Cat Girl will never look as cool inside this book as she does on the cover of it. Leave all your preconceptions about sultry cat ladies behind; this is a very different cat heroine!
Cat Girl is Cathy Carter, whose father was a somewhat bumbling private investigator. One day while she was in their attic to look over hetr father hard at work guarding a nearby insurance building from a suspected break-in, she stumbled over a casket her father’s African friend had sent and found a cat suit. She put it on, went on to the roof to look over her father and saw him being beaten up by a couple of thugs. With all the grace and instincts of an actual cat, she didn’t hesitate and immediately jumped over to save him.
That’s how she debuted in the first issue of weekly girls comics magazine Sally, in June 1969. She would continue her adventures there in weekly installments of two and a half pages until Sally was merged with Tammy, then continued there until 1971. Because the UK comics industry was even more amateurish than its US counterpart, its writer remains unknown, but the artist is Giorgio Giorgetti. Giorgetti was an Italian who migrated to the Uk after the war to become an hotelier but ended up being an IPC cartoonist. He sadly passed away in 1982 due to cancer.
With each installment of Cat Girl being barely two and a half pages long, running for six to ten or so issues, the stories are stripped to their essentials. What with each part having to end on some sort of cliffhanger as well, it’s a testament to the qualities of both the unknown writer and Giorgetti’s drawings that they read as coherent as they do in this collection. Each story starts with Cathy’s dad getting some sort of job offer and Cathy deciding to help him. Thanks to her cat instincts and abilities it’s never long before she finds a clue to solve the crime, or tracks down the crooks responsible. But these can also land her in trouble, for example when her instincts force her to flee from a couple of guard dogs in one story. The crooks in these stories are ruthless: in her first case she’s caught, wrapped in a net and thrown in a river to drown; in another put on top of a chimney stack to slowly roast to death. She saves herself in that one by howling like a cat, attracting every feline in the neighbourhood and alerting people to her plight…
As I said at the start, Cat Girl is not an especially cool or sexy superheroine. Giorgetti consistently drew her acting as a real cat, in the way she moved and behaved. It’s all done in a similar way as to how e.g. a Ditko would draw Spider-Man in action, moving in a way that invoked the animal he was named after. Giorgetti also has a sense of humour about it, as Cathy gets into a literal cat fight with another girl wearing a cat suit and then has to take a job in a local panto as Dick Whittington’s cat!
Like dozens if not hundreds of other British series, these Cat Girl stories were trapped in mouldering back issues of Sally and Tammy for decades before Rebellion published this anthology in 2022, having bought the rights to all IPC properties they could get their hands on. Part of the Treasury of British Comics imprint, the Best of Cat Girl also has the Cat girl story from the Tammy and Jinty Special 2020, which introduced a new Cat Girl. The costume is slightly redesigned, losing the whiskers but keeping the tail. The story’s by Ramzee and Elkys Nova and I wouldn’t mind them doing more of this modern Cat Girl.
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