The Fantastic Four was a firm childhood favourite of mine and when colour Marvel Comics returned on sale, after a hiatus, in the mid-70s, I was buying it as regularly as was possible, given very spotty distribution between 1976 and 1978. The Kirby Kovers and Perez interiors were very appealing to my 13- year- old eye.
Having infiltrated the Baxter Building in her MTIO Cougar investigation, Tigra returns when the trio now comprising the Frightful Four audition for their fourth slot. Rather audaciously, Greer plans to flirt with the Wingless Wizard and pretend to join the evil FF to bring them down from within. It's the first time we've seen this wily, "kittenish" persona before and it's a shift from the Greer we first met.
It seems that, like the Hulk in the Sixties, Marvel wants to keep Tigra in the reading public's eye but doesn't know what to do with her. Given that a red-headed Amazon (Titania) would join the evil FF in the 80s, perhaps it would've been exciting to see a conflicted Tigra get carried away with her game and maybe even be swayed into a criminal lifestyle, before pulling off her coup against the Wizard. It could've been a long game and an exciting bait and switch.
However, another redhead's arrival in the FF vs. FF saga takes Tigra's characterisation in a different direction.
Thundra, the Wonder Woman parody and first replacement for Medusa ( tied, I think by Gerry Conway into the Femizons from Savage Tales) also returns. Her schtick had been an unrequited crush on the Thing and now she finds a rival in Tigra. Alongside the Impossible Man, she forms an amusing sub-group with Tigra for eight issues ( although one is an emergency reprint).
I was so disappointed to find yet another deadline missed with this issue.
Their next adventure involves a temperature-changing robot, robbing banks ( I love his wee thermometer). However, there's so much going on with the A-plot, where Reed Richards has been replaced by his evil duplicate, the Brute, that we're left to assume the robot is a tool of the Mad Thinker. One of his 60s androids has evolved in the Negative Zone and is the threat at the end of this arc. That's why this Stan and Jack tale should've been the fill-in reprint, rather than the Maggia story above
Len Wein replaces Roy Thomas in the autumn of 1977 and swiftly writes out Impy, Thundra and Tigra, so Greer's attraction to Ben is forgotten until the mid-80s. Her next appearance is in a Claremont/Byrne issue of Marvel Team-Up, cover dated March 1978. That means it was probably on sale in the US the previous Christmas, but I got it in Strathaven the day before the Easter holidays began ( and a week before I saw Star Wars at the Odeon in Glasgow). That was also the same day I got my school friends to perform an adaptation I'd written of a Howard the Duck comic in our English classroom. I was a precocious theatrical at fourteen.
MTU 67 is a sequel to Marvel Chillers 4. Tigra has been hunting down Kraven ,who escaped from prison after his encounter with Spidey in a very early issue of the Conway vehicle, Peter Parker The Spectacular Spider-Man.
Kraven gets the upper hand and makes her a slave with a "mnemonic scrambler". Claremont always liked these domination/ bondage plotlines but his Tigra is a fiercer, less flirtatious character and he highlights her fears about her animal nature. Byrne draws her with a huge mane of hair, but it's not blue-black inside the comic. She also helps Spidey survive a stampede in a safari park although there's no reference to their first meeting, when Greer was still the Cat. Despite the sleaziness of Kraven's gimmick, this is a dynamic and positive portrayal of Tigra.
Ed Hannigan, probably best known as scripter of the Defenders in the late 70s, revives Tigra for a solo story in Marvel Premiere 42, cover dated June 1978. She's now The Feline Fury, since "Were-Woman" is a meaningless phrase. The story is drawn by Mike Vosburg, who was going to draw Tigra in 1975 and inked by Ernie Chan who kept a flavour of Buscema on b/w Conan so well in the 90s.
The title "Nightmare's Evolution" is a reversal of the POTA story "Evolution's Nightmare", which Hannigan drew. It's a grim story where a human and an ape work together to overcome their disabilities but are killed by mutants.
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The Tigra plot however was by John Warner, who co-created Bloodstone, featured in the Rampaging Hulk magazine. This leads me to wonder if this was an inventory magazine story- maybe the MTU sales had been good enough to warrant a revival of Tigra but I doubt if they'd have had the data in time. It's a lush and classy -looking comic, which would've probably looked good in black and white. It's also written as a first person monologue, so it feels like a lost issue of Marvel Chillers.
My brother bought this comic in Strathaven, at some point before we went on holiday to Morecambe for the first time in June 1978- and before my fifteenth birthday.
MP 42 is set in New Orleans- another new milieu for Tigra- and it's Mardi Gras. She has a spectral visitation from Dr Tumolo, who has died at the hands /paws of Tabur, a cat-man evolved by the High Evolutionary. Tabur was accepted by the Cat People but has gone renegade. He uses a ray, designed to restore Greer, in order to reverse evolution on the Cat People. Presumably the ray was extrapolated from HE tech that Tabur had brought from Wundagore; of course he's devolved, in his turn.
Like the Cougar, Tabur is another potential arch enemy for Tigra who's quickly disposed of, inhibiting her story engine. I liked the idea of two members of hidden races clashing. Maybe Gerry Conway's 1976 Captain Marvel villain, El Gato the Cheetah should have been given a chance, gringo pigs!
With the death of her mentor, and a reiteration that she can't change back to human form (last established back in Giant Size Chillers, three years earlier), this feels like an end-point for the Feline Fury. The Showcase-style MP doesn't lead to any further appearances anywhere in 1979 or 1980, any more than it did for her contemporaries, Paladin or Seeker 3000. But the next stage in her career was with the Avengers in the autumn of 1981, which is a pretty spectacular comeback. More of that next time.
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