yo said today The Owl feels like a rejected Batman villain. But if he escaped from Gotham City, he didn't come alone.
Before he was known for all his embarrassing work for Marvel, Jeph Loeb was famous for exactly one thing: Batman: The Long Halloween. A 13-issue murder mystery set during the early days of Batman's career, the story saw Gotham haunted by a killer who struck on holidays, leaving an untraceable pistol and a seasonal decoration at the scene of every crime. The story was well-received, but it honestly wasn't written all that well, with a lot of the resolution hanging on coincidences and tremendous leaps of logic. Still, it was one of the influences on Christopher Nolan's films, and has a place on seemingly every "best Batman stories" list, so read it and decide for yourself.
Riding that success, Loeb re-teamed with artist Tim Sale for a series of Marvel "color" stories, each focussing on a particular character's formative years: Captain America: White, Hulk: Gray, Spider-Man: Blue, and the first of them, Daredevil: Yellow. In issue #3 of Yellow, Matt Murdock returns to his law office to find Foggy Nelson meeting with a client named Grace:
The unidentified person she's afraid of turns out to be The Owl, who shows up later in the issue. But her story is what we're interested in. "My husband... was a good man. An important man. And I did some things... some terrible things. But I did them to protect him."
In issue #5, she appears again, and we learn that the Owl actually sent her to Nelson and Murdock in the first place, and everything she was doing was on his orders:
"The Owl uncovered things about me. Personal things. Secrets."
It's all very cryptic, unless you've read Long Halloween. And now, spoilers if you haven't: while the Holiday Killer was found to be someone else, someone who confessed to all the killings, the very end of the story reveals that at the beginning of the spree, Holiday was Gilda Dent, wife of Harvey Dent, who thought that killing mobsters would make her husband's life easier. And the way "Grace" is drawn in these two issues is exactly the way Gilda was drawn in Long Halloween: brown hair, wide eyes, dark lashes... that may not sound very distinctive, but it's unmistakable if you've seen her.
So basically, "Grace" is Gilda having moved out of Gotham and into New York City, and somehow The Owl knows what she did back home. Her line about having a secret and knowing how much it's worth hits particularly hard if you know about what the future holds for Karen Page.
The funny thing is there are some who say Marvel's Owl is a ripoff of The Penguin, but there's another villain called The Owl who rips off The Penguin...created by Bob Kane! This Owl is a recurring villain in the old cartoon Cool McCool, and has many Penguin-y features like birds who commit crimes and a tuxedo.
The hat and coat she's wearing in the second scene are what Holidat wore too.