Wildcat
1904 - Ted Grant is born to wealthy parents, who raise him to excel in all sport and combat arts.
1922 - 18-year-old Ted goes to college studying -pre-med, breaking collegate boxing records.
1926 - 22-year-old Ted graduates with a Pre-Med degree, & goes to med school.
1928 - 24-year-old Ted's parents die, and he has to leave school to repay his family debts.
1929 - 25-year-old Ted is unable to find work during the Great Depression.
1931 - 27-year-old Ted saves the life of heavyweight champ "Socker" Smith, who takes him on as a sparring partner.
1933 - 29-year-old Ted begins his professional boxing career, quickly climbing the rankings.
1935 - 31-year-old Ted and his friend Socker fight for the championship, but Ted's gloves are tampered with by his managers Flint & Skinner, and he is framed for Socker's murder. A hit intended to silence him kills two cops, and Ted becomes a fugitive. He chooses to don a costume and become Wildcat, clearing his name.
1941 - 37-year-old Ted joins the Justice Society when they are formed after the attack on Pearl Harbor, training the other members to fight.
1945 - WW2 ends.
1953 - 49-year-old Ted and the Justice Society are called before the Un American Activities Commission. The Society chooses to disband and retire. Ted opens his boxing club.
1955 - 51-year-old Ted's prodigy student Yolanda Montez is the first female boxing champ.
1957 - 53-year-old Ted is diagnosed with parkinson's.
1965 - 61-year-old Ted dies of septic shock.
Wildcat is an incredibly simple character. The trope of "guy wants to be a hero so he puts on a costume and punches people" was so prolific in the Golden Age. and something very particular needs to be incorporated to make a character stick. In Wildcat's case, that special something was boxing. The character was built around the world of athletics and boxing, and it manifested those ideas in superheroics. It does seem a little odd that this concept is being pulled off by a guy dressed as a big animal, but I think that the reason it all works is because it's being executed by Bill Finger, who knows a thing or two about getting a superhero costume to work.
Wildcat's Comic HistoryWildcat's first appearance was in 1942, as one of several back-up stories in Sensation Comics. The book was clearly built as a vehicle for brand-new character Wonder Woman, but it actually had quite a few really interesting supporting features like the Black Pirate and the Gay Ghost. Wildcat and fellow Sensation Comic character Mr Fantastic both debuted in Sensation Comics #1, and both stood out as characters who didn't need a catalyst to become excellent; they were characters who had achieved excellence for their whole life. In Ted Grant's case,what made him unique was his focus on boxing; he was a natural athlete and exceptional boxer. His origin story showed him being falsely accused of murder and becoming a fugitive that has to fight to clear his name, and in a cute bit of meta fiction, gets the idea to wear a costume from a kid on the street who wants to buy Green Lantern comics. Wildcat continued to appear in every issue of Sensational Comics until 1949, a staggering 90 consecutive issues.
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Interestingly, this incredibly prolific run as a recurring supporting feature actually makes up the bulk of Wildcat's Golden Age appearances. While modern audiences know him as part of the old guard of Justice Society members, he actually only made two appearances as a member of the Society in that era, issues 24 & 27 of All-Star Comics, neither of which actually featured his joining the team. Once the Society started making guest appearances in Justice League, or appearing in their own comics as All-Star returned to regular publication, Wildcat was consistently depicted as a regular member, but this is actually functionally a retcon.
Of course, as the Crisis of Infinite Earths rewrote the role of the classic Justice Society, Wildcat was always depicted as part of the team's history. We did briefly get a new WIldcat in the Post-Crisis Infinity Inc in Yolanda Montez, but the characters built at that point in the series all largely faded into obscurity, and soon Ted was back as a founding member of the new JSA. Ted's position as the old-school scrapper of the superhuman set was pretty quickly established. You started to see him referenced in a lot of character's backstory as having trained practically anyone with any martial prowess; Batman, Black Canary, and even Superman. He was depicted having an intense affair with Catwoman (clever), and was even established as having been the lover of the time-displaced Queen Hippolyta during her adventures in the 40's. Ted has evolved into one of the most beloved elements of the classic Golden Age catalog of characters, even though when these characters were actually published, he was really just a well-liked backup feature. |
Our Wildcat StoryWe have a pretty big decision to make with Ted. He's not someone we want to split between the WWII and modern timelines, so where do we put him? What's more important with this character; his role as one of the old school characters that kick off the culture of superheroics in our DC world... or his relationships with modern characters like Black Canary? Ultimately, what it came down to was this; his relationships with modern characters are fun, but they're more afterthoughts; ideas added to the blend of these characters after the fact. When you go back and read his original stories, he's really a character defined by his era. The idea that he falls back on his skills as a boxer after his family fortune is lost just fits into the era of the great depression perfectly, and the idea of this tough scrapper being part of the Justice Society and training all those other heroes how to put up their dukes just fits him too well to try to shift it into a different era.
Of course, for our timeline, we get to build out the rest of his life after he and the rest of the Justice Society are forced to retire. For Ted, it makes sense that he would devote himself to his boxing gym, and we actually gave him a star pupil in Yolanda Montez. (In real life, women's boxing wouldn't be sanctioned for another 30 years, but in the long run that's a small change in our timeline). We did need to depict the end of Ted's life, and while it's not pretty, we decided that he would probably have a similar end to the Greatest Boxer of All Time. |