The Untold Truth Of Batwoman

While some fans prefer to see him as a lone avenger of the night, Batman's popularity has led the caped crusader into a full-on franchise of characters. Sidekicks like Robin, supporting cast members like Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, and even other heroes based in Gotham City like the Huntress or Hitman have been in the spotlight for decades. Over the past decade, however, none of them have been as important or notable as Batwoman, who is now breaking out of the comic book page and onto the television screen. 

The history of Batwoman starts long before Kate Kane donned her black-and-red costume in 2006, however, mirroring the history of comic books themselves. The name and the role of a female equivalent of Batman date back to the controversy surrounding the influence of superheroes in the '50s, and weave through the original Kathy Kane and her successor, Barbara Godon, before winding up with the highest-profile gay character in DC's history. Here's the truth behind Batwoman. 

While Kathy Kane was phased out of the comics, the idea of keeping a woman in the Batman family persisted elsewhere — specifically television. In 1967, at the height of the Batman TV show's popularity, producers William Dozier and Lorenzo Semple decided to expand their cast to introduce a new Batgirl. Since comic books have never been shy about capitalizing on the success of their adaptations, which was proven when the Superman franchise imported kryptonite and Jimmy Olsen from the radio show, Schwartz and Carmine Infantino decided to introduce the new Batgirl to the page, too.

Rather than creating someone out of whole cloth, the TV show tied the new Batgirl to an existing character by introducing her as Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Gotham City's solemn and stentorian police commissioner. The viewers (and readers) were clued in on her secret identity, but unlike Kathy Kane, Batman and Robin were initially unaware.

Barbara proved to be incredibly popular, and served as Batgirl until 1988, and then again from 2011 to the present. Even when she wasn't Batgirl, however — thanks to the Joker paralyzing her with a gunshot to the spine in 1988's controversial The Killing Joke — she was popular enough to be featured as Oracle, an incredibly skilled hacker who provided information to Batman and the Justice League.

In 1999, Barbara Gordon was Oracle and Kathy Kane had been written out of existence, so there was nothing stopping DC from teasing a potential new Batwoman (or Batgirl) in the pages of the No Man's Land story arc.

In that story, which took up the entirety of 1999 and was spread across every Batman title with tie-ins in other books to boot, Gotham had been devastated by an earthquake and abandoned by the United States government. That left the entire city as a post-apocalyptic ruin that was fought over by gangs led by various supervillains and the holdouts of the GCPD. Since Batman had also been missing for three months after the No Man's Land edict, someone else started wearing a bat costume and claiming territory in his name.

That Batwoman turned out to be the Huntress, but she wasn't the only one to wear the distinctive costume with the stitched-shut mouth. By the end of the story, it was passed to Cassandra Cain, a teenagerwho had been trained since birth to become an assassin. With the Huntress back in her normal identity, Cassandra became the new Batgirl. That was for the best, though, since it left the door open for an all-new Batwoman only a few years later.

In Detective Comics #858, Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III dove into Kate Kane's origin story, and in the following issue, they dealt with her dismissal from the United States Military Academy during her senior year.

While she was an exceptional soldier, Kate was accused of being in violation of Article 125 of the Uniform Military Code of Justice. For those of you not up on the specifics of martial law, that's the article concerning homosexuality, which was used to keep gay (and bisexual) people out of the military. While she was offered the chance to claim that it was all a misunderstanding, Kate chose to leave West Point and never fulfil her lifelong dream of serving in the Army rather than lie about who she was and what she had done, and that integrity has been one of her defining characteristics ever since.

It's worth noting that this story was originally published in 2009, when the official policy of the military was "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," meaning that gay people could serve, just as long as they were in the closet. Only two years later, in 2011, that policy was changed, and Article 125 was officially repealed from the UCM. That means that eventually, Kate's origin and that defining moment may have to be retconned, in the same way that  Marvel's Punisher is now considered too old to be a Vietnam War veteran. Considering that's a fictional retcon that comes at the cost of real-world progress, it's no surprise that the creators of that origin story are absolutely fine with it.

The massive crowd of sidekicks, associates, and hangers-on that surround Gotham City's Dark Knight are often referred to as the Batman Family, but in Batwoman's case, that's not just a team name. Kate Kane is in fact a member of Batman's biological family. It's one of the reasons that he's always trusted her with his symbol, despite the fact that he wasn't part of her training.

If you're up on the complicated in-universe history of Gotham City, you may already know that the Kane family — named for Batman's co-creator, Bob Kane — is one of Gotham's oldest and richest. What you might not know, given that the Wayne name is usually the one that's explored in detail, is that before she got hitched to a handsome doctor named Thomas, Batman's mom was Martha Kane. Her father, Jacob Kane, was Martha's brother, meaning that she's Bruce Wayne's cousin.

That represents a pretty big shift from most modern ideas about Batman. In the Silver Age, the question of who raised Bruce after his parents were killed was answered by the introduction of his uncle Philip, who took custody of young Bruce and brought him on his world-traveling adventures. In the '90s and 2000s, Bruce was meant to have been raised by Alfred, the family butler, a pretty buck wild family situation that we all just sort of accepted. The current version of Batman's origin, however, reintroduced Uncle Phil as Philip Kane, another one of Martha's siblings, once again expanding Bruce and Kate's family tree.

Over a period of years, the CW formed a full-on DC multiverse on television, with a core roster of shows encompassing Flash, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow, plus Supergirl and Black Lightning, which exist in their own separate dimensions. In 2017, the "Arrowverse" shows crossed over with Supergirl for "Crisis on Earth-X," an event based on the multiverse team-ups in the comics, and another crossover in 2018 came in the form of "Elseworlds." In addition to existing heroes, The CW used it to launch a new character to DC TV: Batwoman, as portrayed by Ruby Rose, best known for her work in John Wick: Chapter 2 and on Orange Is the New Black. Like Kate Kane, Rose identifies as a member of the LGBTQ community, although she took some heat (and subsequently deleted her Twitter account) for portraying a Jewish character even though she doesn't have that cultural or religious background.

The CW's take on Batwoman exists in a Gotham City where Batman disappeared three years earlier, leading to a surge in crime (and thus the need for a new, bat-themed vigilante crimefighter). The full-fledged Batwoman series, with Rose at the forefront, debuted in September 2019, and halfway through the first season, The CW ordered a second season.

In the same news reports announcing Ruby Rose's exit from Batwoman, production company Warner Bros. made it clear that this would not spell the end for the series. After Rose moved on, so did Batwoman's brain trust. Within days of Rose's departure, they announced that Kate Kane, the character played by the actor, would also be cut from the show, in favor of a new character who uses the Batwoman alias. A leaked casting call revealed that producers were looking for an actor "Female, Mid-late 20s, any ethnicity" to portray Ryan Wilder, the new Batwoman, who is also "likable, messy, a little goofy," and "nothing like Kate Kane."

However, show runner Caroline Dries almost took the easier route of finding a new actor to play Kate Kane. "I did consider the 'soap opera version' for a hot minute, because selfishly we already had a couple episodes written, and transition-wise it would be seamless," she said at the ATX Festival At Home (via TVLine). Ultimately Arrowverse overseer Greg Berlanti made the decision to introduce a new character along with a new performer. The new Batwoman: Javicia Leslie, known for her roles on the BET crime show The Family Business and the CBS drama God Friended Me. Her first appearance on Batwoman came in a January 2021 episode titled, appropriately enough, "Whatever Happened to Kate Kane?"