Decades before Felica Hardy poured herself into a slinky furred cat suit, stunt woman and movie star Linda Turner strut the comics pages in bathing suit, buccaneer boots and opera mask as the Black Cat. First appearing in Pocket Comics #1, she was a headliner in Speed Comics before she got her own series in 1946, which ran a respectable sixtyfive issues, though she had to deal with the usual genre switches as superhero comics stopped selling.
Unlike a lot of other golden age comics, the Black Cat had actually a decent line up of second features. Usually there were two Black Cat stories, the obligatory two pages text story (needed to keep up second class mail privileges), with the rest filled up by the usual boring “humour” one pagers as well as some interesting secondary strips. Simon and Kirby had The Duke of Broadway and The Vagabond Prince, there was Invisible Scarlet O’Neil, one of the first superheroines and others like His Honor and the Red Demon, about a judge turned superhero.
And then there were the judo pages. Starting from issue 7, each issue has two pages of judo tricks in which the Black Cat tells her readers how to get away from and subdue any ruffians, ably illustrated by her main artist, the underrated Lee Elias. So I thought, why not make these a regular feature?
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