Sensation Comics #1 (1942)
by Bill Finger & Irwin Hasen
Last debut of this remarkably significant issue, and it’s a wild one.
Pun intended.
Much like Mister Terrific, Ted Grant also excels at every single sport AND he’s academically gifted.
But he does have one thing that differentiates him from all other superheroes of this kind that are already around. He’s broke!
He then helps a guy who is being robbed, and who just happens to be a boxing champion.
So he gets a job at his gym.
This gets him a successful boxing career, but he’s not happy about some of the fights being set up for him and about his potential love interest being engaged to his mentor.
The two boxers are inevitably going to fight each other, with their managers creating the rumor that Ted is trying to steal his mentor’s fiancée.
Ted wins the fight, both because he’s younger…
…and because his opponent has been poisoned.
I don’t know anything about boxing aside from watching Rocky movies, but I’m fairly certain this helps the boxer who is NOT poisoned.
As you might have expected, Ted gets framed for the murder.
And for good measure, they also try to murder Ted.
We interrupt this sports comic for a commercial about Green Lantern.
Ted has a heart of gold for giving money to this child with a greviously deformed hand.
Assuming that is real money, because it doesn’t look like a real one dollar bill.
But more importantly, THAT is what gives Ted the idea to dress up like a superhero.
Criminals are a superstitiously cowardly lot, so Ted decides to wear a costume inspired by the creature that inspires the most fear… a cat.
With a “curious cat-like grace”, Wildcat then PUNCHES A GUY SO HARD THE WALL CRACKS. How cat-like!!!
Wildcat learns that the guys responsible for the champion’s death and for framing him are their managers. Who just lost TWO of their star clients… how are they making money on this? I assume they just bet on Ted to win the fight, but if so… how does framing him for murder help?
This gives Ted a totally legitimate confession that exonerates him from the murder charges.
And as long as there are criminals that need to be punched, Wildcat will keep doing the punching.
Historical significance: 9/10
It’s hard to imagine the JSA without Wildcat, but his influence extends to basically all street-level DC heroes.
Silver Age-ness: 0/10
Possibly the least Silver Age story from the Golden Age that I have reviewed so far.
Does it stand the test of time? 8/10
This holds up remarkably well: even at just 10 pages it doesn’t feel rushed. I’m not even into sport stories but I was already hooked before we had any action!
Just give this modern artwork and you can basically do the exact same story today.
How close is this to the modern character? 8/10
Wildcat is not a particularly complex character, and that’s the beauty of it. He’s just a tough guy with a heart of gold who is really, REALLY good at punching people.
For all the praise Batman gets for supposedly being “the only superhero who could realistically exist”, Wildcat is FAR more deserving of that title!
Wildcat stayed on the pages of Sensation Comics for the entire Golden Age, lasting until #90 in 1949. By issue 4 he gets his own vehicle, the Cat-O-Cycle™.
And comedy sidekick Stretch Skinner because 1940s.
As mentioned in the Mister Terrific review, Wildcat joined the Justice Society in 1945’s All-Star Comics #24, but that would only last one issue!
He also showed up on All-Star Comics #27, replacing the Atom, but once again lasting only one issue.
So when I say that Wildcat is essential to the JSA, I mean in modern times: in the Golden Age he was BARELY there.
Wildcat would be shown with the rest of the Justice Society in the 60s, but he wasn’t a particularly prominent member: while most members show up on Justice Leage Of America #22 in 1963 for a big crossover story, Wildcat’s first Silver Age appearance is on Brave And The Bold #62 in 1965.
But he’s advertised as a “superstar” on the cover…
…and he gets to punch a bear in that story.
He plays a much bigger role in the 70s revival of All Star Comics, in the stories set in Earth-Two, where he often plays opposite to Power Girl.
Confusingly, there’s also an Earth-One version of Wildcat that teams up a few times with Batman in the 70s.
You’d expect him to be younger, but he’s basically the same of the Earth-Two Wildcat except he never joined the Justice Society.
By the 80s, when Earth-Two superheroes got their regular series on the pages of All-Star Squadron, Wildcat was so integrated with the rest of the WWII heroes that it’s easy to forget he’s a later addition to the Justice Society.
He gets a surprising amount of screen time on Crisis On Infinite Earths, where he gets his legs crushed and is succeeded by a new Wildcat.
Crisis would make you think that the new Wildcat would be a big deal, and she does have her storylines, but she’s pointlessly killed by Eclipso in 1993.
In the same story that pointlessly killed the new female Doctor Mid-Nite.
The original Wildcat got back on his feet, only for 1994’s Zero Hour to make him into an old man again (he was younger than he should’ve been for complicated comics shenanigans).
You’d expect him to be killed to pass the title to a new generation, like Starman did, especially since there was precedent.
But he got back on his feet, despite getting older… and unlike other JSA members he shouldn’t have any excuses to STILL being this active.
So in 1997 Grant Morrison came up with the idea that he has nine lives.
The JLA story that drops that bombshell doesn’t give any explanation, which would have to wait until 2010. Basically he has to thank Zatara for it.
In addition to being retconned into a prominent member of the Justice Society, Wildcat is also the reason why a lot of DC heroes learn how to fight.
He’s personally trained Batman, Black Canary and even Catwoman, to name the most important ones.
Wildcat might just be the manliest superhero ever. I mean the guy has both OUTBOXED BATMAN…
…and slept with Wonder Woman’s mother!!!
Out of all the non-powered members of the Justice Society, Wildcat has always been my favorite.
It would be easy to dismiss him as just a hard-boiled and thick-headed bruiser…
…but there’s a surprising depth to his simplicity.
Thankfully, Yolanda’s pointless death has been reversed. She’s alive and well and currently serving in the JSA again. It should be noted that Ted is her godfather. It’s an amazing coincidence that she happens to be more catlike than he is.
There was a third Wildcat, Hector Ramirez, one of Ted’s protégés, in 1997’s Batman/Wildcat. He didn’t last long.
Then there’s Thomas “Tom” Bronson, who’s Wildcat in Kingdom Come, but Tomcat in current times. He’s Ted’s son by a one-night stand with a were-panther. By amazing coincidence, Ted once slept with a woman who happened to be a were-panther.
The Wildcat identity seems to keep reverting back to Ted, probably because he’s a case study in the perfection of simplicity. He doesn’t need anything more than his fists. He’s an uncomplicated guy, punching out bad guys, training good guys, and making the world a better place.
A coincidence, you say?
Sounds legit.
I thought Tom’s were-cat-ness was due to that cat curse on Ted, not anything about Tom’s mother.
I don’t think so? Not only does the fandom wiki say it’s inherited from his mother’s side, there no indication that his (dead) half-brother Jake (from Ted and Irina) was a werecat, which would have been the case if it was coming from Ted. Wildcat’s “curse” isn’t really a curse anyway, it’s an accidental protection/resurrection spell that resulted from Zatara fouling up a magical attempt to turn him into a lynx and the two magics getting mixed to produce an unexpected effect.
I’ve always been vaguely surprised that Ted wound up as Wildcat, a term that (in English) is more commonly a descriptor for a woman (eg she’s a real wildcat!) than a man. Going by period novels I’ve read that was true even back in 1942. English doesn’t formally use gendered nouns the way many European languages do, but some definitely have male/female associations. Tomcat (the name his surviving son uses) would have made more sense for Ted – especially given his bedroom shenanigans over the years.
That all-green fire hydrant in the scene with the kid is fascinating. The US has had suggested rules for hydrant colors (meant to indicate pressure, flow rate, and improve visibility – and more rarely, whether the water is potable or not) since the early 1900s, but even today there’s no national standards and different municipalities have always done what they wanted. Presumably the colorist was from someplace where green fire hydrants were the norm in the 40s, but I can’t guess what city that was. Really hard to look up that kind of detail even with the internet.
Ted was fun in New Frontier, too. His appearances teaming up with Batman in the 70s took place on Earth-B, Zany Haney’s private universe, or so Bob Rozakis taught us.
While it’s true that the term wildcat was often used for explosive dames, it can also mean “a savage quick-tempered person” — also as an adjective, “operating, produced, or carried on outside the bounds of standard or legitimate business practices.”
Sure, men can be described as wildcats as well, “wildcat drilling” referred to risky/unregulated oil prospecting, and a “wildcat reaction” (a fission reaction going out of control) was a fairly common term for a nuclear nightmare scenario in pulp scifi.
But it’s still more commonly applied to women than men in English, at least the American version of the language, where tomcat is definitively masculine (and kind of derogatory, much like calling a man a wolf or a player). Try asking someone unfamiliar with comics if “wildcat” sounds like a male or female supranym and I don’t think you’ll get as many folks saying male over female even today, and (again, going by period fiction) it seemed to be more gender-defined back in the 40s and 50s – at least in old detective noir stories.