HISTORY: Felicia Hardy was only 13 years old when she found out that her father, Walter Hardy, who had been pretending for years to be a traveling salesman, was actually a famous cat burglar. Upon his capture and life imprisonment, Felicia decided to take up where he had left off. Following a stringent physical training program, she managed to enhance her strength, endurance and agility. Furthermore, she studied martial arts extensively and acquired skills such as lock picking and safecracking. Making use of the superstition that says that a black cat brings bad luck to whoever crosses its path, Felicia would study the surrounding area of a future crime scene and choose an escape route. She would then rig the location so that convenient accidents would stop anyone attempting to catch her. Her enemies became convinced that she did actually caused bad luck to whoever crossed her path and hence avoided interfering with her.

The Black Cat changed her evil ways and started to help Spider-Man battling criminals after she became attracted to him. She eventually succeeded in winning his love as well as a pardon for her past crimes. However, Spider-Man dissuaded Felicia to join him in the fight against evil after he realized she possessed no superpowers of her own. This drove Felicia to go on a quest to gain superpowers. She agreed to work for an unknown individual in return for gaining the ability to affect probability and to cause improbable things to happen. She now truly possessed the bad luck powers that she once used to fake with elaborate traps. She eventually found out that the unknown benefactor was in fact the Kingpin and that he had given her those superpowers to get revenge on Spider-Man. Upon finding this out, Spider-Man ended his relationship with the Black Cat. After being dumped by Spider-Man, Felicia fled to Europe. Years later, she came back to New York and to her surprise found out that Peter Parker (who she knew was Spider-Man) was now married to Mary Jane Watson. She decided to annoy her ex-boyfriend by going out with Flash Thompson. Things did not work out as planned: she fell in love with Flash and was heartbroken when he dumped her.

The Black Cat is now at the head of her own private security agency, Cat's Eye Investigations, which provides background checks, bodyguards, bounty hunters, and specializes in installing burglarproof security systems. She was recently seen in the pages of the "Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil that Men do" miniseries, where she joined forces with Spider-Man was again to fight off evil.