April 1968: Wildcat Goes the Distance

How do you build a story around a hero who’s effectively omnipotent? Well, one way is to team him up with another character who’s vulnerable.

That’s what scripter Mike Friedrich and artist Neal Adams did in the third issue of the Spectre’s short-lived 1960s’ title.

Interdimensional forces accidentally empower “Sad” Jack Dold, making him the main problem of the story. But Ted Grant is also troubled by the inevitable dimming of his abilities with age in Hang 'Em Up, Wildcat -- You're Finished.

“Fan-turned-pro Mike Friedrich tapped into a gray-at-the-temples Ted Grant’s insecurities in The Spectre 3 (March-April 1968), devoting fully half of the ghostly title character’s comic book to Wildcat’s growing frustration over the effect that age and retirement had taken on his fighting prowess,” wrote John Wells in his Back Issue magazine article The Domestication of Wildcat.

“The capper was an attack by a cosmically empowered minor crook who found that he could literally control the hero’s every move, and subjected him to a humiliating defeat before a crowd at a boxing match. The Spectre stepped in to defeat the ‘mystic mastermind,’ but Ted was left feeling like a has-been.”

“Hoping to stem his teammate’s depression, the Spectre suggested Ted become a mentor. Opening Grant’s Gym in his hometown of Knickerbocker City, Ted began instructing kids in self-defense and boxing, slowly regaining his old confidence and enthusiasm in the process.”

In fact, Ted Grant turned out to have a good deal of fight left in him. Wildcat continued crimefighting for decades, becoming a fan favorite.

“While reader reaction to the youthful Friedrich’s story was mixed, the dynamic neo-realism of Neal Adams’ art was greeted with wild acclaim,” Wells noted.

December 1965: Catwoman Out of the Bag

You frequently see it reported that, because DC was gun shy about the Comics Code, the Caped Crusader’s archenemy Catwoman didn’t appear from Detective Comics 211 in 1954 until Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane 70 in 1966.

But that’s actually not true — here she is in Batman 176, a reprint giant from December 1965.

The issue republishes Catwoman's Grasshopper Chase, a Batman Sunday newspaper story from 1946.

DC Comics was initially a little leery about reprinting 1940s’ comic book material because somebody there considered it “crude,” but the newspaper strips were produced for an audience of both children and adults, and were of a relatively high quality.

This issue appeared on the newsstands in October 1965, just three months before the Batman TV series would premiere and bring Catwoman back front and center.

 In his memoir The Boy Who Loved Batman, Michael Uslan explained, “It was that same very engine of creative destruction, the Comics Code Authority, that forced DC to retire from comics for years any Bat-villains who seemed too gruesome or menacing, including Two Face and the Scarecrow. It also meant the demise of Catwoman, because she was all the bad things comic book characters were now not allowed to be: a female in a major role; a possessor of no fewer than two exaggerated body parts; a sexy, stacked, bad girl who carried a whip and wore a dress slit up to what my dad would refer to as ‘her pupic,’ suggesting a topic that would give Dr. Wertham overheated conundrums... erotic S&M.”

Uslan noted that, while working at DC in the 1970s, he read a copy of their in-house comic book code, circa 1947, which specifically discouraged the use of females in prominent roles.

“Catwoman was doomed for a generation,” Uslan said. “Any sneak peaks we were given later in the 60s either was some watered-down new thing, or they would use a reprint in an annual of an old syndicated comic strip because comic strips were considered more generally acceptable to family fare than comic books were at that time.”

October 1962: The Batwoman of the 1940s

We had the Huntress in the 1970s, Batgirl in the 1960s and Batwoman in the 1950s. But did Batman have a female counterpart in the 1940s?

Why yes, but DC didn’t publish her. Harvey Comics did.

The Black Cat was to Batman as Wonder Woman was to Superman. Or at least, so it seemed to me when I was 8 and saw Harvey Comics’ all-too-brief, intriguing revival of The Black Cat, drawn with a Caniff-ish touch by Lee Elias.

Both Wonder Woman and Black Cat successfully modulated a superheroic template created for a male character into a different key.

The Harvey heroine was a masked, athletic crime-fighter like Batman. Linda Turner, a stuntwoman turned movie star, was also presumably wealthy, like Bruce Wayne. When a masked wonder boy who’d been a circus acrobat was added to the feature, the resemblance became unmistakable. Batman had his Robin, and the Black Cat had her Black Kitten. Turner’s stuntwoman background gave her plausible crime-fighting skills, and her film star status lent itself to backup romance/glamour stories in which the Black Cat need not figure.

The concept worked well enough to make her Harvey’s most successful superhero, carrying her from a debut in Pocket Comics 1 (Aug. 1941) to a long run in Speed Comics to her own title, which ran for an impressive 65 issues and didn’t finish up until April 1963.

I remember being intrigued, if slightly unsettled, by the implication of the feature when I was a boy. After all, the Black Cat did not exist in the world of the Justice League. As far as we could tell, she was the only superhero operating in her universe.

A world where the only superhero was a woman? In 1962? What an astounding (but kind of fascinating) idea!

You could write a book just about the feline females of popular culture. They seem endless, from Harvey’s Black Cat to DC’s Catwoman, Cheetah, Golden Age Huntress and Wildcat II.

June 1961: Super Pets Peeved

Loving both cats (although I was allergic to them) and the color orange, I naturally appreciated Supergirl’s pet, Streaky the super cat.

Streaky, being an Earth cat, was even immune to kryptonite. He got his temporary powers from “X-kryptonite,” an experimental substance Supergirl had discarded (Action Comics 261, Feb. 1960).

But somewhere along the line it occurred to me that if cats could actually fly, we’d all be in a lot of trouble.

“Probably the best early Streaky story, The Battle of the Super-Pets, appears in Action Comics 277,” observed comics historian Matthew Grossman.  “Convinced that ‘Krypto is stealing Supergirl’s love away from me...’ Streaky begins a cat-and-dog super-rivalry, one that Superman suggests they take to outer space to avoid collateral human damage.

“Supergirl adjudicates a contest between the two set on an alien planetoid. And while both pets cheat like mad, they remain well-matched even as the laws of physics in their extraterrestrial contest grounds grow increasingly malleable and cartoon-like.

Supergirl discovers that the planetoid is ‘Headquarters of the Interplanetary Multi-Dimensional Practical Jokers Club’ and that Mr. Mxyzptlk and his 5th dimensional friends planted ‘magical joke gadgets’ on its surface.

“Ending the duel with the simple declaration that ‘I like both of you, so stop this silly rivalry!’ Supergirl’s feminine sweetness proves more effective at handling matters than Superman’s challenge.

“The story concludes with Beppo the super-monkey popping by for an unexpected visit and the former combatants both agreeing that they can’t stand their new pest of a rival. It’s a fun tale of tails which fur-shadows the later Legion of Super-Pets.”