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Ororo Munroe is a weather goddess, but if Marvel had followed her creators' original plans, she would’ve been a feline instead.

When Marvel began developing the character Storm, she was envisioned as a feline hero called the Black Cat. What changed? We could thank former teen comics character Patsy Walker.

In 1975 Marvel was gearing up to relaunch the X-Men franchise with Giant-Size X-Men #1. The team needed new characters, so writer Len Wein and editor-in-chief Roy Thomas turned to Dave Cockrum. Cockrum presented them with a feline-based heroine called the Black Cat.

“When I did up the original X-Men designs, one of the characters was called the Black Cat,” Cockrum said during an interview for Fantagraphics’ The X-Men Companion. “Take a look at Storm without the white hair and without the cape, and that’s essentially the Black Cat. She had dark hair which was sort of like Wolverine’s, tufted on top with the ear effect. And she could transform into a cat – I preferred the idea of a house-cat and I think we were talking about both a house-cat and a panther- and she could also half-transform into a humanoid cat.”

 However, Roy Thomas had recently revamped former Marvel teen comedy star Patsy Walker into a feline-based superhero called Hellcat. This forced Cockrum to go in another direction.

“Storm was first conceived as a character called the Black Cat, with an entirely different set of powers. Roy, I think nixed the Black Cat – she’d have a little black cat cut out of her costume, entirely different costume – since he had come up with another cat of some sort – I don’t remember, maybe Hellcat – and not wanting duplications of her powers,” Wein said during an interview for Fantagraphics’ The X-Men Companion.

Not wanting the design to go to waste, Cockrum combined the Black Cat with another character idea.

“I had another character in the group, a male called either Tempest or Typhoon – I think Typhoon was his name – who was going to be a member of the group, and we decided that rather than have all these members, we would simply combine the essential visual of the Black Cat – because the face was essentially the same, with that kind of cat’s eyes – with the powers of Typhoon, and we created Storm,” Wein recalled.

That’s why Storm is drawn with cat eyes in her early appearances.

As Wein recalls, it was Roy Thomas’s idea to call her Storm. “She was called Typhoon originally, and none of us liked it. It didn’t sound feminine enough, it sounded like something you spat rather than said, and we talked to Roy about it as he was going out the door.: ‘Well, she’s a mistress of the storm, she’s got all these powers, what do we call her?’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you simply call her Storm?” And we all went, “Jesus, Johnny Storm…” and he went, “So what?” and we just said, “Okay, you’re the boss,” and we called her Storm.”

Marvel eventually used the Black Cat name for another character, and I don’t think the Human Torch minds sharing his name with one of the most powerful X-Men. All in all, it seems like it all worked out for the best.

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