BHOC: AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #194

The next issue of AMAZING SPIDER_MAN that came out introduced a character who would prove to possess remarkable staying power over the years, though it didn’t really seem that way the first couple of years. This was the Black Cat, a sexy sneak thief who would go on to become a recurring love interest for Peter Parker. Like the Fly and the Comet before her, she was named after a defunct character from the 1960s and earlier–Harvey Comics’ Linda Turner, the Black Cat. Creator Marv Wolfman apparently believed that these assorted characters whose names he’d scooped up had been gone long enough where their names had become available for use again. And despite the similarity of appellation, Felicia Hardy doesn’t really share anything more in common with Linda Turner.

As the letters page details, Marv had first come up with a completely different take on a character called the Black Cat when he was writing the SPIDER-WOMAN series, but he left that book before the character could be brought to fruition; all that remains from that earlier attempt is an unused cover, which gets reproduced on the letters page in this issue. Undaunted, he devised the incarnation of the character that we know today, and had Dave Cockrum design her. Dave’s model sheet is likewise reproduced on the letters page of this issue, along with a rejected cover for this issue. So it seems as though the Black Cat’s birthing process was no easy thing.

The issue opens with a sequence that introduces the readers to the Black Cat. She breaks into Police Headquarters in order to access their files on recent underworld activity. Locating the information that she’s after, she departs with no one the wiser that she was ever there. The next evening, the Black Cat breaks up a gang of criminals who are stealing tires from a warehouse. In doing so, she recruits one of the heisters, Bruno, to work for her. Thereafter, she similarly foils the efforts of a Dr. Boris Korpse to heist from a military base. So the question remains here: what’s the Cat’s deal? Is she a good guy or a bad guy?

While all of this is going on, we see that Peter Parker is spending time with his Aunt May at the nursing home where she’s been staying since her last medical emergency. For really no good reason other than that Marv didn’t think about it, Peter’s spider-sense doesn’t register a tingle even though he’s being eyeballed by a pair of no-goodniks: Doctor Rinehart, the administrator of the nursing center and the burglar who had killed Spidey’s Uncle Ben so many years ago. The burglar (he remains unnamed throughout this series of stories) tells Reinhart that he was after something specific when he broke into the Parker household and wound up shooting Uncle Ben, and he reasons that Aunt May might know his prize’s whereabouts. For his part, Rinehart keeps his own homicidal tendencies towards the gunsel in check, vowing to pay him back for these indignities once he’s learned what the prize is that the burglar is after.

Spidey has more pressing problems on his mind, though. When they were recently shackled together, Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson had an opportunity to unmask the wall-crawler and learn who he really is–and Spidey isn’t certain that he didn’t do just that. A visit to Jameson’s office is inconclusive–the publisher still hates the web-slinger and claims to have a surprise to spring on him soon, but what that is remains in doubt. Afterwards, Peter checks in at the Daily Globe, where he’s now working since Jameson fired him. He can’t get over how generous and gregarious his new editor Barney Bushkin is. On the way home, he stumbles across the Black Cat on her way to buy guns, and gets involved. But he’s stymied both by the Cat’s ability to manifest bad luck around her, and the fact that she’s a lot more sexually uninhibited than he is.

So the Black Cat escapes, but Spidey does prevent her from recruiting the gun dealer into whatever string she’s forming. In the aftermath, seeing news reports about the Cat’s recent activities, Spidey puts the pieces together and realizes somehow that it’s the four men whose files went missing at police headquarters that the Black Cat is seeking out. The last name on that list belongs to cat burglar Walter Hardy, who is in prison and also terminally ill, so the web-slinger sets out to have a conversation with Hardy to get to the bottom of things. But when he arrives, the Cat and her crew are in the midst of attempting to break Hardy out of prison.

Spidey and the Cat tussle while Bruno and Doctor Korpse go about their work–and the hero is constantly stymied by the Black cat’s powers of misfortune and he’s unable to stop her. As the issue reaches its climax, Korpse detonates some explosives to provide entry to Hardy’s cell, and the wall-crawler just happens to be on that very wall. The detonation stuns him, and as the issue closes out, we see that he’s unconscious in the rubble, with the Black Cat indicating that she’s going to get away with Hardy. It isn’t quite a To Be Continued, but it’s close enough, as the next issue blurb makes it clear that we’re going to be finding out more about the Black Cat and what she’s really up to next issue.

As I mentioned earlier the Spider’s Web letters page in this issue shows off the unused cover of SPIDER-WOMAN #9 that would have appeared had the Black Cat made her debut there, the Dave Cockrum design drawing of the character, and the Keith Pollard cover for this issue that was apparently spiked by Stan Lee as not being strong enough. Stan apparently wanted to see more of the Cat’s assts on the final image.

As this was the beginning of a new month, this issue also included a new-to-me edition of the monthly Bullpen Bulletins page. In his Stan’s Soapbox column, Lee begins to build up hype for the magazine that will eventually be called EPIC ILLUSTRATED–though here, it’s only referred to as “Project X” as there were complications with the proposed name, ODYSSEY. There’s also a tease in the body copy towards the return of MACHINE MAN, as well as a call-out of the launch of MARVEL FUN AND GAMES, a hybrid of a comic book and a puzzle magazine. In a time before there was an Internet, the Bullpen Bulletins page was one of the few sources fans had for news about upcoming projects and characters.