Skip: The story takes place eight weeks after the events of Knight Terrors.
- To Be Lawful or Good: The main drive of the story is this — Catwoman's plan for Gotham's lingering henchmen is to give them actual burglary training and have them steal from Gotham's rich. This deprives Gotham's Rogues Gallery of their Mooks and has a positive effect on lowering crime. Catwoman just wants the Bat-Family to look away. Batman sees this as pointless, as soon there's gonna be mooks with incredible training working for them once it's all over. Jason clearly sides with Selena and Damian sides with Bruce, with Dick, Barbara, Kate, Tim, Duke, Steph, and Cass in varying stages of uncertainty.
- You Monster!: Nightwing roars this after he finds out what Batman did to Jason.
