If playing through Insomniac's Spider-Man PS4 game was your first major exposure to the world of Peter Parker outside of the cinematic stylings of Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, chances are you just met a whole bunch of characters for the first time--or sort of the first time. Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, technically made her live action debut in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, though she never got to actually evolve into her costumed alter-ego. She's been given a second chance at the limelight after being introduced as an on-screen presence care of Spider-Man's first DLC expansion, appropriately titled The Heist.

　　Prior to the DLC, Felicia had been in the game, but only as an off screen voice. She led poor Spidey around the city on a wild goose chase that doubled as a side quest to unlock a cool new suit, but the Cat herself stayed far away from the action as things went down. This, of course, was by design--she'd just been biding her time, moving pieces around the board, and preparing for the right moment. Or, well, the right content patch to come in and add her subplot to the game--you know what we mean.

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　　So now that The Heist is live and Felicia is here in the flesh, you might find yourself wondering: who exactly is Black Cat and what does any of this have to do with Spider-Man's long and wonderful history?

　　The easiest--and most reductive--way to explain Black Cat is that she's Spider-Man's take on Catwoman, though that's not entirely fair. Felicia and Selina Hardy are both products of the same narrative tropes--the sexy cat burglar/femme fatale who takes her gimmick a bit too literally--but their stories aren't actually that similar once you start breaking them down. If you're a Batman fan and drawing those comparisons helps you wrap your head around her, more power to you.

　　Felicia is not quite a villian, in that she doesn't regularly victimize innocent people and tries her best to minimize collateral damage. But she's certainly not above manipulating the people around her for her own personal gain. Sometimes she operates under Robin Hood-style rules where she steals specifically from the corrupt, but other times, she seems to only be interested in the thrill of the job.

　　Felicia was introduced in the late '70s in Amazing Spider-Man #194, where she suits up for the first time in a bid to break her cat burglar father out of prison. It was her dad who first instilled in her the desire to become a thief, and who impressed upon her the need to be the best at whatever she does--which, in Felicia's case, meant following in her old man's footsteps. It was during that prison break attempt that she first met Spider-Man, who, despite his interference in her plans, she begins to feel a sort of kinship and attraction to.

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　　Spider-Man and Black Cat continued their on-again-off-again flirtation through most of the '80s. This was some time before Mary Jane and Peter became the tried-and-true couple we know them as today, and just a short time after the death of Peter's other longtime romantic interest, Gwen Stacy, so the way was clear for some new romantic competition and drama. After all, it's hard to be more romantically compelling than a straight-and-narrow golden boy falling for an ambiguous anti-hero who, by all accounts, made a point to emphasize that she'd never really cared about men at all until Spider-Man caught her eye.

　　Felicia and Peter eventually got more and more serious with one another until Pete finally unmasked himself, making her one of the very few people he trusted with his secret identity, but things didn't last--or, at least, they didn't last well. Felicia struggled with Pete's need to maintain his civilian life and Pete struggled with Felicia's less-than-legal impulses. They remained friends, most of the time, even when they called things off, and Felicia went on to join other hero (and villain) groups both in New York City and abroad. She even launched her very own criminal empire for a time, a gang called the Black Cats, which she used to rule the underworld (and turn quite a profit for herself in the process.)

　　Briefly, Felicia was given a vague sort of metahuman ability which actually gave her the power to "curse" people who came in contact with her, giving them bad luck, like the superstition about actual black cats crossing paths. She mostly gets by on her acrobatic skill and technical know how, having honed her body to peak human performance and trained herself in just about every skill that could come in handy on the job, from hacking security systems to manipulating unsuspecting marks.

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　　So how does all of this translate into Insomniac's Spider-Man universe? Well, for the most part the Felicia Hardy they've built is cut from the same cloth as her comic book counterpart. There's some heavy implication through the main story (that turns to direct confirmation in the DLC) that she and Peter used to be in a relationship, and that she is well aware of Peter's secret identity. She's interested, predominantly, in executing the biggest scores possible--even if that means manipulating Peter along the way by any means necessary.

　　She does seem, like comics Felicia, to harbor (or at least to have harbored in the past) some genuine feelings for Spider-Man, but it's difficult to really tell where the lies stop and start. If anything, Insomniac's Black Cat is just as ruthless as the original, but without too much information about her past in this particular timeline, it's even more difficult to know just how ruthless she actually is.

　　Felicia's intimate connection with Spider-Man also makes her a pretty natural choice for a proper live action adaptation somewhere in Marvel (or Sony's) myriad movie projects. Given the MCU's young, high school attending Peter Parker, she's probably not a likely candidate for a Tom Holland project at the moment--at least not with some serious overhauling of her backstory--but given the way the "Spider-Verse" is headed with films like Venom and Into The Spider-Verse, there's a decent chance she could show up all on her own. Alternatively, if Marvel does want to fold her into an arm of the official MCU, her skills would make her right at home for an appearance in the Netflix universe--though, given how the future of those shows are anything but certain right now, it's probably best not to bank on that.