Review by Ian Keogh

While working well enough bouncing off Spider-Man, the problem with considering Black Cat in her own series rapidly becomes obvious: she’s too similar to Catwoman. Jed MacKay begins this volume with some cat comparisons, and Felicia Hardy may be blonde, but otherwise she ticks the boxes as a beautiful thief at home in society and occasionally employing henchmen. The one major difference is a vaguely defined super power of luck falling in her favour. MacKay’s choices amount to just to running with the copy or trying for something more original.

He achieves a sort of middle ground. There are no great revisions to Felicia’s essentially acquisitive character, but rather than jewellery heists MacKay sets the task of breaking into what one might imagine are the most impenetrable locations in Marvel’s New York. The starting point is Doctor Strange’s place. It establishes a determination and a challenge, as there are surely few who’d target the Master of the Mystic Arts.

There’s occasional stiffness to the people, but Travel Foreman’s use of novel viewpoints, usually from a distance, and his designs distract from moments of suspect movement. His Felicia has the necessarily glamorous look without resorting to exploitation, and everyone Foreman draws has a personality. That’s partly down to MacKay, who avoids the usual procedure of the humans in the vicinity of the super-powered being pretty well interchangeable. Everyone is distinctive here.

While the individual escapades are fun, they build toward a bigger picture, and MacKay knows well enough that even the best planned robberies require complications if we really want to maintain our sympathy for the Black Cat. These are duly supplied with considerable imagination and include people you’d imagine Felicia is ill-equipped to deal with, luck notwithstanding.

Everything is running swimmingly as we move toward On the Run. Alternatively, both are found with the remainder of MacKay’s run as Black Cat by Jed MacKay Omnibus.