AKA Jessica Jones has a fairly strong cast, with Krysten Ritter, David Tennant, and Mike Colter. And now, Marvel has cast one of their strangest characters, Hellcat, in a role as well.
Rachael Taylor, probably best known for her role in Transformers, will be playing Patsy Walker, former model and current radio talk show host, as well as Jessica’s best friend. She’s also, as we noted, Hellcat, but the character has a fairly weird history.
Walker dates back to the ’40s, but she was pretty much the star of Marvel’s (then Timely Comics’) humor line. Seriously. Patsy was always in print from the late ’40s to 1967. It gets stranger: Patsy actually showed up in Marvel’s superhero comics in 1965, and Marvel established that all the Patsy comics were actual comic books being sold on the stands in the Marvel universe. It’s a bit like Archie comics not only being read in the DC universe, but Batman is able to ask Archie himself about his jalopy.
If that weren’t odd enough, Marvel made all those humor and romance comics canonical to the Marvel Universe at a later date, which meant that before she became Hellcat, Patsy pretty much ran around being a very silly person. Dressing up in a blue and yellow suit with cat ears actually marked a turn for the serious in her life. Only at Marvel, folks!
Of interest to nerds is that Patsy is usually a member of the non-team the Defenders, and all these Netflix superhero series are building to a Defenders show. As for what Taylor brings to this role, we’ll find out later this year.