We had the Huntress in the 1970s, Batgirl in the 1960s, and Batwoman in the 1950s. But did Batman have a female counterpart in the 1940s?
Why yes, but DC didn’t publish her. Harvey Comics did.
The Black Cat was to Batman as Wonder Woman was to Superman. Or at least, so it seemed to me when I was 8 and saw Harvey Comics’ all-too-brief, intriguing revival of The Black Cat, drawn with a Caniff-ish touch by Lee Elias.
Both Wonder Woman and Black Cat successfully modulated a superheroic template created for a male character into a different key.
The Harvey heroine was a masked, athletic crime-fighter like Batman. Linda Turner, a stuntwoman turned movie star, was also presumably wealthy, like Bruce Wayne. When a masked wonder boy who’d been a circus acrobat was added to the feature, the resemblance became unmistakable. Batman had his Robin, and the Black Cat had her Black Kitten. Turner’s stuntwoman background gave her plausible crime-fighting skills, and her film star status lent itself to backup romance/glamour stories in which the Black Cat need not figure.
The concept worked well enough to make her Harvey’s most successful superhero, carrying her from a debut in Pocket Comics 1 (Aug. 1941) to a long run in Speed Comics to her own title, which ran for an impressive 65 issues and didn’t finish up until April 1963.
I remember being intrigued, if slightly unsettled, by the implication of the feature when I was a boy. After all, the Black Cat did not exist in the world of the Justice League. As far as we could tell, she was the only superhero operating in her universe.
A world where the only superhero was a woman? In 1962? What an astounding (but kind of fascinating) idea!
You could write a book just about the feline females of popular culture. They seem endless, from Harvey’s Black Cat to DC’s Catwoman, Cheetah, Golden Age Huntress, and Wildcat II.
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