ATTENTION: While this technically wouldn’t be filed under “Not Safe For Work” because it doesn’t feature complete nudity, keep in mind this would’ve been included in a comic book rated “Teen +”.
Artist Guillem March, who illustrated the opening arcs of Catwoman in The New 52, posted some unused artwork for issues 3 and 4 on his blog page. They explore a plot thread in which Selina Kyle figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman because their kisses are identical. (That’s kind of reminiscent of Chase Meridian in Batman Forever.) Apparently her strategy to expose Batman’s dual identity was to expose herself on his front lawn.
I’m aware of the uproar that came following Batman and Catwoman being shown before and after engaging in romantic congress in Catwoman #1 & 2, respectively. That I didn’t really have a problem with because these aren’t childrens’ comics and they didn’t actually show them doing “the deed”. However, I can understand DC deeming the following artwork too risque. Guillem March elaborates:
The pages below were supposed to be pages #16 to #20 from Catwoman #3. This has been one of the few times I´ve been asked to redo pages. Actually I was asked to draw some new pages from a new piece of script. I got an explanation about why DC wanted to change the story and get some new pages done, but I guess it all have to do with the sexy depiction of Selina in these original pages. I didn´t mind at all, since it wasn´t my fault and I got paid for the extra job. The only thing I don´t like is to work on stuff that remains unused.So I´m showing these pages now, but I must confess I don´t like them at all. I don´t like how Selina looks like when she´s naked. Both the body and the face. I´d like to think today I´d do a much better job, and a bit more classy. The colored pages look much better thanks to Tomeu Morey.Anyway, this is only an artwise issue I have. The action in this scene was a depiction of who Selina was: a woman taking advantadge of his sexuality to get something from a man. That made sense according on how the character had been approached in the earlier New52.
As I promised yesterday, here you have 4 pages that were never published.Some people will say they were censored, but that´s not exact. The new pages were not a toned down version of these, they were telling another story. Actually, we had a big turning point here that could have changed the whole book from this point: Selina knows who Batman is. You don´t need ballons to get that from yesterday´s pages..Maybe DC didn´t want to explore that storyline, so it´s not that obvious that the new pages were drawn just to remove the sexy content. It´d have been much more easy to censor these pages than having to redraw them all.This is the funny thing: who knows?
Somebody asked why am I showing this stuff now: I´m not going to keep them secretly in a drawer until I die, and I´m not going to burn them, right?I´m doing a selection of original art for sale and if I don´t show them, the buyer will anyway, so…Btw, some of the little panels strategically placed over Selina´s body were drawn separately. Maybe I´ll post a scan of the original art tomorrow. Ha, ha, this is a dirty trick to get more pageloads. Why do I need pageloads? I don´t know, I have no ads!Ah, these pages never got colored. The decision to change the story came in the gap between inks and color.
Source: Guillem March’s Blog
