You Do Know You're A Cat, Right?

I don't keep a list of things I never imagined existed. Who does that? If I did, though, a DC comic teaming Superman with Top Cat would certainly be on it. And now I'd have to cross it off because such a wonder, if that's what you want to call it, does in fact exist. 

As of a couple of hours ago, I can also confirm that I've read it and it is... not good. Okay, it's bad. I mean, I cut it as much slack I could but there just isn't enough slack to cut. It's just bad.

I probably ought to make it clear I didn't go looking for a Supes/TC collab just to prove one couldn't exist. I was just following up some reviews I'd read of the Supergirl back-ups in recent editions of Action Comics. 

I'd seen those on a blog I follow by the name of Supergirl Comic Box Commentary. I tend to disagree with most of the reviews there, although I enjoy reading them, which is why I like to check the source. It was while I was doing that that I caught sight of the cover of the  Superman/Top Cat Special.

My first reaction? Disbelief. My second? Thrilled. 

Not by the cover, that's for sure. It's horrible. By the concept.

These are two of my favorite fictional characters of all time. I grew up with both of them and in their own very different ways I consider each to be an influence and a role model. I own more than a thousand comic books featuring the Man of Steel in some version or other and I own  - and have watched, multiple times - all thirty episodes of the one and only, 1961 season of Top Cat.

I also have enough experience with both comic books and animation to know that absolutely no crossover, no matter how outlandish, ludicrous or ill-conceived, is ever completely off the table. If you can think of it, someone is going to try it. (Generally applicable almost anywhere, that one...)

Just because TC is an anthropomorphised cat who lives in a garbage can in a back alley is no reason to think he couldn't or shouldn't team up with an alien being powerful enough to lift mountains and turn back time (Superman cannot turn back time. Other superheros who can turn back time are available.)

It is theoretically possible that someone could write a good story featuring a team-up between a three-foot tall talking cat in a vest and a hat with holes cut in it for his ears to poke through and a six-foot tall hunk of beefcake in spandex and a cape. We do, after all, live in a post Howard the Duck: The Movie world. Anything is possible. It just hasn't been done yet and certainly not in this comic book.

I won't attempt to summarize the plot. I'll just say it revolves around the last living Kalien, a race of sentient vegetables living on Earth as the leafy green we know as kale and the villainous billionaire CEO of a global internet shopping business, who just happens to have a really Greek-sounding last name. Whatever that leads you to imagine, the reality is worse.

Oftentimes in comics, a bad plot can be saved by some snappy dialog or some great art. Not here. Top Cat has to have one of the most distinctive "voices" in the entire funny animal kingdom. Granted it's not all his own work , given his whole persona and presentation was lifted almost verbatim from a signature performance in a 1950s TV show, but it's still one of the most recognizable around and, I would have though, one of the most easily imitated. 

Not in this comic book, it's not. I have to wonder why anyone would even bother to borrow a well-known character from another medium if they weren't going to make use of any of the things that made that character famous in the first place. FFS, it doesn't even look like TC. If he wasn't wearing the hat and vest I wouldn't know who it was supposed to be.

Still,it could be worse, right? It can always be worse. They could have teamed him up with Batman.

Ah. You're ahead of me. 

I have a twist, though. The Batman/Top Cat team up, which precedes the one I've been talking about in continuity (Seriously, though? Is any of this canon?) and explains how TC got to be in the same world as the superheroes in the first place, is actually much better! I'm not saying it's good but it's definitely better.

For one thing, TC is drawn as both more recognizably the character we all know and in a style more appropriate to a superhero comic. I don't mean he wears a costume... well, okay, I guess he does... it's that hat and vest again... but he's taller and slightly less cartoonish and just fits the Gotham milieu. Plus I would one hundred percent know who he was supposed to be from his face, without the hat and vest. 

Not that anyone ever saw TC without his hat and vest... oh, wait... that actually happens here, too.

There's a nice bit of interplay between Batman and TC and later between TC and Catwoman and amazingly it all stays broadly in character for all of them, insofar as anything featuring those three characters together ever could. TC still doesn't really sound much like himself but he doesn't sound entirely wrong all the time, like the version that Superman met, either.

I enjoyed it, anyway. There were a couple of good jokes and I liked the way it looked. The story, which is only an eight-pager, appeared as the bonus feature in Adam Strange Future Quest Special, another crossover. In the main feature, Adam Strange teams up with Jonny Quest and his crew but I didn't read that. Jonny Quest wasn't shown in the TV region where I grew up so I get no nostalgic buzz when he turns up in other media, something he seems to do quite often. I'm happy to pass.

The story ends with a "To be continued in Top Cat" teaser, which does somewhat suggest TC was about to get a DC title of his own. That was back in 2017. We're still waiting.

Of course, TC has already had his own comic book. Several, in fact, published, on and off, by Dell, Gold Key and Charlton and running from the early nineteen-sixties through to the mid-seventies. I have a few copies tucked away somewhere. Gold Key, I think.

After that, a company I'm not familiar with, Murray, picked up the franchise until the end of the decade and then, once again to my complete surprise and mystification, it seems in 1983-4 Marvel put out more than thirty issues of something called Top Cat's T.V. Comic Show. I was not only very active in comics fandom at the time, I was working in fricken' comic shop but I don't recall ever hearing about it, let alone seeing a copy.

Which brings us almost full circle, back to comics I didn't know existed, a very long list indeed. But it's not quite the end, not yet. There's still one more team-up featuring the cat in the vest-and-hat I need to mention. It's by far the most natural pairing and the most recognizable version of Top Cat DC has published so far.

I don't have quite the same level of nostalgia for Scooby-Doo as I do for TC, mostly because I was a few years older by the time the original sseries surfaced on British TV, but as I've mentioned a few times here in the past, I do still have a pretty large soft spot for the Scooby and the gang. My favorite iteration by far is the one in Scooby-Doo, Mystery Incorporated. but I like the OG Scooby series a lot, too. 

The original seems to be the main basis for DC's Scooby-Doo Team-Up, a fairly long-running title in which the gang collaborate with a whole range of DC superheroes, as well as just about any other I.P. DC holds the rights to, including Jonny Quest, again, and Top Cat.

The Top Cat team-up was first published in issue #29 and then again, split acoss two digital issues as #57 and #58. It's a far more authentic take on the familiar characters from the TV version. All the Top Cat regulars appear, staying firmly in character, with dialog that wouldn't feel out of place in the show. The plot, involving a ghost that - no spoiler warning required - turns out to not to be a real ghost at all, is the Scooby Gang's schtick but the way it's handled is very much according to TC.

I read all of three of the above comics today and enjoyed two of them. I'd still quite like to see that missing Top Cat comic, too, the one that never seems to have appeared.  We could have followed a more time-worn, cynical TC, searching for his lost pal, Benny, trapped in a world he never made.

They could have made a movie out of it.

Then again, maybe not...