Queen Cat is back, baby, and she’s got her sights set on Felicia. Nina Vakueva is guesting on art duties, alongside our usual creative team – Jed MacKay, Brian Reber, and Ferran Delgado.
Allison Senecal: Uh, I was not expecting this from a Lily Hollister issue in the year of our Lord 2021.
Zoe Tunnell: No kidding, good god. I’m not going to pretend I am a diehard Lilly Hollister stan but this issue might have made me one.
AS: What did you make of Lily being in the driver’s seat for this one? I really enjoyed seeing everything in the series so far get re-framed from her point-of-view. The series is obviously Felicia’s so we’re used to rooting for her but!
ZT: I am a sucker for the bit of every heist movie where they go back over stuff we’ve already seen with some extra context or a new angle so I was HERE for all of this! Just a perfect use of the series’ clear influences.
AS: Guy Ritchie Black Cat vs Queen Cat movie when?! But yeah, same here, and this was a great move for bringing Lily back into the Marvel Universe fold. Until she popped up in that cliffhanger from the previous run, I’d kind of forgotten about her. She’s one of the rare characters to whom AXIS was a boon, haha.
ZT: That Hobgoblin mini is honestly the only positive thing I remember from that disaster of an event, so it’s really nice to see her get her due. I never stop being amazed by Jed MacKay’s ability to keep mining long forgotten plot points without bogging things down with continuity. Dude kills it.
AS: Can we talk about how gay her journal is? “It wasn’t the art that caught my eye. Her. Her.” It’s obviously so subtextual that it’s sub-subtext, but still I love the idea of Felicia having another lady hero on her tail besides Silk. They always have amazing chemistry, so if we get this going forward with Lily – *chef kiss*
ZT: God this was the gayest issue yet, and it didn’t even have an inch of explicitly queer stuff in it. The entire obsession QC has with Felicia is just one quiet revelation away from being some POWERFUL sapphic yearning. Poor girl doesn’t realize that journaling over the same woman and how beautiful and amazing she is for months is uh
Well It’s not really in the standard superhero guidebook.
AS: They even have the complementary outfits. They’re practically dating.
ZT: Y’know, if my first date with Felicia ended with her sucker punching me for stealing from her and her leaving me a flirty note…I’d be alright with it.
Okay, getting back on topic: I truly love how relatable poor broke-ass Queen Cat is.
AS: All things considered, she’s actually doing pretty ok at the street-level superhero thing? I love her admitting that her whole obsession with Felicia isn’t very healthy but that she has to see it through anyways-
ZT: Okay I gotta call you out here, bud. You just described the woman who had to get free food from her superhero bud because she couldn’t afford dinner from the money she makes under her fake name as “doing pretty okay”.
AS: I SAID SUPERHERO THING, NOT PERSONAL LIFE! Sure she isn’t eating three square meals a day, but she beat the &%$# out of Black Fox!
ZT: THAT DUDE IS, LIKE, A HUNDRED AND FIFTY.
AS: A SPRY HUNDRED AND FIFTY. Ok, but consider that she figures out Felicia’s entire beat, which – that’s good! That is good. Even though Felicia eventually gets the drop on her. She’s a mess and didn’t think it entirely through, but she’s trying so hard.
ZT: I actually love how she never gets fully there. Her disguise as a cop is seen through immediately, she didn’t consider Felicia would tag her loot and got the holy hell kicked out of her the second they actually throw down.
(Because she is weak from needing nourishment, ALLISON.)
AS: Ok, so she should have eaten sushi instead of surveilling the sushi place, but I respect that she’s doing about as well as I would be on the Marvel streets with only kickboxing under my belt. Wheeze.
ZT: I am going to spare our readers the full details of me having to remind YOU to eat food on more than one occasion to instead be a good, respectable comics critic and go: hey whatcha think about Vakueva’s guest stint on art duty?
AS: I really like Vakueva! She did my favorite little bit in Guardians last year with Gamora and she rocks at drawing sad, angry ladies. She also kinda hearkens back to the Foreman era a bit? While meshing well with Villa’s style. It’s not too jarring.
ZT: I was a little put off by the first couple of pages, they felt a little too…blurry? Her linework is very thick and between Queen Cat, her cork board and her furniture its a whole lot of browns from Reber that all kind of blended together. Thankfully, it really came together by the end and I am a big fan. The fight with Felicia in particular was a huge winner. God, that selfie at the end.
AS: Yeah I’m not sure Reber is a good colorist match for Vakueva? But they did make it work.
ZT: Delgado was a hell of a match, though. The bulk of the issue being narrated via handwritten journal entries is an easy way to make it a pain to read but he really kills it. I appreciate that Queen Cat’s journals are in a very sharp, rushed handwriting while the final entry from Felicia is a lot more refined and, well, pretty. Lady’s got good handwriting.
AS: I know that we have a lot of Infinity Stones madness and Thieves Guild shenanigans coming up, but I hope this thread returns sooner than later. I like MacKay’s Lily. Maybe with some more food, she can actually attempt to beat Felicia up next time. Or…three times down the road.
ZT: Let’s make it four, bless her.
Allison Senecal buys books professionally and comics unprofessionally.
Zoe Tunnell is a 29-year old trans woman who has read comics for most of her adult life and can't stop now. Follow her on Twitter @Blankzilla.
