You had to admire the Black Cat’s sheer pluck.
Going up against a mass-murdering pirate the size of King Kong would give most people pause. But not our dauntless masked movie star and her black-clad Boy Wonder.
With art by Lee Elias and a script possibly by Bob Haney, The Crimson Raider story in Harvey’s Black Cat 28 (April 1951) provided one of comics’ first superheroines with quite a colorful challenge, a man who was a minion of Satan himself.
While shooting a film on the coast of Maine in her civilian identity, the Black Cat and her new partner Kit come across a grotesque murder and terrified townspeople. They narrowly escape a giant who’d been murdered three centuries before.
Later at a restaurant, they learn the legend. Al Gory, the Crimson Raider, had been offered a deal by the devil.
An old crone advised them, “He was told, should he be able to locate an honest namesake to whom he could turn over his ill-gotten booty, one who would use these riches for the betterment of mankind, he would then be allowed to serve out his term of penance with his friends who were already (in hell).”
Sheesh, who could resist a deal like that?
The catch is that each honest namesake he finds is corrupted by the treasure, and the deal falls through.
“This required a few murders along the way,” observed Jon Morris in his book The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains. “But a hidden condition of Satan’s deal made that easier with each failure: Gory grew a foot taller every time he failed to resolve the curse. After three hundred years of bad choices, the Crimson Raider was now a titanic giant, leaving corpses of his victims scattered across the tops of telephone poles or on cliffsides.
“When Hollywood’s Glamorous Detective Star, Linda Turner — a/k/a the Black Cat — and her sidekick Kit become involved with the mystery, they easily make short work of the giant. Pelting him with rocks, dodging his mighty blows, and even causing the colossus to clothesline himself on telephone wires, the Black Cat and Kit confront him at the site of his hidden treasure. A crumbling cliff seals the Raider’s doom, as he plummets to the beach and lands upon his giant-size cutlass.”
The story was reprinted during the publisher’s brief, beloved square-bound revival of the Black Cat in 1962-63.
Harvey’s Black Cat 28 was one of a dozen horror-themed comics on America’s newsstands in February 1951. A year later, that number would more than double to 28. So four-color horror was a coming thing, as was the Comics Code that chilled that genre.
And within three issues, the Black Cat would be pushed out of her own title in favor of horror stories (presumably the magazine’s name then referred to witches’ familiars and not costumed crimefighters).
She’d be reinstated to the renamed Black Cat Western in 1955, a year after the Comics Code kicked in.
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