Felicia Hardy's life as the Black Cat has taken quite a few turns over the years, from thief to crime-fighter to criminal and back again. The current Black Cat ongoing from Jed MacKay and Kris Anka has started to re-explore Felicia's history as she uses her skills as a thief around the world.
With ongoing rumors of a live-action film appearance in the works as well as the success of her current ongoing comic series, we wanted to take a deep dive and learn a few important facts about Felicia Hardy and her life as the costumed Black Cat.
10 SHE'S A CAT BURGLAR
While Felicia has worn many hats, she is best known for her skills as a cat burglar, though when she first put on the costume of the Black Cat it was in order to break her father William Hardy out of prison.
Felicia followed in her father's footsteps to become a cat burglar, and while she eventually started to use her skills as a Robin Hood-like thief with morals, she has also become consumed by her profession at times and will fight for her title as a world-class thief.
9 TRAINED BY THE BLACK FOX
Felicia's father may have planted the idea of cat burglary into her head at a young age, but it was an unfortunate sexual trauma during her college years that inspired Felicia to begin training with the hopes of taking revenge on her assaulter, though she was eventually denied her revenge.
This led her to begin training with the same thief who taught her father, the criminal known as the Black Fox. Spider-Man would end up releasing the Black Fox a number of times over the years due to his weakness for older "Uncle Ben" types, but he eventually captured and incarcerated the master thief.
8 DATED SPIDER-MAN
When Spider-Man first crossed paths with the Black Cat she was a criminal and an enemy, though their relationshi8p would develop over their various meetings into a romantic one, and they soon became partners which led Felicia to a more heroic lifestyle.
Unfortunately, Felicia soon realized that she was in love with Spider-Man and not Peter Parker, and she couldn't understand his need for a civilian identity. An increasing number of secrets and lies would eventually lead to Spider-Man breaking up with Felicia, though things would continue to go badly for a time.
7 HELL HATH NO FURY...
Unfortunately, Felicia didn't handle her break-up with Spider-Man well and launched a series of schemes to get her revenge on the wall-crawler, including framing him for murder with the mercenary Foreigner. She would continue her attack on Peter and his personal life when she later discovered he was engaged to Mary Jane Watson.
Felicia began to date Peter's best friend Flash Thompson in the hopes of making him jealous and would attempt to torment the couple, though her love for Peter would remain and the two would eventually settle their differences. Felicia and Mary Jane would also go on to become best friends, eventually.
6 HAS BAD LUCK POWERS
When Black Cat first began working with Spider-Man she was only a highly-trained thief and martial artist, and occasionally felt like she wasn't good enough to be Spider-Man's lover and partner without her own abilities.
She would eventually find a way to gain "bad luck" powers through science, though those abilities were later revealed to have come from the Kingpin and they began to endanger Spider-Man as much as the enemies who crossed her paths. She later regained a variation of her bad luck abilities after losing them due to cybernetic enhancements from Doctor Tramma.
5 ENHANCED COSTUME WITH CLAWS
When Black Cat's bad luck abilities permanently rubbed off on Spider-Man, he sought aid from Doctor Strange to clear him of the unlucky aura, which resulted in the altering of Felicia's powers that gave her cat-like abilities for a short period before she lost the powers altogether.
Like most of New York's supervillain population, Felicia got a new costume from the Tinkerer that replicated her cat-like abilities, increasing her strength, speed, balance and enhanced her vision with high-tech contact lenses. The costume came complete with adamantium-tipped claws, though later enhancements internalized the claws and her bad luck powers.
4 RAN CAT'S EYE INVESTIGATIONS
While Felicia's personal life was falling apart (Peter was married and Flash had recently left her after finding out her secret identity) she decided to find some balance through legitimacy and began taking cases as Black Cat that focused on using her particular skill set for investigation and protection.
She created Cat's Eye Investigations alongside wealthy industrialist Paul Proust and Loop, a former associate of her father's who helped Felicia from a minimum-security prison. While her time with Cat's Eye didn't play into a lot of storylines, it finally gave Felicia a legitimate business to help keep her on the side of the heroes.
3 FOUGHT MARTIANS IN THE FUTURE
Felicia has taken part in quite a few big superhero battles over the years including the Maximum Carnage event that tore through New York City in the Spider-Man titles, but she has also found herself in the far future fighting against an alien invasion.
During one of Black Cat's adventures with Wolverine in the Claws series, Felicia and Logan were transported through time to the future where they met Killraven and his allies as they fought a Martian invasion of Earth. Black Cat and Wolverine would eventually return to their own time and have continued to work together over the years.
2 WORKED WITH HEROES FOR HIRE
The original Heroes for Hire was created by Luke Cage/Power Man and Danny Rand/Iron Fist back in the 70s, but after Marvel's superhuman Civil War, the team returned under the watch of former police detective and frequent superhero ally Misty Knight.
Knight's version of the Heroes for Hire featured a few street-level heroes like Colleen Wing, Shang-Chi, Paladin, and Black Cat who worked to apprehend the costumed characters that were in violation of the Superhuman Registration Act, though Felicia's involvement with the team was mostly due to financial reasons.
1 QUEENPIN
Following a disastrous encounter with the Superior Spider-Man (Otto Octavius), Felicia found herself beaten and humiliated by someone she thought she could trust and fell hard back into her old criminal ways, leading to her purchase of the infamous Bar With No Name that served a unique supervillain clientele.
There she used her criminal connections and knowledge of the superhuman community to become the new Queenpin of New York's criminal empire. She would eventually abandon her criminal empire after Peter finally managed to fix the damage done to their friendship.