Rating the Super Hunks #24: Catman

In honour of Cat Week, I am going to examine a guy who has been around the DCU for a long time, but has only recently converted to hunkdom. Not unlike Kiefer Sutherland, Catman only became sexy when he was given a starring role in a series. For this we can thank Gail Simone, who saw the potential for hunkiness where no one else did. So let's all take a good, long, dreamy look at

Thomas Blake, aka Catman

HE WISHES SHE WAS DEADSHOT.

Costume/Appearance:

Well, y'know. His costume is basically Batman's. And it doesn't help that he broke onto the scene back in the sixties as a villain who was ripping off both Catwoman and Batman.

I WONDER IF THOMAS EVER LOOKS BACK ON THIS AND IS DEEPLY ASHAMED.

But the claw marks on the front, matching the real scar underneath, add a bold, seductive touch. And the brown and gold colour palate he has gone with as of late is working for him. And he fills the suit out nicely.

"I DON'T KNOW WHAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT. MY COSTUME IS NOTHING LIKE THIS ONE."

Sans costume, Thomas Blake is a blonde (or possibly red-headed depending on the artist), ripped, square-jawed and frequently shirtless dreamboat. He has a macho permanent stubble and loose locks thing going on, not unlike Sawyer from Lost but possibly with more shampoo.

MAN. CATMAN.

I am going to give Catman full marks for looks, but he will lose points on the unoriginal costume choice.

7/10

Personality:

Who doesn't love a sexy anti-hero? We all love Superman and everything, but there's something extra delicious about a villain with morals. He's the unofficial leader of the Secret Six, commanding respect with his relative sanity, his awesome fighting skills, and his perfectly sculpted chest.

"DON'T MAKE ME REMOVE MORE OF MY COSTUME! BECAUSE I WILL!"

DEADSHOT WILL PROBABLY SHOW HER HIS IF SHE ASKED.

Let's not forget that this guy hit rock bottom not long before joining up with the Six. He was fat, disgraced, and suicidal when he decided that, rather than offing himself, he would move to Africa, get ripped and come back with a vengeance. And you have to respect that.

MACHO!

Not as terrifying as his sexy pal Deadshot, but by no means a sappy good guy, Catman has a perfect balance of good and...well, I don't want to say 'evil', but certainly 'self-interest.'

She smells like catnip.

9/10

Sexiness of Super Powers:

According to Wikipedia, Catman is "an Olympic-level athlete and skilled hand-to-hand combatant. He is also one of the world's finest hunters and trackers." So basically, if you are choosing a partner for The Amazing Race, this is your guy.

"LET HER GO OR I SWEAR I WILL TAKE MY SHIRT OFF AND MAKE OUT WITH YOU SO HARD."

10/10

Day Job:

The only job Catman has is working with the Secret Six to kill people who are even worse than they are for large amounts of money. Since I didn't fault Jonah Hex for being a bounty hunter, I can't really take points away from Catman on this one. Or can I? Hex is an entrepreneur, and he works alone. That makes his work slightly sexier.

But I do love the "will-they-or-won't-they" romance he shares with Deadshot.

"I SEE YOU ARE WEARING YOUR TIGHTEST SWEAT PANTS. AS AM I."

9/10

Cons:

You could argue that Catman is a much lesser Batman, and why eat hamburger when you can eat Bruce Wayne? He's a B-lister for sure, but he clawed his way up (pun!) from D-list, so that's something. We can't really ignore the fact that, for many decades, this guy was a total joke. And, y'know, he kills a lot of people.

COOKING WITH CATMAN!

HE HAS REALLY NICE EYES, TOO.

He's the first villain, if we can consider him that, to be rated among the Super Hunks, so I'll go easy on him. For a villain, he has surprisingly few flaws.

- 2

FINAL SCORE: 33/40

THIS WOULD ALSO MAKE A GOOD COSTUME.

I'm afraid so, Catman. But that is a perfectly respectable score! In fact, that ties you with Iron Fist, so not bad at all! Especially considering the dramatic and sexy comeback from being a fat loser.

Cat Week Begins! An Interview With Tigra Superfan #1!

 And so begins Cat Week at Living Between Wednesdays! To kick off this seven-day festival of feline foolishness, I thought I’d do a bit of investigative journalism into one young man’s slightly unhealthy obsession. Sean Jordan is a former Strange Adventures employee and current Silver Snail employee, a man of many talents renowned for his microphone skills under the nom du rap Wordburglar (check out him out on the web here), as well as his quick-witted comic scripting—SJ co-created (with Mike Holmes) and writes the Arcana webcomic Snakor’s Pizza (check it out here, and dig the mad art skills of Kody Peters). Sean also co-created and provided artwork for the legendary Halifax-based minicomic Adventures in Paper-Routing, scripted by Alex Kennedy (check out this retrospective here, and keep your eyes peeled for the book’s upcoming revival). What many don’t know about this modern-day Renaissance man is that he is also, quite possibly, the world’s biggest fan of Greer Nelson, AKA Tigra. SJ can’t get enough of the Avengers’ resident cat-lady, and maintains a pretty impressive collection of her appearances and merchandise. Sean graciously agreed to be interviewed from his Toronto crib, peeling back the curtain on his comic-book crush.

 

Can you remember what your first Tigra comic would have been?

Yup. Marvel Tales #203, an old reprint story where Kraven had brain-washed her into fighting Spidey, then I believe Spidey cured her and they teamed up to take Kraven down in the classic Mighty Marvel Manner. I believe an adult I knew bought it for me at a gas station somewhere so I'd be quiet in the backseat…haven't read it since I was kid actually - now I need to go track a copy down!

What makes Tigra more special to you than, say, Hellcat, Catwoman, or even X-Force’s Feral?

Hmm, well first of all Hellcat's kind of a clone of Tigra's first incarnation, The Cat, so she's out. Catwoman, while pretty cool and also cat-based, does not have a tail, so she's out. And Feral??? Dave, please. In Avengers #216 Tigra stopped Molecule Man from destroying the world by convincing him to go see a therapist! That was shortly after he'd taken out Thor, Iron Man & The Silver Surfer! Beat that, Feral! 

Well put. Do you have a particularly favourite issue or run of issues featuring Tigra?

That Avengers Molecule Man issue is pretty cool, I believe he kept her alive after beating all the other Avengers because he wanted her to be his girlfriend haha…I feel like that happened to her a lot actually. Poor Greer. I also enjoyed John Byrne's West Coast Avengers run, and lately she's been kickin' some ass in Avengers: The Initiative. 

Is there any one artist who draws the best Tigra, in your opinion?

Don Perlin's swanky Marvel 1970s style is pretty great, he drew her first appearance and you can't go wrong with classic John Byrne. Also, Amanda Connor did an awesome Tigra sketch for me a few years back and I'd love to see her work on the character some day.

How exactly did your Tigra shrine get started? Is there one particular piece of Tigra merchandise that you remember buying first? 

It's not a shrine! It's just a place on a shelf, sheesh! I think it started out as a joke actually. I got the Bowen statue after it was revealed that I knew more about Tigra than anyone at the Silver Snail, and then every time I saw a Tigra toy everyone I knew made me buy it haha

 And finally, do you think you'll ever do a rap professing your love of Tigra?

Funny you should mention that, I just recorded a track with a hint of Tigra in it for my next album...stay tuned! 

Hat Week: The Hats of Romance Comics Explained

Hats and head-wear play an important role in romance comics. By studying the trends of the era, and using hats as signifyers we can gain understanding about social norms and the political climate in romance comics.

In other words, let's look at the crazy crap people put on their heads in the Silver Age.

Head wraps were a popular look that seems to have pretty much died out. I like it. It'd be cool to just wrap a towel around your head after you get out of the shower and not have to worry about blow-drying or flat-ironing or curling your hair.

The head wrap diminished in popularity when girls began to discover that having so much warmth around their heads affected their brains, sometimes turning them violent.

The swim cap is another obsolete head piece you'll see a lot of in romance comics.

I understand the practicality of it: you can go for a swim, but still have your hairdo looking fine when you're relaxing on the beach afterward.

But to me, those swim-hats seem to make a girl look like ol' Cabbage Head.

Men's hats are often a subtle indication of their personalities, or their likes and dislikes.

Most pervasive head-piece of the Silver Age? The headband, hands down. But there are distinct differences between the types of headbands, and the way they're worn.

There's the evening headband:

A girl's got to wear a bow to bed, in case Dennis (or Arthur or Tommy) show up in the middle of the night.

The basic headband, worn across the top of the head, is incredibly common, and indicates an average, demure, chaste girl.

But flip that thing down, and wear it across your forehead, and oh boy. That's the way hippies wear headbands, so a girl rocking that style is in for crazy, European sex parties:

And getting caught up in dangerous revolutionary politics:

Wear a headband across your forehead and you'll undoubtedly find yourself in a situation like this:

Lastly, romance comics have lead me to believe that there was some sort of baldness epidemic in the Silver Age because wig ads are everywhere.

Wigs are the hats of yesteryear. I wish I could find a hat with a built in scalp that looks like skin.

But even wigs could lead a good girl down the bad path of political rabble-rousing.

So if you're having trouble following the complex plot of an issue of Teen Age Love, Sweethearts, or Secrets of Young Brides, take a look at head-wear, and that'll clear everything right up.

A Hat Week Salute to Tough Guys in Derbies

 Tough Guys in Derbies:

 

 

 

 

 

 

... a special breed. Give a tough guy in a derby a hug today.

John Buys Comics, Puts on Special Reviewing Hat

With special theme-week-appropriate rating system!

First Wave No. 1 (of 6)

Oh, what a rollercoaster ride this has been.

The First Wave special earlier this year, as I recall, was fun and I gave it a tentative pass. A melding of the DCU and a pulp-style setting has a hell of a lot of potential, after all. Then we had two separate waves of Post-It Previews, which are just the sort of thing to poison my mind against a project (“Brian, Just read your background material on the Blackhawks. Loved it but am concerned that it is too awesome and may blow everyone’s minds way too hard. - Dan”), so by the time this actually came out I was primed to loathe it. Hell, I almost didn’t buy it, that’s how grumpy I was about the whole thing. Happily, the quality levels of the marketing and the actual book were not at all comparable. In short: I liked this book, despite all odds.

Okay, that was a falsehood. When you have a book that features the Spirit AND Doc Savage AND a version of Batman who is also kind of the Shadow, you’re kind of starting off with me as your target audience. If you go ahead and write it really well, then you’ve got a good chance at keeping my attention, and so it’s a good thing for Brian Azzarello that he did just that. First Wave doesn’t really read like a pulp novel - a good thing, because I don’t know that it’s a writing style that would translate very well - but like some of the latter day attempts to write adventures in pulp-style worlds. Uh, by which I mean it’s a lot of fun, like most such projects are. Plus you’ve got Rags Morales knocking the art out of the park, plus there’s what I suspect to be a robot with a human brain on page four. So, yeah: four out of five hats:

Sparta: USA No. 1

Man, what is it with Wildstorm lately? Every time something like Mysterius the Unfathomable or North 40 ends, another series that scratches the same sort of itch appears. I’d like it even more if two or three of those sort of series would run at the same time, but I’ll take what I can get (the itch, by the way, is for a series that is well-written, well-drawn, has an interesting mystery at its core and is full of supernatural or science-fictiony weirdness. Hey, The Unwritten is an ongoing that fits that description, isn’t it? I’m so lucky).

The preview for this book last week was the best teaser for a comic book I’ve seen in a long time. It starts out as a description of a small American town and got just weird enough to intrigue: the folks have just a bit too much civic pride. They like football just a bit too much. There’s a hint of menace here and there, where there shouldn’t be, and then at the end there’s mention of a yeti. Five pages and DC had made a sale, though as it was just the first five pages of the comic I guess I should credit David Lapham and Johnny Timmons more than anyone.

This is the sort of comic that I form a deep attachment to on first read - I know that all of the weirdness associated with the town of Sparta will be explained in good time an am pretty sure that the process is going to be joyful. Five hats.

Age of Reptiles: The Journey No. 3 (of 4)

Richard Delgado has a bit at the end of these issue where he talks about falling in love with dinosaurs as a kid, and this issue focuses on how fascinated he was with the dinosaur paintings of Charles R. Knight. That’s precisely right - this series even more than the prior [Age of Reptiles] books feels like a study of a collection of actual animals, just like all of the pictures that I used to pore over in my dino books. The storytelling on the cover alone just sucked me in for a couple of minutes, for heaven’s sake. I’ll be getting a copy of this for my nephew, once I’m sure that he’s past book-destroying age. Five hats.

Nemesis: the Impostors No. 1 (of 4) - Though RUN! was the most viscerally pleasing of the Final Crisis Aftermath series, I reckon that Escape was the best book over all. It did, however, leave a huge number of questions hanging in the air. Will this series clear anything up? Let’s decide in a SECOND ISSUE OF JUDGEMENT. In the meantime: three hats, the hat-equivalent of one eyebrow raised expectantly.

Adventure No. 8 - Okay: the first issue of Adventure under a new creative team without crossover bullshit to contend with! How’d they do? Let’s see… Legion of Super-Heroes stuff: good times. Legion Espionage Squad, Mon-El and Superboy stuff: also good times, and the first two parts look like they’ll come together into a Brainiac beat-down in good order. General Sam Lane and Project 7734? HAS TO END. SO BORING. SNORE.

I guess that makes this issue two-thirds good, which I’ll say is three hats.

Astro City: Dark Age Book Four No. 2 - Astro City books get five hats even when I’m not using a hat-based rating system, that’s how much I love them. And this issue features Las Vegas’ super-hero, who is named Mirage and has neon sign powers. I weren’t so lazy I’d make another graphic and give this book six hats.

Sweet Tooth No 7 - Okay, next issue has got to be the one where Sweet Tooth wakes up and he’s still with Mr. Jessup and then Mr. Jessup teaches him to play hockey. And then a kitten. Four tear-stained hats.

*doffs hat* Good night everybody!

HAT WEEK: HATS!

In celebration of HAT WEEK, I am going to take a look at some very real super hero hats that you can buy and wear (though I would not recommend it).

First we have a Superman cap plastered with Jim Lee artwork. This hat blatantly ignores the "less is more" philosophy:

"SO, DO YOU LIKE SUPERMAN?"

And if Superman isn't your thing, but you are still into hideous hats and Jim Lee artwork, the cap also is available in Batman:

"HAVE YOU EVER READ HUSH, BRO?"

This next hat seems like a pretty straightforward, though still terrible, Death of Superman hat:

NEVER FORGET.

Except wait! It's not that at all! It's actually part of a series of hats featuring superhero logos that have been splattered in paint:

THE FLASH CAN OUTRUN EVERYTHING...EXCEPT A BUCKET OF PAINT.

Of course there are plenty of Dark Knight Joker hats, none of which should be worn by anyone:

I'M NOT SURE WHO THINKS THEY CAN PULL THIS OFF, BUT THEY ARE WRONG.

"HMMM...I THINK I'LL WEAR MY FORMAL DARK KNIGHT JOKER CAP TONIGHT."

NEVER FORGET.

There's a confusing series of Marvel hats that feature other Marvel logos with Wolverine slashes through them. I guess it's like the Marvel equivalent of having Calvin peeing on a Chevy logo:

HAHA! FUCK YOU, FANTASTIC FOUR!

SPIDER-MAN? MORE LIKE SPIDER-DICK!

This is a very intense movie Batman hat that just looks insane to me. Although if I were talking to someone who was wearing it, I would probably be staring dreamily at their forehead the whole time:

"HELLO RACHELLE. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE NERD BELOW ME. YOU NEED ONLY SPEAK TO ME."

This hat is, for real, just straight up awesome:

IF I WORE BALLCAPS, I WOULD WEAR THIS ALL THE TIME.

This hat is straight up terrifying:

"I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR BLIND DATE. I'LL BE THE ONE WEARING CAPTAIN AMERICA'S HEAD ON MY HEAD.

Hey, I know there's really no limits to how tacky your Punisher merchandise can be. But if there were a limit, I would say this hat is dangerously close to it:

"AW MAN, THE PUNISHER IS SO FUCKING DOPE. HE, LIKE, SHOOTS SHIT AND SHIT."

"AND HE'S GOT A SKULL ON HIS SHIRT. HE'S EVEN COOLER THAN VENOM."

And finally, Superman would never wear this:

UNLESS BATMAN TOLD HIM TO.