Sit back and let this Golden Age heroine headscissor her way into your heart (or at least your loins) – Black Cat #10

Few comic characters have possessed as much inherent eroticism as the Black Cat — the Golden Age Black Cat that is, though the white-haired, fluffy-booted, tightly-attired, Spider-Man-bedeviling version certainly has her allure. The flowing red tresses, the mask, the boobs, the leather and the boots all made Linda Turner’s old-timey alter ego an object of desire both for the men in her fictional universe and the boys of all ages reading her Harvey mag (and women so inclined). We’ve encountered her once before on this blog (almost exactly one year ago — circadian rhythms), when we looked at the first appearance of her young male sidekick, Kit (GET IT?) Weston, who served as a Pavlovian proxy for all the salivating horndogs counting down the hours until the next issue hit the newsstand. We were/are all Kit.

She’s back again. We won’t delve too deeply into the content of this issue, since, well, the cover pretty much says it all about our dear Cat, with an appeal so fierce it could make hearts magically appear over a pipe-smoking man’s hat. The comic contains latently erotic self-defense tips, though, and by God that’s something we have to discuss.  

Any heroine in the Golden Age was going to have her share of bondage imagery — if that heroine was Wonder Woman, it would be incorporated into her very crime-fighting tools. The Black Cat wasn’t as much into bondage as her Amazonian peer, though her costume is, obviously, already halfway there in the BDSM aesthetic sense. And lassoing her quarry worked its way into her repertoire just the same, as we see in these panels (crafted, as many Black Cat panels were in the day, by Lee Elias):

The Black Cat wasn’t really about hog-tying bad guys though. She was more into using that bodacious bod of hers as her primary certified lethal weapon. She’d just as soon deploy her taut thighs to subdue her enemies, as she does in this panel:

You know, of all the ways for a superheroine to rudely yank a villain out of a speeding automobile, wrapping him up in her bare gams surely has to rank as one of the more pleasant. A pleasant unpleasant surprise, as it were.

This ties into (no pun) the tips found, appropriately enough, in the comic’s centerfold. For a time, a running feature of the Black Cat’s mag was a series of haphazard self-defense how-tos, which were a narrowly ineffectual learning tool for anyone who might one-day find themselves in costume, in heels, and in desperate need of subduing an aggressor. Yet there they were, “Judo Tricks” for the lonely-hearted, and their titillation potential was immense.

The erotic appeal of this issue’s first tip, Lesson Seven, isn’t so profound. If a fisherman fresh off the boat on the Old Spice bottle tries to abduct you, attacking his thumb is apparently your best countermeasure:

And do it with a smile too, I guess.

Lesson Eight is where the Black Cat’s gams come to the fore, and the lines between Judo and the Kama Sutra become a tad blurred:

There are plenty of men who would pay good, hard American currency for such treatment, and Ms. Turner didn’t know what a gold mine she was sitting on. Metatarsal, shmetatarsal, they’ll take a healthy dosing of 2 and 3, please. If word of this gets out, men are never going to stop trying to choke her. “The Darling of Comics” indeed.

And there you have it. Not much more can be said. Should any of the women reading this ever want to parry someone who’s strangling you, you have your simple three-step life-saver. And if you ever want to give your man a night of oxygen-deprived pleasure/pain that he’ll never forget, you’re all set for that too. Excelsior!