Can Black Cat Overcome Her Reputation As A Catwoman Ripoff?

Title says it all. Do you think it is possible for Black Cat to overcome her reputation as a Catwom ripoff? If so do you have any ideas on how it could be done?

I guess if it were up to me, I'd bring back Felicia's detective agency or put her on the Heroes for Hire team.

They seem to be evoking Silver Age trappings with Felicia at the moment if her Silk and Hellcat material is any indication.

I would explore her bi-sexual aspects, we've only really seen elements of it in MC 2.

Wouldn't that defeat the point, since Catwoman is also bi?

You mean hinted at, and by the way I don't think Felicia has murdered over 200 people like Selina has in the new Batman Rebirth series. I kind of think while there are lots of traits Black Cat shared with Catwoman there is a difference between them.

Selina: Teases and plays with being Batman's one true love succeeding a few times.

Felicia: Teases that, but she will never match Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy as Peter's true love.

Selina: Steals valuables while remaining good in nature.

Felicia: Sometimes goes down a grey area despite being a good nature thief.

Selina: Became a crime lord to restore order in Gotham.

Felicia: Turned into one because of circumstances involving her identity, and her new ambition for having power to stay out of prison.

edited 17th Nov '16 1:09:05 PM by Mizerous

Not hinted at. Selina kissed another woman in one of the later issues of her last solo series.

Oh yeah I forgot that other Catwoman girl. Like a role in the MCU as a Spider villain?

edited 17th Nov '16 3:54:33 PM by Mizerous

I think first she needs to be more "mainstream" or at least visible to the audience. Most people today don't get exposed to Black Cat and when they see her they rightfully think of Catwoman. Taking a major part of a story arc is one of the best way for that. Bucky gets over his Robin ripoff reputation thanks to Captain America volume 5 and the MCU.

edited 17th Nov '16 5:06:52 PM by RAlexa21th

They'd need to show Felicia in some other media, and in a capacity other than "cat burglar/ low level super villain who flirts with the hero." Because otherwise, she IS way too much of a Catwoman rip-off.

One of the problems with Catwoman is that since the 80's, given the shift in tone on the Batman books, there is increasingly little reason for Batman to pay any attention to her, but she's well known enough that DC want's to keep her around, so they have to keep finding things to do with her. It's still well within Spidey's purview to go after a cat-burglar, so it's still workable to make them antagonists, if that's what the writers desire.

Should Felicia have powers or not? If powers, which ones bad luck or enhanced stats?

Just speaking personally, I tend to dislike it when characters have superpowers and are really good fighters. It's like mixing a cheeseburger and a hot fudge sundae in a blender; give me one or the other, not both. And I hate luck-based powers of any kind because it so easily excuses away bad writing and can be abused that way.

So, yeah. "No powers" is my vote.

I dunno. I'm for super-powers (I don't mind luck-based at all, given that they'd fit her). What is her backstory these days? Could it accommodate the years of training necessary to become a Badass Normal in a believable (at least, comic book believable) way?

I don't see that she needs to be an awesome fighter. In the stories I read with her, while she's a competent fighter, her usual strategy is evade, avoid, and trick. Which again, I think works better for her character.

Her backstory seems to be that she learned thievery and martial arts after learning her dad was a thief. Don't know if the "Evil That Men Do" is still canon. Or how much is still intact after Secret Wars.

I hated the rape subplot....

Me too. The story was a fairly decent one without it and it does show how much Felicia had grown over the years. I honest to God don't know what Kevin Smith was thinking.

Any way, what team would you like to see Felicia on? Maybe having her branch out to the MU a bit more might help set her apart from Selina.

Smith, apparently, wanted to do a story about sexual abuse. I think it's well within believability that Felicia might have been sympathetic to what had happened to the antagonist without having gone through something similar herself, but there you go.

I'm mildly surprised he did not as well dredge up that old story about Peter having been molested by an older boy (or at least, the older boy attempted to molest him; the story was hazy on that point—it was a PSA newspaper strip from the 80's trying to raise awareness of the problem and get kids to whom it happened to report it).

Even the part about Felicia having sympathy for the antagonist might have gone over better had he not had Felicia say she agrees that all rape victims secretly want to be raped.

The way to set them apart is to make Felicia the Vulturess.

So she stops wearing her cat outfits?

Spider-Man 4 reference.

The way to set them apart is to put her in a major film adaptation that is hugely successful, as MCU projects tend to be. DC fans will rage about how she's a clear ripoff but the casual moviegoing audience won't care, they'll just love this awesome new character in yet another Marvel smash hit.

She'd hardly be the first MCU character with clear parallels to a DC one. Even Tony Stark is repeatedly referred to as "Marvel's Batman", yet is also their most profitable character. Audiences only really care about originality when it's a method of attack against something they already had other reasons to dislike.

I don't know. The similarities between Felicia and Selina are a lot more blatant. Tony and Bruce's similarities pretty much stop at billionaire superheroes.

What do you mean by the last part?

This depends on how the DCEU portrays Catwoman.

Unless the DCEU completely reinvents the wheel with Catwoman, I wouldn't expect too much of a drastic change. Throughout all her various incarnations, even the shitty ones, there's usually a basic set of constants that are maintained. Beauty. Flirty relationship with Batman. Dark, skintight cat-themed costume. Use of sexuality and feminine wiles to get what she wants. Martial arts skills. Whip. Ect.

And even in Iron Man's case they deliberately changed parts of his world to seem less similar to Batman. Hence why there's no Stark mansion and why JARVIS is a computer instead of a stuffy English butler.

That does sound pretty much like Black Cat (minus the whip, I think).

My sense as a relative comics outsider is that what makes the characters differ has less to do with any inherent divergences between Felicia and Selina as it does with differences between Peter and Bruce and the worlds they inhabit.

Because Batman is usually pretty serious, there's typically a personality contrast with Catwoman, which you don't have with Spider-Man and Black Cat, who both have playful personalities. And similarly, because of the typically dark tone of Batman stories, even though the light-hearted Classy Cat-Burglar association remains with Catwoman (probably because of the 60's tv show), it has been a diminished aspect of her character.

So, despite the fact that Felicia is currently an evil crime lord in the comics, I think you could pretty easily go the light-hearted Classy Cat-Burglar with her in the Spider-Man movies (which is what I figure they will do if she's adapted), without her seemingly like too much of a Catwoman ripoff.

Thing is they kind of did that with Catwoman in DKR, so they shouldn't play Felicia up as a love interest so they can only make her similar to that version of Selina, but that would make her a rip off to some fans.