Le Redditeur wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 8:18 pm
I thought Batman's girlfriend/beard was supposed to be
Catwoman.
Well, they kind of retired the Catwoman character around the time Fredric Wertham was accusing Batman and Robin of being gay because he also targeted her. He basically said that there's no attractive women in Batman comics, the only woman regularly in them is Catwoman, who is vicious and uses a whip (Wertham was very obsessed with Wonder Woman being an allegory for bondage, which she actually was so that's a case of broken clocks) and she tries to get with Batman but she can never get past DICK. Words to that effect.
So they stopped using her and brought in Batwoman who was a nice girl, so DC could say 'See kids, Batman isn't gay. Look, he has a girlfriend'.
Thing you have to understand is that a lot of the characters we associate with Batman (The Joker, Catwoman, The Penguin, The Riddler, etc) hadn't appeared in the comics for YEARS until the Adam West show came along and made them popular again, so the comics pretty much had to bring them back.