Not to be confused with Nocturna.
So I just finished up that Joker TPB I was talking about the other day, and came across this panel from issue #9, guest-starring Catwoman:
That struck me as odd, and I posed the following question to Twitter, and now I pose it here: was this ever a thing with Catwoman, that she wouldn’t/couldn’t go out in the daylight for some reason? Plus, like I’d said on Twitter, “nocturnal” doesn’t mean “will explode into flames like a vampire if exposed to the sun.” My guess is that this particular characteristic was just thrown in there to move the plot along, so that this fellow could escape without pursuit.
Or maybe that fellow is in fact recounting some kind of urban myth about that inhabitants of Gotham might have developed around the larger-than-life superheroes and supervillians they share the city with. It could be that one of the common beliefs about Catwoman is that she’s a nocturnal being who can’t come out in the daylight, maybe along with equally-unjustified beliefs that she can command cats with her telepathic powers, and that her nine lives allow her to come back from the dead, et cetera et cetera. These are normal people living in a nightmare world filled with beings with strange powers…it’s only natural that they would generate folklore around these creatures. Granted, there’s nothing in the actual text of this particular story to support any of this…though the much-later (and now abandoned) editorial edict of Batman being believed to be an “urban legend” (and only comes out at night) is sort of in line with this general conjecture.
“No wait, I’m thinking of that Elseworlds story where Batman’s a vampire!”
If she was really part cat, she’d be crepuscular. Active most at dawn and dusk.
Plus, her bathroom would be a room-sized litter box, and I pity the henchman who has to clean that every day.
Your urban legend explanation’s better.