Short Lived Comic Series #9 - Marvel Comics' Beware! The Claws of... The Cat

Now this little series is something I was eyeing at my local comic store for quite a while.  I've always loved comics with female leads, and this series was originally published long before I started reading comics. But the store had them a bit high priced, so I waited until they had a 50%-off back issue sale, and I purchased the complete set (and later found the Marvel Team-Up and the Spidey Super Stories issues that featured this character).  And now, I finally got caught up on a lot of my other comic reading, so I had the chance to read it!

Beware! The Claws of... the Cat was a four issue series published by Marvel Comics back in the early 1970s. As with comics back in that day, her origin story was told in one issue (egads! imagine that!), but there was enough story packed into that first issue, that you definitely got your money's worth! The Cat, it turns out, is Greer Nelson - a former college student turned housewife after she meets the man of her dreams. But, as all dreams are wont to do it becomes a nightmare when her husband, a police officer, is killed in the line of duty. Greer returns to college and volunteers with an old professor to help her on a project. It turns out, however, that the project is one that gives volunteers extraordinary powers. When an unscrupulous partner steals the technology and creates his own powered volunteer, it turns to tragedy - Greer watches helplessly as the woman falls to her death!

But, as with any good origin story, from tragedy comes the birth of a hero - and, thus, the Cat is born! Greer takes on of the other woman's costumes and goes out to avenge her professor (who she thinks is dead) and takes on the bad guys. And all of this was just the first issue!

Written by Linda Fite (a woman writer for a woman character - and a darned good one at that), the first issue boasts art by Marie Severin and Wally Wood. The second issue keeps Severin, but the inker is switched to Jim Mooney. The third issue saw a new penciller, Paty Greer (coincidence?), and a new inker (Bill Everett), and the fourth and final issue brought yet another art team, with Jim Starlin and Alan Weiss taking on the pencils, while Frank McLaughlin was on the inks. I find it odd that a series that only lasted four issues had four different pencillers and four different inkers in the span of four issues. This was a bi-monthly book, so I wonder what Marvel was thinking, switching the art team around they way they did. Was it Marvel's choice, or was it the creator's choice? At least the writer remained the same, so the stories were consistent, building on one another, and while the artists did change, the quality of the art never wavered.

The second issue featured the Owl, the third issue brought in the Kraken (along with some aliens pretending to be government scientists), and the fourth issue found the Cat battling the Man-Bull. Something interesting about the fourth issue is that it features a short back-up story starring Marvel Girl (of the X-Men). It had no connection to the main story, and I have no clue why that was thrown in, unless the main story just didn't fill out enough pages.

Now, before the series was cancelled, the Cat did make an appearance over in Marvel Team-Up, issue 8 of that series. Perhaps as a way to try and promote the character in the hopes of selling more issues of her regular title, the Cat teams up with Spider-Man to fight the villainy of the Man-Killer. It's a fun little tale written by Gerry Conway and drawn by Jim Mooney.

The Cat made one other appearance two years later in issue 12 of Spidey Super Stories, the younger-age comic presented by Marvel in collaboration with The Electric Company. The Cat guest-stars in the main story (there are a couple of short stories after the main one), in which she and Spidey team-up to battle ... the Owl. Interesting that she fought the Owl in her own title, and fights him again in this all-ages story. With the plethora of villains Marvel has to choose from, why re-use one she's already faced? And, being the first Spidey Super Stories comic I've ever read, was surprised to see how large the font was - I guess to make it easier reading for the children who picked up the comic.

Now, something I didn't realize - apparently the Spidey Super Stories issue, which came out in 1975, featured the Cat after she had been turned into Tigra (the character she still is today), since Greer became Tigra in Giant-Size Creatures #1 in 1974. Something else I have to wonder about - the Cat's costume is yellow and blue and very similar in so many ways to Hellcat's costume (a/k/a Patsy Walker). So, being the diligent little detective I am, I looked it up and discovered that it IS the same costume, as Patsy found it in Avengers #144 and dons the costume to help the Avengers.

With all that explained, I can look back at Beware! The Claws of... the Cat and say that I enjoyed the short-lived series very much. It's a shame that so many series back in the day with female leads just could not seem to last - Night Nurse, the Cat, Ms. Marvel, Dazzler, Sheena, etc. Even today, while there are a number of female-led titles on the market, with the exception of Wonder Woman, the others are on a constant rotation, restarting, changing, etc.  Is it the fans' lack of interest in the titles?  Is it the creative teams not telling good stories?  Or is it the comic companies' belief that female leads cannot sell titles?  Who knows....

RATING:  8 far-reaching grappling claws out of 10 for introducing Marvel's newest action bombshell to comic fans of the '70s and creating a character that, although changed drastically, has managed to maintain a presence in the Marvel universe all these years!