So, a little while back, I mentioned Wildcat’s forgotten side-kick, Stretch Skinner. But did you know that Stretch wasn’t just comic relief? Oh, no, he was also a costumed side-kick!

His origin begins with Stretch bragging in the gym about how he’s the real hero, and Wildcat is just some guy who tags along with him. At that precise moment, due to narrative causality, crooks break into the gym and Wildcat shows up in the nick of time to save Stretch. Who doesn’t take Ted’s arrival well…

Discouraged, Stretch hits the streets, still complaining about Wildcat saving his life. It’s then that he realizes the source of Ted Grant’s powers:

Which leads us to the most disturbing panel in Wildcat comics history. Yes, even more disturbing than that time he beat up a transvestite, or all the times he shouted “Low Bridge!”

You know, I might be okay with Stretch being killed off, now.

Why not?

I mean, let’s be honest here, everyone has a character they’re fond of for no readily explainable reason. I mean, there are people out there who are actually Swamp Thing fans, if you can believe it. Why, exactly, I would end up with Wildcat as my favorite character is a bit of a mystery, even to myself. The first encounter I had with him was in Crisis on Infinite Earths, and that was less than an auspicious introduction.

Not only is he feeling sorry for himself, but he gets himself crippled by dumb luck. And his appearances in the next few issues are still Ted feeling sorry for himself, or other characters feeling sorry for him. And then Yolanda Montez shows up and takes his name and costume and that’s that. Now, don’t get me wrong, Yolanda was a perfectly fine character, even if she was primarily introduced to make the DC Universe less male and WASP-ish (see, nerds, it’s not just a recent thing, so get the hell over yourselves). And she certainly deserved a better fate than what she got, killed off with a bunch of third-stringers to try and convince us that Eclipso could possibly be any kind of threat. But in Crisis, Ted comes off as fairly expendable, but at least well-liked enough to not actually go ahead and kill.

That self-loathing angst he had in Crisis seems to be a fairly popular way for writers to try and get an angle on Ted. Being one of the few Golden Age heroes to still appear on a semi-regular basis, portraying him as the “past his prime” man in the midst of a mid-life crisis must seem like an obvious approach to take, especially since he lacks the deus ex machina powers of other characters that made the transition to the Silver Age and contemporary comics. I sometimes get annoyed by its over-use, but I can’t argue against it too much: it is pretty much how he was introduced into modern comics.

It’s also marked his too few appearances in other media. His appearance in Justice League Unlimited had him joining a super-powered “fight club” to prove that he still had what it takes to stay in the super-hero business, and his appearance in Batman: The Brave and The Bold had him in denial about his age, before semi-retiring to train younger heroes. It’s a valid interpretation of the character, but it’s too mired in thirty to forty year old stories involving him for my taste. I’m much fonder of the more adventurer-based, man-of-the-world Wildcat that appeared in several team-up stories in The Brave and The Bold.

My first real, ongoing exposure to Wildcat was in the 1992 Justice Society of America series by Len Strazewski and Mike Parobeck. Now this was a Ted Grant I could get behind. Light-hearted, joking, palling around with the Atom. All in all, a fairly grounded and humanistic character surrounded by god-like characters. That there seemed to be something…special, shall we say, about his relationship with the Atom didn’t hurt at all.

And pretty much from there I was hooked. I went back and scrounged up all the appearances I could, and even managed to complete a set of the “Super Squad” era of All Star Comics, just in time for DC to put out a nice two volume set. These stories, along with the Batman team-ups, form probably the core of the Wildcat “canon.” The two most important aspects of his characterization are established here: his fist-first attitude:

And his bickering with Power Girl.

This is actually a significant improvement over Wildcat’s Golden Age appearances. Irwin Hasen’s art is beautiful, but Bill Finger did tend to write him as basically a blue-collar Batman. A lot of his Golden Age charm comes from some of the lighter moments that Finger did manage to get in there, such as Ted getting the inspiration to become Wildcat, after being framed for murder by fight-fixers, from a kid reading Green Lantern comics.

Although the absurdity of a costumed crime-fighter, calling himself Wildcat, who shows up right after Ted Grant, whose nick-name is Wildcat, gets framed, and that same crime-fighter taking a special interest in the guys who framed Grant…and no one realizing the obvious, is fairly charming.

Though perhaps the loss of his allegedly comedy relief side-kick “Stretch” Skinner to comics history isn’t to be lamented.

(I’ve just doomed Stretch to getting killed off in a Geoff Johns comic by reminding the world of him, haven’t I?)

Of course, the finest Ted Grant moment is in JSA #10, when he single-handedly defeats the Injustice Society, after they interrupt his bath/phone sex with Catwoman.

Which gives us ample opportunity for the incredibly sexy Wildcat that Steve Sadowski drew in his time on the title.

Over the course of this fight, Ted runs over Count Vertigo and Geomancer with his Cat-O-Cyle, straps Icicle into a Dr. No laser table, drops Blackbriar Thorn down an elevator shaft, beats the crap out of the Golden Wasp (son of the only “super-villain” Ted really fought solo in his run in Sensation Comics), oh, and drops a statue of Ma Hunkel on Tigress, daughter of his retconned in arch-enemies Huntress and Sportsmaster…

And, of course, at the end of it all, Ted knows where his true priorities lie:

So, why Wildcat? A working class hero in a world of billionaire playboys resonates with me. An unapologetically low-power hero in a world of gods appeals to me. The accepted at face value silliness of his look and origin is exactly the sort of glorious nonsense I want from super-hero books. And, yes, even the occasionally over-done angsting over being an older man in a young man’s game gives him something unique.
Plus, artists like to draw him looking really, really effing hot.

Comics!

“Something’s wrong with tomorrow” is an absolutely brilliant, pure Superman sentence.

Cartoons!

Did they make Evil Wildcat pink?

Carol Channing!

I can still never decide if this song is misogynistic or misandristic.

Employee Aaron made me this for Christmas. He knows me well.

Some mornings, it’s a picture of Wildcat groping Power Girl

“Karen didn’t seem to like that much, Ted.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what Joan said last night, Jay.”
“What?”
“You heard me!”
“But it doesn’t make sense…”
“Yeah, well, that’s what she said.”
“What?”

So, I’ve been amused by DC Universe: Decisions, and not particularly in the “wow, this is a really good comic” sort of way. Now, this comic series isn’t as bad as you’ve been hearing, not by a long shot…but it’s not any good either. I’ve been enjoying it as “stupid DC fun”, and since it’s been coming out during the Final Crisis skip-month, it’s also filled my “DC heroes team up and bicker” quota for the month.

But it’s still hard, even as someone who is finding some enjoyment in it, to see what the point of the series is, other than to give people on message-boards something to complain about. To be sure, there are the usual complaints about the writers, Bill Willingham and Judd Winick, mostly of the fan-anger and fan-entitlement varieties. I was hoping for more overt attempts to alienate fans from characters by revealing previously unguessed at abhorrent political beliefs of various super-heroes, like finding out that the Question is a Libertarian with Objectivist overtones (oh, wait…), as I joked about in this post. So far, the closest we’ve come is the laughable revelation that Lois Lane is a Republican:

I mean, this characterization can sorta work…if this is the hateful, emasculating shrew Lois of the Golden and Silver Age Superman comics. But the modern Lois is a muck-racking journalist with an emphasis on exposing corporate crime, and her background consists pretty much of rebelling against her hard-line conservative military father. I mean, the whole reason that the Lois Lane as Bill O’Reilly bit works in Trinity is that it represents a complete inversion of the character’s personality:

And we can tell this is what Busiek is going for, because the same issue gives us mobster Dick Grayson and nerd Donna Troy. But Lois as a Republican in the mainstream DCU? That’s just laughable. That’s making a character a Republican just to do it. It shows no thought or creativity.

Which is the big problem with Decisions, it’s lazy. For a book that’s supposed to tell us the political opinions of super-heroes, all we’ve really been told is that Green Arrow and Guy Gardner are jack-asses. We don’t know anything about the politics of the candidates, which makes the endorsements from the various heroes utterly meaningless. We can infer something about their policies based on who endorses who: Green Arrow’s candidate is probably a far left liberal activist who is more than willing to pay lip service to progressive politics, and then ditch them when they become politically inconvenient, because that’s just the kind of candidate old Ollie would gravitate towards. And we can presume that Guy Gardner’s candidate is just shy of being a fascist because it’s inconceivable that Guy would support anyone else. That Hawkman, who pretty much is a fascist, supports the same candidate would seem to support this, except that Power Girl, a militant feminist, supports the same candidate as well. Which leads me to the real significant problem with this comic:

You see that? That’s Wildcat and Power Girl supporting the same politician. And this is how I know the book has lazy writing, because it’s painfully apparent that neither Willingham nor Winnick has ever read a book with Wildcat or Power Girl in it before. Ted and Karen…agreeing on something? No, never, that’s simply not going to happen. Since Power Girl was first introduced, she and Wildcat have never agreed on anything, and they will pointedly disagree on things just to get a rise out of the other.
I mean, come on…let’s get on the ball here and at least write Wildcat correctly, guys.

I really can’t decide if I want to write up anything more about Wizard World, especially since Mike pretty well covered it. The dealer’s area alternately depressed, angered and overwhelmed me, and I think in future I’m just going to have to stay in the Artist’s Alley type areas, because as confusing as that was, at least I got to briefly chat with Amanda Connor, Jimmy Palmiotti and Todd Nauck and his wife Dawn, which was nice. I also meant to find Matt Maxwell again and give him some money for Strangeways, but I couldn’t remember where in all that chaos he had been sitting.

So, I’ll just share a couple of the good shots.

Here’s a man beating a woman with a dead pig, from Ken Shannon #3. Forget all those new comics that are either too expensive or too cheap; just point me in the direction of coverless Golden and Silver age books at the next con and I’ll be happy.

A trio of costume shots…I have NO IDEA how that last one ended up on my camera. Honest. I think Pete took it.

And finally, my first ever convention sketch, by Todd Nauck, which I’m absolutely thrilled with.

Nauck is drawing the upcoming American Dream series for Marvel and his creator-owned book Wildguard is returning to Image soon. I really like Nauck’s work and he’s not an artist I usually get to bring up here, so go out and buy those books and encourage more work from him.