{"id":1051,"date":"2019-07-17T00:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T04:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deweybass.com\/spiderman\/?p=1051"},"modified":"2019-05-08T18:17:55","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T22:17:55","slug":"asm-226","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2019\/07\/17\/asm-226\/","title":{"rendered":"ASM 226"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This month, Jim Mooney tags in on inks. The Black Cat hasn\u2019t been seen in these parts since way back in ASM 205, that only the 2nd story she ever appeared in, she\u2019s still pretty new. And due to the scheduling of this blog, this is her first appearance here. That\u2019s awkward. But, this is also the earliest appearance by her I\u2019d 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\u2026 the very same mental hospital currently home to Felicia Hardy, The Black Cat. Her last caper ended with her declaring she\u2019d 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 \u201csome doctors,\u201d and that was that. After passing Greg raving about Spider-Man, Felicia has been relating all this to her nurse, who\u2019s stopped to buy a candy bar from a vending machine…
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Oh ho! Felicia forces her nurse back to her room, and by the time a doctor comes to check on her hours later, she\u2019s 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\u2019s not setting off his Spider Sense, so he swings down to meet with\u2026
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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\u2019s apartment. She gets in and out without any trouble, reminding the reader her dad was the world\u2019s greatest cat burglar in his time, but complains that there\u2019s no recognition in being a great thief, so she throws a rock through a window to let people know she\u2019s been there. Then she bribes the driver of a horse-drawn carriage to be her escape vehicle.
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Why, he\u2019s just getting home from a night out looking for her, as luck would have it. He\u2019s been trying to track her down all week with no luck. And he\u2019s just realized there\u2019s no food in the house and he has to do laundry.
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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\u2019s talking to the painting she stole, so she decides to\u2026 go do laundry. But it\u2019s 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\u2019t her type. She knows who her type is, and his name is Spider-Man. She doesn\u2019t know how she could contact him and doesn\u2019t know if he\u2019d even want to talk to her, but then she sees an ad in the paper for a skywriter, so\u2026
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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 \u201ctheir first date\u201d at the time, because these two have been flirt-fighting from jump. After a fire escape he\u2019s standing on breaks out from under him, one of Black Cat\u2019s classic \u201cbad luck\u201d gimmicks, she reveals herself.
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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\u2019d stolen it himself.
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Spidey says even if she went legit, she\u2019d have to turn herself in first, and she\u2019s 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\u2019t go near that costume party, as it\u2019s being held by Phil Bradshaw, the very Maggia don Felicia stole the painting from, but I mean, come on. So now we\u2019re 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.
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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\u2019s a war zone. Black Cat is having a great time beating up goons, but Spidey can\u2019t stop worrying she\u2019ll get hurt, and then she accidentally jumps right into him during the fracas.
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Bradshaw runs for it, right into DeWolff and an army of cops. Turns out, she had been planning to raid the place, and that\u2019s why she told Spidey to stay away. But when she gets inside, she finds most of the party goers webbed up\u2026
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Well well well. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful romance? You may already know the answer to that. And if not, you\u2019ll 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\u2019t 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\u2026 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.
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This month, Jim Mooney tags in on inks. The Black Cat hasn\u2019t been seen in these parts since way back in ASM 205, that only the 2nd story she ever appeared in,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112,1],"tags":[9,156,158,18,118,194,117,2],"class_list":["post-1051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1980s","category-uncategorized","tag-amazing-spider-man","tag-black-cat","tag-jean-dewolff","tag-jim-mooney","tag-john-romita-jr","tag-maggia","tag-roger-stern","tag-spider-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1051"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4223,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1051\/revisions\/4223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}