You might call DC’s Golden Age character
Wildcat an elemental superhero, verging on the generic.
Created by writer Bill Finger and
artist Irwin Hansen for Sensation Comics
1 (Jan. 1942), Ted Grant was a champion boxer who put on a costume to clear
himself after he’d been framed for murder.
Why a costume? Because a kid who’d
been reading about the comic book hero Green Lantern gave him the idea, of
course. Wildcat was meta before meta was cool. And his costume had a clean, black-silhouette
design.
That back-to-basics approach made
the character popular with a number of readers over the decades, among them Piperson
in The Great Comic Book Heroes blog.
“Wildcat is a hero who takes on a
masked identity for a believable reason with believable physical prowess,” he
wrote. “I love the down-to-Earth environment that the story takes place in.
This is not some Art Deco Metropolis or some Gothic Gotham, this is the streets
of New York City or Chicago. This is Madison Square Garden. And Wildcat is not
some idealistic ‘fighter for justice.’ He is a guy who has been wronged and he
is taking back what they took from him using the skills he has available to
him. Even the costume makes sense in that he is on the run from the law and so
has to stay incognito. It’s a great take on the whole superhero genre, one that
Brubaker, Rucka or Bendis would appreciate with their gritty, down-to-Earth
styles.”
Of course, if you were to show the
character to somebody off the street today, they’d be likely to say, “Oh, yeah,
I know him! That Marvel character, what’s his name? The Black Panther!”
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