Nimble and playful, Felicia Hardy is a cat burglar who lives up to her profession literally, stalking the nightly rooftops as the renowned and elusive Black Cat. Born to the master thief Walter Hardy , Felicia devoted herself to a life of crime at a young age after his arrest, being taken under the wing of her father's former mentor, the Black Fox.
A complicated romance blossomed for a short time, [10] leading to a brief partnership in crime-fighting before they broke up. Although naturally skilled and acrobatic, Felicia has gained and lost superhuman powers several times throughout the years, most notably possessing a "bad luck" aura capable of inflicting people in her vicinity with misfortune; the underhanded plot by which she first obtained these powers, from scientists working for the Kingpin , being one of the factors that strained her initial romance with Spider-Man.
Growing up, Felicia Hardy was very close to her dad, Walter Hardy , who, unbeknownst to her, was a world-renowned cat burglar. When she was thirteen years old, he was arrested when and, not wanting his daughter to follow on his footsteps, he asked Felicia's mother Lydia to tell her he had died in a plane crash. Felicia was devastated, but soon found out the truth, and began looking into his deeds, feeling inspired by all the stories about her father's heists.
A few years later, she found her dad's lock picks and rapidly mastered their use as well. Later in her teens, she got pinched after a heist gone wrong, but was freed from prison by the Black Fox , her father's mentor, who took Felicia as his new pupil, alongside fellow thief Tamara Blake , with whom Felicia became romantically involved. They pulled many heists together for many years, [19] but eventually she decided she had learned everything from Black Fox and decided to move on.
Feeling Tamara wasn't ready and not wanting her to get pinched, she decided to leave without saying anything to her. After finding out her father had terminal cancer, she decided to provide him with a worthy ending. She donned the Black Cat costume for the first time and broke into the police precinct's files to identify ex-cons Boris Korpse and Bruno Grainger , who she paid to help break her father out of prison.
