Who the heck are Cat-Man and Kitten?

When I started doing research for the Monster Mash-Up anthology, I ended up diving pretty deeply into the world of public domain superheroes. And my friends, what I found there was equal parts fascinating and coocoo-for-cocoa-puffs insane (and just the slightest bit racist?). These characters were created around the dawn of superhero comics, about 1940, and pretty much none of them landed. The companies that published them folded, copyrights expired or never existed, and they lapsed into the public domain for anyone to use if they wanted to.

Everyone promptly forgot about them.

But I kind of fell in love with a lot of these absurd characters, all clearly created to capitalize off the popularity of the highly successful and relatively recently debuted Man of Steel and Dark Knight Detective. Even after completing the anthology, part of me really wanted to explore some of these characters a little more, and with the launch of this website I decided, why not do that?

Generally speaking, publishers don’t have a ton of interest in revamps of failed Golden Age characters. But I enjoy them, so I’m going to be flexing my writing muscles by coming up with re-imagined stories for these characters and giving them all-new twists. But before we get into that, I wanted to set the stage with some info on the character’s original backstory.

With that in mind, buckle up any feline-based-character fans because I’m going to start things off with Cat-Man and Kitten! And if you think Cat-Man sounds like it’s gonna be a pretty close rip-off of Batman, I’m here to tell you, boy is it!

As a young child, David Merrywether witnessed his parents’ murder—but in Burma, so very different. He was raised by Tigress (a literal tiger) and that somehow gave him all the powers of a cat: agility, night vision, the ability to scale any surface, and “nine lives.” The “nine lives” thing never actually came into play, though this character survived the sands of time better than a lot of other Golden Age heroes, so kinda.

David eventually returned to the U.S. where he became a private detective by day and the heroic Cat-Man by night. He also gained a ward, the 11-year-old circus acrobat Katie Conn. It’s like they weren’t even trying, huh? Although, despite him being an adult man and her being a literal child, readers seem way more okay with that than Batman and Robin. I wonder why. I’m kidding. We all know why.

Cat-Man and Kitten’s adventures didn’t last long, with their original run ending after 33 issues (which is actually quite an accomplishment comparatively). They had a few revivals here and there but these days whenever anyone hears Cat-Man, they either think you mean a suspiciously similar DC Comics character (not Batman, actual Catman) or that you mistakenly meant Catwoman.

However, Cat-Man and Kitten are BACK, everyone! Stay tuned for my re-imagining of the characters in an over-sized one-shot issue!