Friday, June 21, 2024

Random Back Issues #130 - Black Cat #5

Can I trade it in for Flagstaff, or maybe Santa Fe?

This is the opening chapter of "The Gilded City" arc, the big heist that MacKay's entire Black Cat run (spanning the previous volume) was building to. Felicia, her crew, and the Black Fox have gathered all the pieces they need to break into the vault where the New York Branch o' da T'ieves Guild sends all their stolen goods.

This issue largely boils down to Felicia and the Fox descending through a series of tunnels to the place where they'll use the "dimensional resonator" she broke into Stark's building to make, to help the Randall Gate - whose design she copied from the one in Iron Fist's place - open the doorway they need.

In the meantime, flashbacks! First, to the point when Felicia told Fox that she was going to head out on her own, and that her first heist would be to get her father out of prison. Also, that she was taking the name "Black Cat", a combination of Fox's title and her father's, Walter Hardy, aka "The Cat".

A different "The Cat" from the one that became Tigra. At least, I hope so. That would be weird. "Felicia, your dad appeared to die, but actually, he traveled back in time, became a costumed female crimefighter, then a werecat-woman who was written as extremely horny by Steve Engelhart, and later humiliated by Bendis' latest attempt to prop up a crime boss character."

Anyway, Black Fox reveals 2 critical pieces of information. First, the New York Thieves made a deal with a being called The Gilded Saint. 10% of their take in exchange for immortality. Second, he's dying. He tried to get a lot of different cures, but he either can't get them, or they don't work. Even tried asking Dracula to turn him, but Drac remembers when Fox cheated him in a card game (detailed in an issue of the first volume), then sicced Ulysses Bloodstone on Drac to cover his escape. Dracula would rather watch Fox wither and die than turn him and have the guy under his thumb for an eternity.

I guess at that age, you find your kicks where you can.

Felicia should be getting bad vibes by this point, but Fox is still spooling some line about wanting to go out committing a heist no one else can, so she tells the guys to fire up the Randall Gate. But instead of all that gold landing in their laps, a giant skeleton emerges from a tear in the air in front of Felicia and demands answers. The Fox wants the immortality of the Thieves Guild transferred to he and Felicia, and in exchange, he'll hand over Manhattan (the deed to which Felicia swiped from the Sanctum Sanctorum.)

{2nd longbox, 140th comic. Black Cat (vol. 2) #5, by Jed MacKay (writer), Michael Dowling (artist), Brian Reber (color artist), Ferran Delgado (letterer)}

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