This month, Jim Mooney tags in on inks. The Black Cat hasn’t been seen in these parts since way back in ASM 205, that only the 2nd story she ever appeared in, she’s still pretty new. And due to the scheduling of this blog, this is her first appearance here. That’s awkward. But, this is also the earliest appearance by her I’d ever read until recently, and I caught on to the basics, so we should be fine. We begin with our pal Greg Salinger being loaded into a mental hospital after his battle with Spider-Man last issue… the very same mental hospital currently home to Felicia Hardy, The Black Cat. Her last caper ended with her declaring she’d done all her recent crimes for Spider-Man because she was in love with him, and also, she had a shrine to him in her home. It was all rrrrrather unhealthy. He gently guided her off to meet with “some doctors,” and that was that. After passing Greg raving about Spider-Man, Felicia has been relating all this to her nurse, who’s stopped to buy a candy bar from a vending machine…
Oh ho! Felicia forces her nurse back to her room, and by the time a doctor comes to check on her hours later, she’s long gone, the nurse tied up in her bed. Meanwhile, Spidey is out swinging around, thinking the best thing to happen to him all day was Falcon buying him lunch after they stopped Stone Face earlier (Continuity!) when a spotlight is shown on him. It’s not setting off his Spider Sense, so he swings down to meet with…
Spidey leaps away, once again feeling weird about how much he likes Black Cat in spite of her profession. Speaking of which, one week later, we find her stealing some priceless artwork from a rich guy’s apartment. She gets in and out without any trouble, reminding the reader her dad was the world’s greatest cat burglar in his time, but complains that there’s no recognition in being a great thief, so she throws a rock through a window to let people know she’s been there. Then she bribes the driver of a horse-drawn carriage to be her escape vehicle.
Why, he’s just getting home from a night out looking for her, as luck would have it. He’s been trying to track her down all week with no luck. And he’s just realized there’s no food in the house and he has to do laundry.
The young lady never says a word as Peter continues bumbling through an attempted conversation, so he gives up. Believe it or not, at that moment, Felicia Hardy is sitting in her apartment, so bored she’s talking to the painting she stole, so she decides to… go do laundry. But it’s not gonna be that kind of story, she goes to the laundry room in her own building and talks to some other dude, who she finds just isn’t her type. She knows who her type is, and his name is Spider-Man. She doesn’t know how she could contact him and doesn’t know if he’d even want to talk to her, but then she sees an ad in the paper for a skywriter, so…
Has Peter’s fellow grad student & TA Steve Hopkins appeared on the blog yet? I am getting really confused. Peter sees a news report about the message snarling traffic, and later that evening, Spider-Man is swinging toward the site of his first meeting with The Cat in ASM 194, which he did call “their first date” at the time, because these two have been flirt-fighting from jump. After a fire escape he’s standing on breaks out from under him, one of Black Cat’s classic “bad luck” gimmicks, she reveals herself.
That middle row of panels is some great action staging. Felicia makes her case, saying she only steals from people who can afford it, and in fact the painting she stole earlier was in the possession of a Maggia boss who’d stolen it himself.
Spidey says even if she went legit, she’d have to turn herself in first, and she’s not into that, so she slips out of her gloves, leaving in them in the hands of a very surprised Spider-Man as she leaps off the roof and vanishes. But down in the alley, Spidey finds a peace offering in the form of the painting she stole, and a note telling him to meet her at a costume party the following night. Spidey delivers the painting to Jean DeWolff, who tells him he shouldn’t go near that costume party, as it’s being held by Phil Bradshaw, the very Maggia don Felicia stole the painting from, but I mean, come on. So now we’re at the party, and and after finding a guy in a Spidey suit who turns out to be a random guy, Felicia is feeling pretty down.
The days when they’d just straight up put people in a Superman costume without worrying about trademarks for a gag were good ones. To show Spidey how committed she is to being a good guy, Felicia picks a fight with Bradshaw, letting him know she stole his painting. When he tries to attack her and Spider-Man steps in suddenly it’s a war zone. Black Cat is having a great time beating up goons, but Spidey can’t stop worrying she’ll get hurt, and then she accidentally jumps right into him during the fracas.
Bradshaw runs for it, right into DeWolff and an army of cops. Turns out, she had been planning to raid the place, and that’s why she told Spidey to stay away. But when she gets inside, she finds most of the party goers webbed up…
Well well well. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful romance? You may already know the answer to that. And if not, you’ll get more info next issue. I get why Stern would go this route, but the retcon that Cat was just pretending to be crazy last time doesn’t really hold up. She stole a whole bunch of stuff to create the perfect romantic offering to Spider-Man, and then let him lead her off to the psychiatric hospital. If that was a con… what was the goal? She says she did it to avoid prison, but she was doing that pretty well by just not messing with Spider-Man. On the other hand, if you want to bring her back, not making her a weirdly naive lovesick superfan is a smart move. Just kinda messy. Mooney smothering JRJR is getting really tiresome. Almost no trace of his style on these pages. When I first saw this stuff, I didn’t really have a sense of what Mooney’s inking style was like, but one thing this blog has taught me is anyone’s pencils are gonna look a whole lot like Jim Mooney’s under his inks. I’ve always thought of Romita, Jr.’s early work as owing a lot to his dad, which I’m sure is true, but now I wonder how much of that old school look is just Mooney. Ah, well. Romita will go through quite a few inkers on this blog, including his dad, so we’ll see that question answered in-depth.