Amazing Spider-Man #195 Aug 1979
Second appearance of the Black Cat in "Nine Lives of the Black Cat!"
The Black Cat successfully breaks her father out of prison!
And leaves the Spectacular Spider-Man lying in the rubble with a broken arm!
What a stroke of bad luck for the web-slinger! However the wondrous wall-crawler is undeterred!
And despite his wounded wing, the amazing one tracks down the mischievous cat several hours later!
Will Spidey and Felicia end their game of cat & mouse on a friendly note...or a fatal one?
NOTES: The Black Cat returns in Amazing Spider-Man #204. The letters page includes a letter from comics historian Peter Sanderson.
Script by Marv Wolfman. Art by Keith Pollard (breakdowns) and many hands (finishes).
Spectacular Spider-Man #93 Aug 1984
"A Hot Time in the Old Morgue Tonight!"
Peter Parker's doubts concerning his relationship with the Black Cat continue to grow.
Meanwhile, The Kingpin calls in his first favor from Felicia after granting her bad luck powers four issues ago.
The Black Cat participates in a fake bomb plot in order to keep the wall-crawler occupied,
so the Answer can steal a body from the morgue!
Script and Pencils by Al Milgrom. Inks by Jim Mooney.
Well Felicia may be a criminal but it was always nice to see that she still had a conscience...
Felicia in the preview mention this isn;t the first time she had to break into the F4 headquarters and I then I remember the nice continuity nod being a reference to Maximum carnage when she, Spidey and Venom did just that to get to Reed's sonic gun in Amazing Spider-man 379... hell the MC game for both SNES and Genesis has a whole level in the Freedom four where you fight annoying robots and a giant mecha as a boss
I wonder if they'll mention that Spidey/Human Torch issue which I believe would've been the first time Johnny and Felicia actually met? Isn't even the first time she's conned him into helping her with a job :P.
Also gotta love the confidence of her strutting out in broad daylight in full-costume with a wine bottle in hand. This is not a woman who is worried about standing out or getting caught, compared to, say...Queenpin Black Cat.
Felicia Hardy: The Black Cat #2 Aug 1994
"First Strike"
The Black Cat has accepted a job from the Morelle Chemical Company to eliminate
a copy of their chimera project that was stolen by their rivals, Cobalt Chemicals.
While trying to wipe out the records on a private yacht, she is interrupted by Cobalt's super-operative, Faze and his Mechabytes.
Although the mechanical bugs are easily destroyed by the Cat, Faze is harder to stop thanks to his ability to make parts of his body intangible.
When he tries to figure out what she is doing to the computers, the Black Cat
gets in the way in order to prevent Fazer from ejecting the disc from the computer.
She explains that she has implanted a virus into the computer that has also set off the ship's self-destruct system.
When Faze demands to know the override password, she ejects the disc causing the self-destruct sequence to begin.
Unsure if the upper limits of his powers, Faze decides to flee the scene in order to save himself.
He plays into Felicia's bluff as she quickly activates the override.
Faze returns to the helicopter and is joined by the pilot.
He tells the pilot to take him to Morelle Chemicals so he can steal the plans for chimera there.
However, the "pilot" turns out to be the Black Cat in disguise.
She grabs his briefcase full of Mechabytes and kicks him out of the chopper into the water below.
As she heads back toward the mainland, she wonders why the computer disc collected data on
something called Project: First Strike, as she was sent to retrieve the stolen data on chimera.
Not sure who she can trust, she decides to look up an old colleague of her father, a man named Loop.
The following morning she gets a private visit with Loop at the Parkgreen Correctional Facility
using forged documentation that lists her as Loop's wife.
That evening, Felicia returns as the Black Cat and slips past the minimum security
prison's defenses so she can pass the data disc to pull any relevant data out of it.
After handing off the disc, she tells him that she will come back for the data later and swings off.
While at another prison, doctors continue their observations on a prisoner named Brian Lash.
After checking on some anomalous readings on his charts they figure he will remain comatose for the rest of his sentence.
However, as soon as they are gone, Lash suddenly wakes up, ambushing the guard in his room.
He kills the guard and steals his uniform, giving him a means of ambushing other guards as he breaks out of custody.
Back in Manhattan, Felicia Hardy invites herself to dinner with Paul Proust.
When they sit down at a fancy restaurant, she confronts him with the fact that he is not telling
her everything about chimera and he decides that they should finish this conversation at his place.
There, Paul pours her some drinks and offers to show her the hard copy of the chimera file in order to gain her trust.
However, Felicia doesn't totally trust Paul and so she scratches him
behind the neck with a drugged fingernail so she can look at the computer files.
Unable to get at the files due to a password, Felicia decides to go to Morelle Chemicals in person.
Changing into the Black Cat, Felicia breaches the outer security of the Morelle building.
Once inside, she slips past more of the security systems.
Soon she finds herself in a lab where experiments are being conducted.
There she is spotted by security guards but easily dispatches them.
Finding a vault door, the Black Cat blows it open to see what is inside.
There she finds a secret lab where human test subjects are in held in stasis cylinders.
These people have been turned into cyborgs, leaving the Cat to wonder if these test subjects volunteered for these projects.
Suddenly, the cylinders open and the cyborgs spring to life.
They attack the Black Cat, but although she tries to fight back the cyborgs have self-repair systems.
That's when Cardiac enters the room and tells her that these cyborgs are indestructible unless they are broken down at a molecular level.
Written by Terry Kavanagh and Joey Cavalieri. Art by Andrew Wildman and Stephen Baskerville.
Something I've been thinking about in regards to Felicia's love interests. Apart from Peter, Felicia has hooked up with Matt Murdock (Daredevil) and Johnny Storm (The Human Torch). She was also in exclusive relationships with Flash Gordon and Thomas Fireheart and I think she's even been mentioned as having a thing with Luke Cage once. Given all four (five?) of these men are heroes, I think it is safe to assume Felicia is genuinely attracted to good and kind men even if she wouldn't openly admit it. The relationship with Flash is especially notable as she originally dated him to make Peter jealous only to genuinely fall for Felicia when she saw how much he cared for her and she even proposed marriage to him.
To be fair, she has a lot more reason to want to be wary as Queenpin than as Black Cat, since as Queenpin she has to worry about other heroes, gang members who wanna kill her and take her place, and other super villains, as Black Cat she doesn't have as much to worry about, but yeah, still really confident in doing that lol.
It looks like she's also into guys minimaly connected with Spidey
I'll say there were two small details I found interesting in issue#4, first we have how that Sonny guy found Felicia, which was because someone took a picture of her and Johnny when they were at the door, which you can see in an earlier page, when Johnny opens the door, second one is when Sonny and that other guy waiting in front of the Thinkerer's shop, and you can see the piles of noodle cups, indirectly showing they've been there for a while.
That said, while the comic is interesting, feels like something is missing, the characters have decent enough chemistry with each other, and Felicia ironicaly having bad luck while trying to steal stuff makes the stories unpredictable in a good way, it feels like it could be more to be better, I dunno in what though... Maybe make give more focus to the security from the person Felicia is stealing from to make it look less like "She walks in and steals", but hey, it's fun enough, at least, just hope Felicia doesn't beat Blastaar with pure bullshit like she did with Xander lol.
Last edited by Lukmendes; 09-11-2019 at 12:43 PM.