Felicia made a mistake. Usually, she’s so good about being a few steps ahead of everyone else in the room. That’s what makes her such a good thief. This month’s she’s so bad at doing what she’s supposed to be doing that she actually stumbles into immortality. Naturally, she’s upset about that, but she’s going to have to deal with it later as her adventure continues in Black Cat #6. Writer Jed MacKay glides Marvel’s greatest thief through an appealingly imbalanced adventure rendered for page and panel by artist Michael Dowling. It’s weird and quirky, but MacKay keeps a tight focus on those things that have made the series so good thus far. 

Black Cat should NOT have trusted the Fox. The good news is that the plan played out perfectly: Fox had been dying, and now he’s going to live. The bad news? He’s sold Manhattan to an ancient demon to secure everlasting life. And Black Cat had been such a big help that he’s giving her immortality too. In exchange for all of Manhattan. Black Cat will have to do something about that, and she’s probably going to have to forfeit her own immortality in the process.

MacKay’s writing is REALLY erratic here. High drama is mixed with weird humor. In a particularly dramatic moment, Black Cat makes a few emotionally-charged ’80s pop-cultural references to make her accomplices go away. This has to be one of the most Gen X moments MacKay’s committed to the page in the past couple of years. It’s part of a comic book that’s so delightfully distorted that the biggest moment isn’t the sale of Manhattan to an ancient god or the main character accidentally stumbling into immortality. It’s something far more subtle: she lies to Spider-Man. It really upsets her...not because of the lie, but because of the fact that he trusts her so implicitly that he believes it. His trust in her mirrors her trust in Fox, which reverberates into her own character: she doesn’t want to be like Fox. She doesn’t want to hide things from people who trust her, but she does so on a couple of different occasions this issue. MacKay is working with a pleasantly complicated emotional dynamic.   

Dowling doesn’t quite hit the more dramatic end of things all that well this chapter. The intricacy of the drama feels a bit stiff, which is too bad as so much of the rest of what Dowling’s rendering is beautifully composed, from moody mists to vines climbing up a towering building to pull them into the earth to a contract accepted by an entity that actually manages to look convincingly omnipotent. It’s all quite impressive, but the drama at the heart of the story feels visually flat. In light of this, the lettering by Ferran Delgado is a welcome comfort as so much of the wit, and emotional intensity of Felicia’s internal life is brought to the page in the white script in black caption boxes that have become so very, very familiar to the series. 

A few slip-ups aside, MacKay’s work on Black Cat has been delightful. The sixth issue in the series continues to show the writer’s gift for emotional intricacy. Felicia is one of the more interesting characters in the Marvel Universe right now, and a lot of her appeal seems to be coming directly from MacKay.

Grade: A-