Posted in: Batman, Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: detective comics, gotham, jorge jimenez, Marshall Rogers, matt fraction, Silver St. Cloud, Steve Englehart, The Penguin
Silver St. Cloud Returns? Matt Fraction & Jorge Jiménez’s Batman #15
The return of Silver St. Cloud to Gotham? Matt Fraction and Jorge Jiménez’s Batman #15 out this week
Silver St. Cloud, the Gotham socialite and event planner who dated Bruce Wayne, worked out that he was Batman, and then left because she could not live with the nightly odds, was created by Steve Englehart and Walt Simonson for Detective Comics #470 in 1977, collected as Batman: Strange Apparitions. Steve Englehart said he wanted Bruce Wayne to have an actual adult relationship rather than a string of disposable dates. Silver St. Cloud was written as intelligent, independent, and comfortable in the same night-time circles Bruce Wayne moved through. She meets him at a yacht party that was also covering for a fight with Doctor Phosphorus. The attraction was immediate, but so was her suspicion.
Dating Bruce, she noticed the disappearances, the interest in crime reports, and, crucially, the chin. After watching Batman’s close-quarters fight with Deadshot in Detective Comics #474, she connected the dots.
The confirmation comes during the “Laughing Fish” sequence with the Joker. Few civilians in the books have ever done it with less drama and more precision.
What followed was unusual for the period. Silver St. Cloud does not demand that he stop being Batman. She simply decides she cannot live with the constant possibility that one night he will not come back.
She ends it, asks him not to follow, and leaves Gotham.
For 1977 it was a remarkably grown-up resolution, and one that left the Dark Knight unusually rattled.
She returned in Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ 2005 Batman: Dark Detective, now engaged to U.S. Senator Evan Gregory, who was running for governor against the Joker. Old feelings returned, Bruce proposed, the Joker maims Gregory, and Bruce asks Silver to stay with her fiancé until the campaign ends.
Steve Englehart wrote an additional chapter to the trilogy to resolve its plot, but DC Comics declined to publish it. In 2009, she returned in Kevin Smith andWalt Flanagan‘s Batman: The Widening Gyre. She and Bruce rekindle; he proposes again; he even considers hanging up the cowl because a new vigilante called Baphomet appears competent, but Baphomet is revealed as supervillain Onomatopoeia, who slits her throat in the final cliffhanger of the series.
The second half of the story was never published and is widely treated as non-canon, or at least unresolved, so Silver’s death remains in a strange limbo as one of comics’ more notorious unfinished fridgings.
And there were Elseworlds appearances, notably Elmer Fudd/Batman byTom Kingand Lee Weeks in 2017, where Elmer Fudd confronts Bugs “The Bunny” for the murder of his lover, Silver St. Cloud, and declares his intent to kill him,
But then she appeared in a fantasy rewrite of the DC Universe in 2019’sHarley Quinn #61 and #62 by Sam Humphries andOtto Schmidt as a bow-and-arrow-wielding elf member of the Gotham Knights that are loyal to Queen Selina, usurped by the Sorceress Queen.
Eventually she was freed, but her presence needed the work of DC Jonni, the Continuity Cop, to rewrite her as being alive again.
It is the kind of minor continuity tissue that keeps characters alive even when they are not actively starring in stories. On television, Natalie Alyn Lind played a teenage, more manipulative version in season two of Gotham as Theo Galavan’s niece. She has also appeared in animation, most recently in My Adventures with Supermanvoiced by Melanie Minichino,in Batman: Soul of the Dragon, voiced byErica Luttrelland in DC Super Hero Girls, voiced by Grey Griffin. And now, in Batman #15, out this week fromMatt Fraction and Jorge Jimenez, we have another…
The St. Cloud modelling agency and Wayne Enterprises on a Shark Tank/Dragons’ Den style show, BILF Mountain, for “Billionaires I’m Looking To For Financing.” Might Silver want to work with Bruce Wayne again… in one way or another? Batman #15 by Matt Fractionand Jorge Jiménez is out this Wednesday…
- Batman #15 by Matt Fraction and Jorge Jiménez
Nothing is slowing down for the Caped Crusader in the aftermath of Bad Seeds as six assassins descend on Gotham with one target in their sights: billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. It’s all going down at El Granda Gala Enmascarado, and by the end of the night, Bruce Wayne will die before the eyes of the world. Time for Batman to get to work… 40 pgs • $4.99, On Sale November 4, 2026
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