Here Comes Hellcat! (right) Writer Steve Englehart used the Beast’s feature in Amazing Adventures (panel here from #15) to inch Patsy Walker into the mainstream. (below) Hellcat’s big debut. © 2010 Marvel Characters, Inc.
ongoing feature. Questioned in connection with this article, the veteran author recalls that the girls’ walk-on in Fantastic Four “struck my fan’s eye by including her in the Marvel Universe (MU). So when I got my chance to do strange things in comics, I thought it would be cool to bring her in as a real character, with things to do. Part of my ‘training’ as a Marvel writer was writing romance stories and Westerns, but Patsy was defunct as a comic by the time I got there so I never wrote anything about her previous to ‘The Beast.’ Still, as a fan, I had collected everything Marvel, including Patsy Walker and Patsy and Hedy—toward the end of their runs, they had moved into a running soap opera, which I enjoyed—so I knew them as characters, and enjoyed exploring Patsy in the MU.” Although the Beast already had a love interest in his lab assistant, Linda Donaldson (who was, unfortunately, an operative of the Secret Empire), Patsy served as a feminine presence, a damsel in distress, albeit an intrepid one—equal parts Nancy Drew and Katy Keene. Patsy, now married to her former high-school sweetheart, Col. Buzz Baxter, also provided intrigue and melodrama, elements associated with romance comics, but truthfully an intrinsic part of the appeal of superhero titles, ever since the Marvel Age began with Fantastic Four #1. Things like Reed and Sue’s relationship problems, Spider-Man’s girl troubles, and Thor’s angst over his mortal love interest and conflicts with his father were what defined Marvel Comics and redefined the medium. Patsy’s inclusion in the world of superheroes demonstrated that the distinctions between the two genres were not so sharply defined after all.
FROM AMAZING ADVENTURES TO THE AVENGERS
When “The Beast” was replaced with another feature in Amazing Adventures, Englehart incorporated him into The Avengers, and Patsy soon followed. The one loose end from the earlier series Englehart seemed intent on tying up was a pact the two had formed after Patsy had discovered that the Beast’s other identity was Hank McCoy. The story in The Avengers revealed that Patsy had elicited a promise from the Beast in return for keeping his secret from her husband and his employers, the shady Brand Corporation: she had demanded that the Beast help her become a superheroine and he reluctantly had agreed to, despite having no practical way to accomplish such a feat. Englehart relates that he initially had no plans to turn Patsy into a superheroine, but that “my characters tend to write themselves, and pretty soon I knew she would want in on this game for real.” In The Avengers, the other heroes are somewhat bemused by Patsy, particularly after her enthusiasm gets the better of her and she attempts to aid them against their opponents, the Squadron Supreme, with disastrous results. When they later happen upon the Cat’s costume in the Brand Corporation’s facility, however, even the reluctant Captain America is persuaded by her girlish exuberance and naked idealism to allow Patsy to don it. As Patsy says in The Avengers #144 (Feb. 1977): “I’ve waited all my life for this moment! You couldn’t stop me with a team of wild horses!” In a sequence that relates Patsy’s history as a way of explaining her motivation, Englehart effectively married the disparate worlds of romance and superhero comics. Camp elements like a caption that attributes the design of Patsy’s wardrobe in one panel to a reader, referencing a popular gimmick in girls’ comics that
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