Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn. Three of the most notorious women in Gotham City’s criminal underworld. Each with a softer side and pet charitable causes. Each with their own complicated relationship to Batman.

In 2009, Batman: The Animated Series impresario Paul Dini presented us with Gotham City Sirens, a comic book series that set its sights on this trio of the city’s most larcenous ladies. It remains a resounding fan favorite to this day, defining the characters’ dynamics outside the auspices of Batman in an era where the Shadow of the Bat was largely absent. This month, Power Girl’s Leah Williams and a coterie of hot artists including Matteo Lolli, Daniel Hillyard, Ted Brandt and Ro Stein brings back this long-missed crew for a four-issue limited series. You likely know who these three ladies are on their own. But what exactly is their history together? We’re here to give you the scoop so you can jump right into the fun.
 

First Impressions

So, when exactly did the Sirens first meet? Poison Ivy, our second member, was introduced 26 years after Catwoman, in 1966’s Batman #181. But they wouldn’t cross paths until eleven years later, in 1977’s Batman #291-294—the “Who Killed the Batman?” multi-part epic where Batman’s greatest enemies gather to claim responsibility for their foe’s apparent demise. There, Catwoman, one of the claimants alongside Riddler, Lex Luthor and the Joker, stands before a jury made up of Gothamites of similar ill repute, including one Poison Ivy.

The following year, Selina and Pamela would team up for the first time in a sort of Proto-Siren group for The Batman Family #17, taking on the now mostly forgotten villainess Madame Zodiac as their third member.

As a creation for Batman: The Animated Series in 1992, Harley Quinn’s first meetings with Catwoman and Poison Ivy naturally occurred on television prior to the page. Harley’s original encounter with Catwoman is notable for a couple reasons today. First, it occurred before she would even meet Poison Ivy. Second, it wasn’t on the best of terms. In “Almost Got ‘Im,” the Joker had put Harley in charge of keeping watch over a kidnapped Catwoman as bait for a Batman trap—one our Dark Knight manages to spring Selina from with some assistance by the cat-napped herself.

Harley’s first meeting with Poison Ivy later that season, “Harley and Ivy,” requires no introduction. It’s here that Harley and Ivy’s partnership blossoms all but fully formed, leaving an explicit romantic attraction to bear fruit in the decades to come. Some years later, like Selina and Ivy’s Proto-Sirens in the ‘70s, Harley and Ivy would take on Superman: The Animated Series original villain Livewire as a third partner of their own in The New Batman Adventures episode “Girl’s Night Out.”
 

Gotham Girls

The turn of the century brought with it DC’s first experimental forays into interactive internet media—including a webseries set in the world of Batman: The Animated Series with a focus on the show’s breakout female characters: Batgirl, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and Catwoman. Together, these misadventures were dubbed those of the Gotham Girls—a concept which would make its way into comics as a miniseries bringing the four together with GCPD officer Renee Montoya. The mismatched relative morality of the Gotham Girls’ members lent a chaotic air to the team, leaving viewers unsure whether we’d be seeing a heroic or villainous escapade with each new episode. It was a dynamic which would come to be synonymous with the classification-defying Harley, Ivy and Selina going forward.
 

Gotham City Sirens

Harley Quinn would finally make the jump into comic book continuity in the Batman: Harley Quinn special, immediately encountering Poison Ivy after getting violently dumped by the Joker. That same year, Selina encounters Harley for the first time in Catwoman #82, getting their relationship off on the right foot as they help each other break out of a high security women’s rehab center.

Unfortunately, Selina and Ivy’s relationship in the 2000s was less amiable—especially after Ivy took advantage of Selina, controlling her mind in Batman: Hush. But after being double-crossed by Hush himself, the two felons would eventually find themselves on more stable ground.

That ground is where we find the three with the launch of Gotham City Sirens in 2009, a book launched in the “Batman Reborn” era exploring a Gotham City without Bruce Wayne as Dick Grayson took up the cowl. After a minor villain destroys her apartment, Selina Kyle ends up rooming with Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy. For two years, the three criminals leaned on each other for their support against fallout from Harley’s time with the Joker, a murder frame-up on Poison Ivy, a villainous turn by Selina’s own sister and much more. Sadly, the three were ultimately separated by Harley’s tragic psychological dependence on the Joker, a pattern she wouldn’t break herself from for years to come.

(It’s also worth noting, incidentally, that the Sirens aren’t the only team that’s claimed all three members. Though never at the same time, Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn have all counted themselves in the past as members of both the Birds of Prey and the Suicide Squad, at least for one assignment. When you’re a female super-villain bordering on anti-hero, you tend to do double duty in the DCU.)
 

The Cobb Squad

One of the most interesting dynamics we’ve seen at play between the three queens of crime is in the animated Harley Quinn series on Max, entrenching Selina as a flustering element in a normally unflappable Pamela Isley’s past. Entering Harley and Ivy’s lives for a museum heist in the show’s second season, we begin to see the power Selina’s relative indifference and coolness has over Pamela, who desperately craves her approval. Selina’s mere order of a Cobb salad at lunch sends Ivy into a spiral that leads to her dubbing the three of them the “Cobb Squad,” even getting an ill-advised tattoo to commemorate their new friendship.

In season three, Ivy reveals to Harley where that insecurity comes from—she and Selina used to date. Now, in a reversal of fortune from the original Gotham City Sirens run, Harley and Ivy share living space in Selina’s luxurious penthouse loft, ostensibly as her cat-sitters while she goes globetrotting. Season four of Harley Quinn ended on a new partnership between the three of them, plus Barbara Gordon, giving us a true animated Gotham City Sirens. We’ll see how that develops this November with season five.
 

Sirens Reborn

Since the continuity restructuring of the New 52, our first real reunion of the Sirens crew comes courtesy of 2015’s Harley Quinn Road Trip Special, where she calls both her girls up to accompany her on an epic summer journey across America. But since then, Selina’s played an even closer role in her former Sirens’ lives.

As we’ve documented for you in the past, the path to romance for Harley and Ivy in mainstream continuity was a tumultuous one, only consummated in the past three years. But the last leg of that journey was one Selina Kyle was personally involved in, doing her part to get the two would-be lovers to recognize the depths of their feelings for one another, first by enlisting Harley to stop a rampant, world conquering Poison Ivy in 2018’s Batman #41-43, and secondly, by aiding Harley in the reunion of two physically and mentally divided forms of Poison Ivy in the climax of 2021’s Fear State event. Selina’s remained on friendly terms with the newly happy couple ever since, which brings us to this Gotham City Sirens reunion for the first summer in nearly ten years.

Move over, Caped Crusader. 2024 is for brat summer, not bat summer.
 

Gotham City Sirens #1 by Leah Williams, Matteo Lolli and Triona Farrell is now available in print and as a digital comic book.

Alex Jaffe is the author of our monthly "Ask the Question" column and writes about TV, movies, comics and superhero history for DC.com. Follow him on Bluesky at @AlexJaffe and find him in the DC Official Discord server as HubCityQuestion.