Hellcat
Real Name: Patsy Walker
First Appearance: Miss America Magazine #2 (November 1944)
Of the many souls in Mephisto's control, one of the beast's most prized was the Hellcat. The champion of the Arena of Tainted Souls, the Hellcat's earthly lust for vengeance had transformed her soul into a feline monstrosity locked in cursed armor capable of eviscerating her opponents all for the amusement of their master, Mephisto. But the deceiver had limited influence among the realm of the living, and often relied on gambling fortunes on favors. It was in one ill conceived wager against Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, that Mephisto lost control over one of their most prized possessions, and the Hellcat was brought back to mortal coil.
To Strange's amazement, the Hellcat was in fact the spiritual embodiment of the soul of Patsy Walker, the former child star of the 1950s sitcom "It's Patsy." Hers was a tragic tale, as Patsy's life took a dark turn after the show's end at the beginning of the sixties, marrying an abusive husband and turning to drugs. Her life was cut tragically short at the end of the decade in a car accident, though it had long been suspected that she was a victim of foul play. The Hellcat had no memories of her former life, however, and in thanks for freeing her from Mephisto's control she pledged her loyalty to the sorcerer supreme. To that end, Strange made the Hellcat the first recruit of his own team of exceptional individuals to help protect the Earth from supernatural threats--the Defenders--all while helping her unravel the mystery as to what had happened to her.
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So there's potential that she eventually remembers being Patsy Walker. As she is now, the Hellcat's body is essentially a hollow magical shell containing her soul.
Hellcat was a character I worked on from many different angles. Like Black Knight there is a lot of different ways she's been tugged at over the years, with her origins as a teen magazine protagonist, and then she got Tigra's old Cat costume and was an Avenger and a Defender for a while, and then she died and came back with vague supernatural powers, and some other stuff. I was never really enchanted with the basic woman dressed as a cat crime fighter motif, and I think Tigra kinda does it better anyway by being an actual cat person (which might explain why some adaptations kind of mix the two together). But I think the name "Hellcat" is wonderfully evocative and decided to lean really heavily into the supernatural aspects that were introduced to the character in the nineties after her resurrection. This was partially tied to my realization that I wanted the Defenders to be a kinda supernatural bent superhero team and I wanted Hellcat on it.
So I came up with this outlandish story of her being a slave of Mephisto's that was transformed into some sort of demon cat thing, and I went through a *ton* of revisions on this idea before eventually settling on something like what you see here. Kind of a mystic cat monster meets sci fi armor. It's vaguely Wakandan in design, perhaps Mephisto got the idea from there (as I assume the Black Panther has dealt with him in my continuity at some point). One concept I have is that the claws on her fingers and toes are retractable and extendable and become superheated when extended, so that's why they're glowing on her right hand.
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