Favourite Female Character: Cassandra Cain (I know, shocking, right?)

[espanolbot]

In comics Cass Cain is probably my all time favourite character, as her introduction in No Man's Land also happened to be the first actual non-DCAU comic series that I ever bought (I was on a post-apocalyptic bender at the time).

Since that I've come to like a lot of other female characters a bunch too (Stephanie Brown my second favourite overall DC character, Darwyn Cooke/Ed Brubaker's Catwoman is my favourite antiheroine, Matt Wagner's Dian Belmont and Madame Xanadu my favourite Vertigo characters, Revy and Major Kusanagi my favourite anime/manga characters) but I've always been attached to Cass for her overall character arc (yes, even including her fall from grace and climb back to the top), her ethics, personality and history.

Admittedly her skillset isn't exactly THAT unique (looking at you Midnighter, Finesse, Taskmaster and that one Jim Balent Catwoman series that Anne Hathaway said she liked) but I thought that it worked for the character.

As an example of her early series, here is a bit from an issue that isn't posted that often.

The context: Something stranger is happening in Gotham, stranger than usual, I mean. Within the same couple of city blocks over the course of several days, seemingly ordinary people without prior histories of mental illness have started to go on killing sprees. Cass sets out to investigate, and after incapacitating a former veteran who seemed to be a hallucinating he was in a war zone while emptying a machinegun on an open street, she notices a man in scientist gear holding an odd machine up on a nearby rooftop watching the show.

She swings up to catch him, only to be blasted by the machine herself, causing her to blackout. Some time later she comes too, finding Batman standing over her, saying that the Joker has escaped from Arkham and he needs her to track him down... only for the Joker to abruptly shoot him from a safe distance.

Comments

[espanolbot]

Editorial didn't like the character and wanted the series to fail? If you're refering to Damion Scott though, he co-created her, and I think his art works a lot of the time, before he recently became a lot more stylised.

[mrstatham]

With Scott, I always found he put a lot of work into the expression of the character, either via her face or other means, and.. It really worked for a character like Cass; Half the time she's wearing a face-concealing mask and she's not a character who can speak, so a slightly exagerrated approach to facial expressions and the like really worked, to me. Certainly the only artists I liked better for her, looking at things, were the ones who worked with Gabrych.