Those comic book aficionados among my readers may protest that Cat-Man was in fact a Batman villain, who is still revived from time to time to flesh out Batman's rogue's gallery of bad guys. However, while Batman's Cat-Man first appeared in the pages of Detective Comics #311 in January 1963, this particular Cat-Man made his debut in Blackhawk #141, in October 1959, predating Batman's baddie by over three years. This Cat-Man shows up to challenge the Blackhawks, claiming to have been given nine lives by an African witch doctor. He proceeds to squander most of them eluding the Blackhawks during the course of the story until Blackhawk convinces him that, rather than two lives left to lose, he has only one. Blackhawk saves his life at the end and we're left to wonder if he really has one or two lives left. He was never used in the pages of Blackhawk's comic again so we never found out and the Batman version was restarted entirely, although with the whole 'nine-lives' thing going for him as well. This is also another example of criminals who appear to be rich already so why turn to a life of crime - he has not only one jet fighter but actually two identical planes!! Not sure what a custom built jet fighter was going for back in 1959 but I would suspect only the rich could afford one, much less two of them. The action figure was made using the body from a DC Infinite Universe Mirror Master and the head from a Wildcat figure.
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