Kathy Kane, the ORIGINAL "Batwoman", appreciation thread

[K. Jones]

I'm a tad confused, aren't Kathy and Kate (both Kane) essentially the same character just different interpretations?

They were.

When Greg Rucka introduced Kate Kane she was intended to fill that role in a new, interesting way. At that point Silver Age continuity was being revisited but probably nobody really suspected Silver Age Kathy Kane would be a concept that got revisited in any way. And so Kate was the "updated" version of Batwoman.

But one of the tenets of Morrison's run was this "everything happened" approach that brought like ... all of Batman's weird history back into continuity in some fashion. Like it all happened, albeit, not necessarily how it was written before or how we remembered it. And much to a lot of our surprise, when he did his "Last Rites" glimpse at Batman's bullet points total career history, there was Kathy Kane, existing as a key figure in his early career. That story was made up of a lot of reference to his mind being mucked with, false memories, false glimpses at non-canonical timelines and elements of the Silver Age possibly being drug-induced hallucinations.

So surprise surprise when Batman Incorporated # 3 came out and we started getting a new in-continuity backstory for how the original Kathy Kane was still part of continuity. Big things were done with her character for a few reasons - first to further the international spy plot happening in Incorporated and to connect with things happening with Batman and all his "imitators" or bat-themed global allies. Second, definitely to differentiate her from current incarnation Kate Kane. For instance we learn her maiden name and where she comes from so that she and Kate are no longer kind of the same character, once removed by continuity.

So while Kate initially was indeed meant to be the modern incarnation of the same character, Morrison got cheeky and weird and brought in the original incarnation, retconned her a lot, and allowed the two characters to both exist in the same universe.

What's more, another later retcon, this time by Marc Andreyko and this time for Kate, finally explicitly names Kate's connection to Bruce, and they are stated to be first cousins. This means that Kathy is Bruce AND Kate's AND apparently Bette's former/one-time aunt by marriage. It also means that the Kane Family Tree is WAYYYYYY WACKIER than even the Wayne Family Tree.