That Cat Can Cross My Path Anytime

I picked up some trades online recently, one of which was Spider-Man vs the Black Cat. It says Volume 1, but as far as I know, this was the only volume. I figured I like the Black Cat, but I'd never read a lot of her early appearances.

It collects three different two part stories, Amazing Spider-Man 194-195, 204-205, and 226-227. Marv Wolfman wrote the first three issues, Roger Stern the last two, and David Micheline wrote issue 205, which is kind of interesting given how it ends.

Throughout issues 204 and 205, Felicia has been stealing various priceless works of art, all of them with some sort of love theme. A gold statue of entwined lovers, an Eros Ruby, stuff like that. She keeps getting away from Spidey, but the last time he managed to plant a tracer and he tracks her to her apartment. He thinks she's gathered all these as some tribute to her deceased father, but it appears as though she's actually taken them to show her affection for Spidey himself. She thinks he loves her, 'just like daddy'.

I have to say, that little revelation flabbergasted me. I knew Felicia looked up to her father, trained to become a great thief, just like him, but this was a bit different. Saying her affection for her dad twisted into something similar for Spider-Man, like a surrogate Electra complex. The fact the story switched writers midstream makes me wonder if that's what Wolfman intended or Micheline made the decision himself.

At any rate, as creepy as I found that, Roger Stern thankfully came along and said that was just a trick Felicia played on Spidey. She figured that would convince them to send her to a psychiatric hospital, which would be a hell of a lot easier to escape from than a real prison. Heck, maybe the writers intended that all along. I've read a few issues from Micheline's Amazing Spider-Man run Felicia was in, and he never brought up the conflation of Spidey with her father. Or it could simply be he saw nobody else that wrote her liked that idea and decided it was better off dropped.

That it was a trick would fit. One thing that comes up a lot in the trade is Felicia pulling the wool over Spidey's eyes. Whether it's her bad luck "tricks" (she didn't have bad luck powers at this point, it was all about prepping things to go wrong), the flirting, playing possum, pretending she'll go straight, she consistently tricks him. I think it's a combination of her studying him for a long time, and also being a decent judge of character. She can tell he's a real do-gooder, that he doesn't like fighting women, and that he is interested in her. And she uses all of it to her advantage. So playing on his sympathy as part of a longterm strategy to avoid jail doesn't sound too farfetched.

It's remarkable how many subplots are going on simultaneously with the Black Cat stuff in these issues. I read enough older comics it shouldn't be a surprise, but then you read the current stuff and it's quite the difference. In the first two stories, Aunt May's in a nursing home being menaced by some thug, Peter's caught in some love triangle with Betty and Ned Leeds, and he's kind of being a tool towards Flash and Harry Osborn (not that Flash doesn't have plenty of that coming for the high school years). Plus, we get to see Felicia recruit her own gang for a job, which is a somewhat different way of doing things for her. Though now that I think of it Jen van Meter gave her a crew in that outstanding Black Cat mini-series a couple years ago. The second two-parter has Jonah wandering the town an amnesiac, plus Peter almost starts a relationship with a one of his students. Fortunately she revealed herself as a thief before Pete could get in trouble for unethical behavior.

Keith Pollard does most of the art for the first 4 issues, with Pablo Marcos handling finishes on one issue. I'm not a huge fan of the Pollard work. Most of it is OK, but then there are some times when Spidey looks very strange. Misshapen head, the body parts looking like they aren't actually connected. Just very awkward. The Romita Jr. and Jim Mooney work on the last two issues is a lot stronger. I think this is early enough that Romita Jr.'s style is still strongly his father's, which is fine. I like Romita Jr.'s current style at least some of the time, but there's nothing wrong with drawing like John Romita Sr. I don't know whether it's Mooney's inks of Bob Sharen's colors, but they do some really strong work with the shadows on Spidey. I especially like it when they put him shadows and show the weblines on his costume by making them red, instead of the usual black. They flip the colors, basically. I don't know why I like that look so much, but it always catches my eye.