Sunday, September 18, 2022

Sunday Splash Page #236

 
"Into the Fire," in Hellcat #2, by Steve Englehart (writer), Norm Breyfogle (artist), Tom Smith (colorist), Dave Sharpe (letterer)

So in 2000, Marvel brought Patsy Walker back from the dead. In a Thunderbolts Annual we'll see in Saturday Splash Page some time next year. After a subsequent appearance in the Avengers Annual of that year, Patsy got this 3-issue mini-series by Englehart and Breyfogle, where Hellcat finds herself caught up in a war for control of the realms of condemned souls.

Patsy herself is struggling with finding meaning in life. She'd committed suicide and wound up in Mephisto's realm, didn't really get asked to be brought back to life, and isn't sure there's any point in it. And while Dormammu's spearheading the invasion, two of the realms being invaded are ruled by Mephisto, who claimed her soul, and her second ex-husband, Daimon Hellstrom. So she's got to help two people she doesn't particularly care for.

Englehart ramps up Patsy's abilities somewhat, as her time in Hell has taught her to both sense magic and be able to evade/slip free of it. She's no spell-slinger, but actually getting her with a spell is hard to manage. Breyfogle and Smith give the magic that gets tossed around a vivid, tangible presence, coiling around victims, which lets Patsy's ability to avoid it be more visually interesting than simply dodging it.

They also, as you notice above, revamp her costume, essentially swapping the blue and yellow. I like it personally, makes her look more sleek, but when Busiek and Larsen pulled her into their Defenders run, they immediately reverted her to the original look (though they retained the magic-sensing abilities). I don't remember them doing a lot with Patsy struggling with her past suicide, either, but a lot of the focus of that book was on how much the Big Four hated being forced to work together.

Englehart wastes what I feel is a lot of pages on the idea that actually, Satannish was created by Dormammu, as a double agent for when Dormammu inevitably invaded these Hell-realms. At the very end, we find out that actually actually (yes I typed it twice on purpose), Hellstrom is the Son of Satannish, because he was Dormammu's second double agent, in case the first time didn't work. Which feels like the sort of needless continuity patch Roy Thomas or Geoff Johns would do, and also seems like much more subtlety than Dormammu would bother with. If he was able to create Satannish back when Mephisto first came into being, why not just crush Mephisto then?

It seems like Englehart really wanted Patsy to figure this all out, like a goofy twist on the soap operas she used to love (according to what she says in this mini-series), and needed an appropriately convoluted reveal.

After this, it was 8 years before Patsy got another mini-series of her own, and 7 years after that before she got an ongoing. We won't see either of those for a few years (probably late 2025.) She will pop up in an ensemble mini-series in a few weeks, however.

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