GIANT-SIZE CREATURES #1 FEATURING WEREWOLF BY NIGHT (1974): 1st Tigra

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Okay, Marv, be serious.  The most oft-requested new series in comicdom is about The Cat?  Come on.  That’s just not true.  Tigra is one of those characters who has only had a few brief moments where she was great (I’m thinking of Roger Stern’s Avengers as the main place, as well as her role as a professor in this century’s Avengers Academy).  But maybe people were asking about it because Marvel had hyped it on a few other series’ letter pages…

And also, look at the cover:

It says Tigra is a were-woman.  No.  She’s not.

Tigra started out in the 1972 series “Claws of the Cat,” part of that year’s wave of horror/horror-adjacent Marvel titles.  It lasted just 4 issues, and by the time Giant-Size Creatures #1 came out, she’d appeared only 5 times (in her own book and Marvel Team Up #8)

In these early appearances, she wore a yellow costume pretty much identical to the future Hellcat character.

This story completely retools the character.

It starts with Jack Russell sadly walking on a beach in Mexico when he comes upon Hydra kidnapping Greer Nelson.  He tries to interfere, and gets knocked on the head.

Hydra don’t dress for the beach.  And it’s nighttime.  Why is Greer in a bikini?  Oh, here’s why…

She makes short work of the Hydra thugs.

Then, she turns to Jack–and calls him a teenager.

I never thought of him as a teen before.  That really seems wrong given everything he’s done in his solo book.

Anyway, I mentioned it was nighttime, right?  So Jack changes, the two fight, and then Hydra captures both of them, so they become allies.

And then they take down Hydra.  But before they do, we see that Hydra has an “older woman” in custody as well.  She’s Dr. Joanne Trumulo, who we all forgot about but was in the four-issue The Cat series.  After Greer Nelson’s police officer husband was KIA, Trumulo experimented on Nelson, giving her super-smarts, cat-like abilities and “intuition and empathy” for squirrels.

(So why isn’t she Squirrel Girl?)

We get pages of flashbacks that take us from Greer’s days as The Cat and then are told that Trumulo is actually a member of a tribe of cat-people who read early issues of The Fantastic Four to learn that they could wear heavy clothes and trenchcoats to hide that they were furry.

And now her experiments on Greer Nelson will kill Greer unless she gets all furry.  And she has a magic ring–which she already had on her finger when she met Hydra at the beach–that can change her from furry to flesh.

Hydra wants to get the secret of making people into cat people and some kind of “world killer” weapon that the cat people possess, which is presumably why they kidnapped Trumulo.  But Greer Nelson was surprised to find her at the base, and they didn’t know about her.  And she earlier had a “cat ring” on.  None of these things are explained.  I also couldn’t find an explanation of why Dr. Trumulo isn’t furry.

And no explanations will be provided.

Werewolf wakes up, breaks Tigra and Trumulo out of the base, and Trumulo–the ultimate badass of the story–poisons all the Hydra members in the base with the black plague.

Very sloppy plotting and writing here, but definitely an issue of historical significance.

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