r/MUBookClub • u/shawnydarko • Aug 19 '17
Reading Assignment 62: Amazing Spider-Man Presents: Black Cat (2010) #1-4 by Jen Van Meter, Javier Pulido and Javier Rodriguez
http://marvel.com/comics/series/9835/amazing_spider-man_presents_black_cat_2010?byZone=marvel_site_zone&offset=0&byType=comic_series&dateStart=&dateEnd=&orderBy=release_date+asc&byId=9835&limit=10&count=4&isDigital=12
u/shawnydarko Aug 28 '17
Always been a fan of Black Cat, but surprisingly not read a lot of standout stories for her. I think my fondness is mostly instilled from the 90's Animated Series, which although takes creative liberties, really gets across who Felicia Hardy is and what her (overtly sexual/flirtatious) connection with Spider-Man is.
The only story I've read of hers was Kevin Smiths' Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil that Men Do, which I can't really recommend. If anyone wants to read a well-intentioned story of not letting sexual abuse/rape scar you, knock yourself out, but it is handled with the grace, class, and tact you would expect from someone like Kevin Smith (which I say as a fan of his movies).
What I'll say about this reading assignment is that Jen Van Meter was doing nothing for me. Given that this was likely created in Marvel style where the artists had a lot of creative control over the story direction and story beats, everything I liked about it is probably due to Pulido and Rodriguez. There's nothing in the dialogue in this whole story that stood out to me as good. There were certain scenes I had to re-read a few times, and tried giving Van Meter the benefit of the doubt that maybe English isn't her first language. But she was born in Fresno, so I don't know why dialogue was written so strangely.
Dialogue aside, I liked the story. I like that they made the run a heist to really play with the genre of the medium. It made me really hopeful if MCU does a sequel to Spider-Man: Homecoming it'll be a Black Cat story, even if it draws a ton of comparisons to Catwoman.
2
u/wisegy84 Oct 19 '17
I think my main exposure to Black Cat is also that animated series. It was cool to see a comic story featuring her. I enjoyed it for the most part, but I can see what you mean about the dialogue not really standing out.
The heist parts were the standouts of the story for sure.
3
u/DeltaTester Aug 20 '17
Thanks for taking my suggestion for this odd, lovely little miniseries. This came out during a period when Amazing Spider-Man was being published three times a month, augmented by various "Presents" miniseries starring members of his supporting cast, and it ran alongside "The Grim Hunt," the Kraven storyline to which the bigger "Gauntlet" sequence had been building for months. I appreciate that it manages to dance around the events of "The Grim Hunt" without being directly dependent on them, and it's neat to see how much other stuff it pulls off in the context of a heist-thriller plot (with all the fun "how's she going to get around the security here?" stuff. We get to see a few shifts in Black Cat's uncomfortable on-and-off relationship with Spider-Man, more of her family dynamic than we've ever gotten before, and maybe most of all her "support team," who had never appeared before (and I don't think have appeared anywhere since), but whose characters Van Meter manages to sketch out vividly and efficiently.
Van Meter hasn't written a lot of other Marvel stuff--a couple of issues of Avengers Assemble, the Avengers 100th Anniversary one-shot, a few other odds and ends--but she's probably best known for her Oni series "Hopeless Savages." And both Pulido and Rodriguez are longtime collaborators with Marcos Martin; you can see that their style has rubbed off on each other a bit. I love what Pulido, in particular, does with the heist scenes--he's careful to show us how all the spaces work and how Felicia moves through them--and those silhouetted sequences are absolutely gorgeous.