As I've mentioned before, the world of Gotham is a big place, ever expanding. Very few villains go away, and new ones pile up all the time. So it's no surprise that there's some counter action to that as well. In the weekly year long series
52, we were introduced to Kate Kane, and her beginnings as Batwoman.
Batwoman does not handle the same type of adventures that Batman does. No, hers are much more surreal, more dreamlike, and more deadly. Her primary opponents are those who follow the religion of crime, under The Crime Bible, and they've nearly killed her. Like Bruce Wayne, Kate Kane not only comes from money, but from old money, being one of the legendary families of Gotham. She is very hard-nosed, and still very new to the business of the superhero. In our brief looks into her world, she's taken some heavy hits, and has uneasily balanced her life as Batwoman and her life as Kate Kane. As she becomes enveloped in more of the former and less of the latter, both worlds become stranger.
I've made it this far and surely there's at least one person reading who has been adding to the end of every sentence he reads, "...and she's a lesbian." Well congratulations, here's your paragraph. Yes, Kate Kane is a lesbian. It's been handled rather gracefully, I think. Whenever the character was first announced, that was pretty much all some people caught. You'd wondered if they bothered to read the comics in the first place. "DC Introduces Lesbian Character, Batwoman," they'd read. And that was mostly it. It tells us about as much about the characters as does saying, "Batwoman likes pie." In both cases, we know what to expect. In the first, we do expect that at some point Batwoman will develop a romantic interest that will likely be a woman. In the latter, we expect Batwoman to be eating pies. In both cases, we are given background information, but nothing real about the character. DC and its writers have treated Batwoman better than that, and have portrayed not a stereotype, but a real person dealing with their life.
