There’s someone who wants to make Tony Stark’s life a living hell. She’s something of an AI incarcerated on a mainframe. (He’s a busy guy. Things are always very complicated for him.) There’s someone else who wants Felicia Hardy dead. She’s prepared to let Stark’s AI enemy out of the mainframe to get to Felicia. The trap is set in Iron Cat #2. Writer Jed MacKay delivers a compelling and artfully-framed backstory for the series that is rendered for the page by artist Pere Pérez with the aid of colorist Frank D’Armata. The five-issue mini-series approaches the end of its first half in style.

Stark has been trying to get a handle on things after a recent announcement that he wanted to get out of tech. One of those things that he’d had to keep track of was a suit of armor Black Cat created for herself with Stark’s nanoforge while she was on the run. Now that Iron Cat armor lies in the hands of Felicia’s old girlfriend. She’s got reasons for hating Black Cat that go far deeper than the present. It’s a complicated background that will only get more complicated when the Iron Cat strikes a lavish yacht party hosted by Stark and Hardy. 

MacKay is doing a few really interesting things with this issue. Having established a firm grounding for the mini-series with two characters (Black Cat and Iron Man), he dives into a very lengthy backstory on Tamara Blake. To MacKay’s credit, the dozen or so pages that he devotes almost exclusively to the character of Tamara are...really, really entertaining. The classical precision that Tamara had in thievery in youth clashed with the brash, crazy improvisation that Black Cat always seemed to dance through. It’s a very fun dichotomy at the heart of the second issue. 

Pérez and D’Armata aren’t given a great deal of action to put to the page for the second issue. There IS a hell of a lot of drama, though. The conversation at the beginning between Stark and Hardy has some clever visual style about it, which is pretty impressive for a scene saddled with heavy dialogue that takes place in a gleamingly generic tech complex. The memories of Tamara scatter across the page in a dynamic narrative that gracefully pirouettes across the page with D’Armata’s appealing purple and pink flashback color palette. 

Building on two well-known characters, MacKay is developing a somewhat intoxicating villain in the pages of this latest mini-series. The second issue of the series takes a real chance by giving the heart of this installment to Tamara, and it pays off in a really big way. Tamara could develop into someone every bit as charming as Iron Man or Black Cat given the right angles. The middle of the series hits the page with an apparent clash between Iron Cats for issue #3. It will be interesting to see how the overall plot arc resolves in the final three issues of the series.

Grade: A