One of the most fondly-remembered comic strips from the world of British weeklies is The Leopard of Lime Street, a distinctly localised version of Spider-Man in which thirteen-year-old Billy Farmer develops superpowers after being scratched by a radioactive leopard. The similarities to Spider-Man are numerous – Billy is a bullied nerd who lives with his aunt and uncle, a would-be photojournalist who is exploited by an irascible newspaper editor and is hunted by the police as well as the villains he battles. The story – which ran from 1976 to 1985 and has more recently been revived in the new version of Monster Fun – has a more prosaic style than its American inspiration, being set in a small British town with a more working-class narrative and fewer costumed supervillains. But the influence remains all too obvious. Despite its derivative style though, the strip has long been a favourite of comics fans, perhaps because actual home-grown superhero strips were so rare in Britain at the time.
Yet before The Leopard, there was another cat-costumed crime fighter in British comics, one that was not especially well-known with comics enthusiasts despite having enough similarities to The Leopard – not to mention the same publisher – to raise eyebrows. The Cat Girl appeared in girls’ comics Sally and Tammy, and as we’ve discussed before, the adventure trips in these comics were never taken very seriously by comic fandom, which until recently was a very male-dominated world. The strip also didn’t last very long, running from 1969 to 1971, so perhaps it is understandable that it didn’t get the same recognition as the more popular Leopard of Lime Street.
The Cat Girl is also a more light-hearted adventure strip, telling the story of young teenager Cathy Carter, the daughter of an absent-minded private eye who finds a cat costume in the attic – a gift from “a grateful acquaintance in Africa” – and puts it on, discovering that it gives her all the powers of a cat. As origin stories go, it’s a bit basic, but it gets everything out of the way within a few panels of the first story, allowing the action to start immediately. There is no explanation as to why the costume is so magical (or, for that matter, just what her dad had done to deserve such a gift) but it gives her the ability to climb, jump large distances and land silently, see in the dark and find her way home instinctively, and seemingly increases her strength. In a nod to Spider-Man and his spider-sense, her costume whiskers also twitch in the presence of danger. It’s not all fun though – the costume also gives her the drawbacks of being a cat, such as a fear of water and an inability to swim (not actually something that cats suffer from, but never mind).
The stories ran for between eight and ten episodes across two and a half pages of the comic per week and are lightweight fun – there’s enough adventure across each tale to keep the reader happy without any real moment of danger or negativity – while the Leopard had to deal with the problems of real life as well as crime-fighting, Cathy has nothing more pressing to worry about than making sure that her dad doesn’t find out that she’s been helping him on his cases. It’s fun, fluffy stuff that probably worked well with the pre-teen audience of girls who were less into superhero action than the readers of boys’ comics. Stripped of the soap opera elements, the stories are pure escapism and all the more enjoyable for that.
Like most British comics of the time, there were no credits for the creators of the strip and amazingly, the writer of The Cat Girl remains unknown to this day. The art was by Giorgio Giogetti, one of several European artists working in the British comic industry. Unusually though, the Italian Giogetti actually lived in the UK, having moved over in the post-war years. He’d worked, anonymously, on countless IPC comic strips – often in girls’ comics but also on crime tales like House of Dollmann and Rat Trap for Valiant and Cor!, as well as labouring as an illustrator for magazines, movie posters and book covers. He has an effective, fluid style that brings a sense of drama to the strips and gives his characters depth even when they are behind a mask.
The Cat Girl survived Sally being absorbed into Tammy in April 1971 but the strip ended in September the same year and did not return. There were reprints in the Dutch comic Tina (where the black-and-white trips were colorised) and a Spanish collection, but that was it. The Cat Girl slipped into obscurity almost as soon as the strip finished. She remained forgotten in subsequent years, only making a brief appearance in the 2000AD strip Zenith, where she was one of several old characters unceremoniously killed off. When Rebellion bought the IPC catalogue in 2018, they inherited the character and the company produced a new strip, The Cat Girl Returns, for the 2020 Tammy and Jinty Special. In this colour story by Ramzee and Elkys Nova, the costume is inherited by Cathy’s daughter, Cathy now being a police detective. It’s not a bad updating but is a tad too fixated on being modern, with social media influencers and text message captions throughout. It rather lacks the charms of the original stories and will probably date far more quickly.
Rebellion has also published The Best of The Cat Girl as a compendium book, both in softcover and limited edition hardcover. This features the new strip alongside five original adventures (including one longer strip from the Sally annual). Notably, there are (so far) three volumes of The Leopard of Lime Street so it seems that even now there is a smaller market for these strips from girls’ comics. It would’ve been nice to see the entire run reprinted but that might be a commercially unrealistic demand. I’m just glad to see some of these stories available again.
DAVID FLINT
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