DC Comics' New Villain the Wight Witch Improves on the MCU's Ghost
DC Comics just improved on MCU villain Ghost - as played by Hannah John-Kamen in Ant-Man & the Wasp - with the terrifying non-corporeal assassin Wight Witch, the latest threat to try and take down Catwoman. Also known as 'the asset,' Wight Witch is the deadly enforcer of Simon Saint, a sinister billionaire currently trying to bend Gotham to his will, and who DC's Future State implied will be successful in turning Batman's city into a fascist police state.
To achieve his dark goal, Saint is prepared to work through Gotham's villains, partnering with Scarecrow to terrify the city and capturing Poison Ivy to produce a devastating new street drug. It's this latter project that sees Catwoman clash with Wight Witch in Catwoman #29 - from Ram V and Fernando Blanco - as part of her mission to protect her newly claimed kingdom in Gotham's Alleytown district.
The issue opens with Wight Witch's bloody assassination of Vilos Nahigian and his bodyguards, clearing up loose ends on the orders of Saint's organization, before she's tasked to deal with Edward Nygma, aka Batman villain the Riddler. Catwoman arrives just in time to stop the killing, attempting to fight off the Wight Witch in order to collect on Riddler's promise of essential information. Though a master of hand-to-hand combat, Selina ends up fleeing the Wight Witch, who demonstrates the ability to turn intangible, combining this power with vicious knife combat that makes her a viscerally scary new villain in DC's roster.
While Ant-Man & the Wasp's Ghost had similar powers of intangibility - and the skill to use them in combat - she turned out to be a sympathetic character desperately fighting for survival. Initially creepy and a formidable fighter, Ghost was a chilling promise that ultimately went unfulfilled in the MCU, since making her a more violent or intimidating threat would have thrown a spanner in the works of the sympathy fans were eventually supposed to feel.
The Wight Witch doesn't have anything close to this problem, complementing the shiver-inducing idea of an attacker you can't hit back with slashing blades and an intimidating, featureless costume. Introduced as a haunting presence able to infiltrate her victims' homes with ease, the Wight Witch combines the MCU's Ghost with 2020's haunting The Invisible Man, creating a super-villain who matches the agility and skill of Catwoman while carrying a genuinely menacing air into what's hopefully the first of many battles between the two.
Enjoyable though Ghost's role in Ant-Man & the Wasp may have been, Catwoman #29 truly taps into the horror potential of being chased down by a knife-wielding assailant there's barely a way to slow down, let alone stop. More morally compromised than Batman, and currently engaged in building a criminal empire, even if for the good of others, Catwoman is someone who has long been prepared to work alongside villains like Riddler and Ivy, meaning she requires even darker foes for it to feel like she's truly in danger. In the Wight Witch, she's found the challenge she needs - now she just needs to survive it.