[Anthony Durrant]

Tygra debuted in Better/Nedor's SURPRISING COMICS #44; in it, a girl named Lynn Thomas – the daughter of Dr. Thomas, a doctor who works in darkest Africa to heal the sick – flies to London to pick up an experimental drug called Autorene from Professor Terry Nelson, its inventor, who is also her old flame.  After he gives her the Autorene – and they go out on the town together – she flies back in her small tan monoplane to Africa.  While en route to her father's camp, she crashes in the territory of the Flame People, who have just lost their king and are waiting for his successor, "the Tawny One."  She makes it out of the crashed plane alive, but spends hours in the jungle, lost, trying to find her way to her father's camp.  Eventually she becomes exhausted and lies down beside a tree to rest and recover her energy.  Before she goes to sleep, though, she drinks what she thinks is a vial of beef juices.  She's awakened by the sound of the Fire People trying to catch a lion they think is the Tawny One; it's broken out of their trap lines and is attacking them fiercely.  Jumping to her feet, Lynn rushes to the rescue, shouting:

"Lion or not, I CAN'T let this happen!"

Rushing towards the lion with a knife in her hand, Lynn tries to attack him with it, but it pounces on her, knocking Lynn to the ground and sending her knife flying out of her hand.  She grabs the lion around the throat just before his jaws can lock on her neck and hurls him away into the jungle, at which point he jumps to his feet and runs away.  Lynn cries:

"Why – why, I can't believe – I can't believe I handled that lion just as easily as I would've handled a kitten!"

Then she looks in the box in which she's been carrying the Autorene and discovers that it's empty.  It's at this point that the Flame People attack her with their spears pointed at her tender bosom because they're angry at her for disposing of the lion that was to be their king, "the Tawny One."

"I NEVER back down from a fight!"  Lynn cries as she faces the Fire People warriors bravely.  "And no one will ever stop me – not a man, not a beast, not one of you!"

The Fire people fight Lynn fiercely in the belief that she is their tribal enemy, "the Demon Queen," but she throws one of the warriors into a couple of other warriors, knocking them down.  Then she rips a branch off a tree to defend herself from the other Fire People warriors, but their leader stops the attack and points directly to Lynn in her tattered clothing.

"We have eyes!"  he cries.  "Can we not use them to see?  She has defeated the lion – she has bested us with her godly might.  SHE is the Tawny One!"

At which point a lightning bolt cracks overhead.  The Fire People take her back to the village with them, where the leader of the warriors takes her to a hut, where he dresses her in a tiger skin bikini whose bra and panties connect at the waist at a metal ring.  Then he leads Lynn outside and shouts:

"All hail TYGRA, Queen of the Fire People!"

But Lynn – now Tygra – leaps over the heads of the assembled Fire People and shouts to them:

"If I must rule, it must be as one of you!"

Later, the head of Tygra's warriors tells her:

"We do not know where we come from, Tygra – the Gods say you are the ones who will lead us back!"

"I will do what I can – whatever is in my power!" she promises.

Later, in the last frame of the story, she makes a fervent wish for Terry Nelson – the man she loves – to come and find her.

[Anthony Durrant]

I made a couple of mistakes in the original e-mail, the first being that in her debut story, Tygra is referred to as TYGRA OF THE FLAME PEOPLE.  The second is that I forgot to mention that after throwing the lion aside – and being attacked by the Flame Peope – Tygra discovers that the "beef extract" she drank the previous night was actually the Autorene!

[Lingster]

Who owns the right to this?  Any idea?  Is the DC's ABC line or AC Comics?  Each company seems to have walked away with some of the relevant intellectual property.

[Lingster]

A look at the AC Comics site indicates that some Tygra material is available from them, but as near as I can tell it's all original AC material, not reprints.

[Anthony Durrant]

Tygra's copyright owner was a company known variously as Nedor, Better, and Standard – in that order.  Nedor/Better/Standard went out of business in the mid-nineteen fifties, so Tygra would be in the public domain now (the statute of limitation on copyright at the time being 27 years).

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