Category: costume party heroes

(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 018-020, 1941)

The Cat’s Paw gets a pretty classic intro: Dr Lin, the Angel’s old mentor and friend who was introduced in the previous issue, is ruthlessly murdered via high-speed application of poisoned dart. The Angel give chase, but fails to make the bust.

The next day we see some of the Cat’s Paw’s scheme begin to emerge. She’s killing industrialists for some reason. But why?

Here’s our first look at the villain in question, because I chose some odd images to clip. A couple of things about her stand out:

-she’s our first example (if not necessarily Marvel’s first example – they’ve got a half-dozen other titles at this point) of a few things in a Marvel comic: a female super-villain, a proper costumed crook, themed weaponry in the form of a cat-claw launcher, and, kind of, a recurring villain.

-on that last point: not really. Though the Cat’s Paw does appear in three issues worth of  Angel comics, it’s all one story, just decompressed a bit.

-it is of course notable that she looks a bit like 90s Catwoman

-most importantly: in the above image both the Cat’s Paw and the Angel are attending a costume party as themselves! A twofer! 

Eventually, the Angel tracks the Cat’s Paw down to her HQ in one of the dozens of deserted castles that litter the mountains a short drive from NYC in any given comic book universe.

Now for the disappointing news: the reason that the Cat’s Paw was killing all of those industrialists is that she was acting as a… catspaw for the Nazis in their bid to weaken US support for Britain (and here once more I must note that Marvel was really leading the pack on making Nazi villains for-real Nazis well before Pearl Harbor). She does rediscover her patriotism once her Nazi handler tries to bump her off, which is better than nothing, I suppose. 

Here’s where I’d normally be decrying the comic for killing her off at the end, pointing out how ambiguous the “guess we’ll never find the corpse, oh well” nature of her death is, and call for her to be brung back as a legacy villain, but the Nazi collaboration is really sticking in my craw. Honestly if she hadn’t walked it back at the end I’d be all for the Cat’s Paw showing up as an Axis agent in period pieces going forward but as-is I reckon she can lie fallow.