According to DC, the current run of Catwoman will be ending with August’s issue #82.

It took 82 issues to run what was one of the best starts in Bat-comics ever into the ground. Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke and Mike Allred launched this version of Catwoman and it was fantastic. I was blown away with the level intrigue and relevance they injected into a character that I always viewed as quite silly. (Remember her purple costume with the curly hair as recently as the No Man’s Land arc? Jeez).

With the launch of this series, though, the character of Selina Kyle was actually great. Make her protective of the East End of Gotham, throw Slam Bradley in the mix and you’ve got mountains of material for compelling crime drama. The book was fantastic and written like a tight noir film.

But, things went downhill.

Ed Brubaker left the book and issue #38 was the beginning of the end.

Scott Morse got to fill in and it just didn’t fit at all with the 37 prior issues. And I like Scott Morse, I think he’s added a lot to Batman, in fact, his “Roomful of Strangers” is one of the best one-shot’s I’ve ever read in the Batman mythos. And let’s not forget his Kurosawa nerdery with “The Barefoot Serpent” (I daresay if I’ve ever met anyone as into Kurosawa as much or more as myself, it was Scott Morse).

But these Catwoman books were misfires.

And Will Pfeifer took over and the sales on the book plummeted.

And here we are at the end. I hear tell he did the same thing to Aquaman.

I’ll be sad to see Selina and the crew go.

(On a side-note: Slam Bradley deserves his own book. Seriously. It could be real Dashiell Hammet kind of stuff. I’ll even write for DC, they just need to get Darwyn Cooke or a reasonable facsimile to draw it. Or maybe even Scott Morse.)