In this story, Rick Horne, who is her boyfriend, can’t put two and two together and realize Linda’s bright red curly short hair is also Black Cat’s hairstyle.
The Black Cat was created for Harvey’s Pocket Comics (which had a short run), then on to Speed Comics. She also showed up in All-New Comics, from which this tale of Japanese saboteurs is taken. Her character was aptly handled by some talented artists, and she kept in print throughout the 1940s. My first ogle...excuse me, I mean look...at Black Cat was in the three 25¢ Giant Size reprint comics from Harvey in 1962 and 1963, in stories drawn by Lee Elias. Al Gabriele, credited for the art by the Grand Comics Database, drew the story I am showing here.
From All-New Comics #9 (1944).
I know that there have been actors and actresses who were quite intelligent and otherwise virtuous; yet my perception of them more typically makes me regard a decent crime-fighter as especially unlikely to come from their number. But the Black Cat seems fairly good as fictional heroines go; I like the fact that she's very self-assured, but only reasonably so. And her love interest doesn't seem like a dolt or a sexist (though she's managed to create yet another love triangle with just two people).
ReplyDeleteThe vision of Asia here is of course an unfortunate confusion of cultures.
Your reference to the Harvey reprints made me think — albeït very tangentially — of how various publishers, including DC, had been returning to the genré of costumed crime-fighters in the early '60s, and of how, none-the-less, Batman was on the cusp of being dropped from publication until the “New Look” was introduced. It's quite something that the style of delivery had been so unfashionable that it needed radical change for the character to survive even in an otherwise increasingly favorable environment.
Daniel, I remember the 'new look' Batman, and I was both happy and unhappy with it. I didn't like the real screwball stuff in Batman with Jack Schiff as editor. Batman was turned over to Julius Schwartz, and originally I was happy about Carmine Infantino as artist. But I stopped buying DC Comics altogether (with a few exceptions) around that time, concentrating instead on Marvel.
ReplyDeleteSomething I read about in the comic fan press in the mid-'70s was that when Warner took over DC there was talk of discontinuing the comic book line because of declining sales, but wiser heads prevailed and said for licensing purposes the characters were better off being published in the comic book format.
Thanks for sharing
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