One of the most talented superhuman thieves in comics has been touring around the Marvel Universe, grabbing-up artifacts from some of the most secure places imaginable. Felicia Hardy got an ancient text from Doctor Strange’s Sanctum. She’d gotten a rare text from the Fantastic Four’s headquarters. In Black Cat #11, she breaks into the headquarters of Tony Stark to steal advanced tech. Writer Jed MacKay puts Felicia’s skills to the test in an issue drawn by C.F. Villa. MacKay and Villa put together a fun, little heist in an issue that launches Hardy into the final issue of the first year of her series with style, poise, and wit.

Black Cat knows that it’s not going to be easy making her way into one of the most secure facilities on the whole planet. Planning becomes a big part of the adventure as she must fashion for herself an entire redheaded secret identity that gives her plausible reason for being in Stark’s place, to begin with. If she can make it through an initial interview with Stark, she still has to find her way into a tightly-sealed lab that will only be accessible through Stark’s own DNA...and then the danger REALLY starts to pile-up. 

MacKay weaves a clever story here that weaves scenes of planning the heist with its execution for roughly the first half of the issue. Then the action switches into high-gear as things go wrong in a way that Hardy seems to have planned for. It’s nearly a year into the series. Black Cat has had a number of successful heists throughout the last ten chapters. MacKay still manages to find a way to make a highly dangerous heist in the Marvel Universe seem exceedingly interesting with a magnetically appealing anti-heroine. 

Villa has a light but firm grasp on the sneakiness of the heist. There’s a subtle tension as Felicia enters the headquarters of Stark Unlimited. There’s a keen sense of delineation in Felicia’s facial expressions as Black Cat and those as she’s playing the role of tech journalist to break into Stark’s headquarters. When the action hits, Villa has an explosively kinetic sense of theft and pursuit. Villa reaches right into the pulse of the story and keeps it moving from opening to cliffhanger, ending with an impressive eye for style and composition. 

The cleanly episodic nature of MacKay’s first year of Black Cat works well with the long pause for COVID. The overall tension looming in the background of Felicia’s life seems to have hung around in the shadows. As the character might well have been planning her heist with her accomplices while in lockdown. Many other titles hit the comics rack this month with a sudden jolt of a million, little subplots that shoot out of the page in mid-stride. It’s nice to see Black Cat jumping out of the quarantined shadows with something fresh that continues to expand on everything that’s happened in the past year without any graceless lurching at plot points. 

Grade: A