Profile: Tigra

Greer Nelson, Tigra
First appearance: 1972

Current status: not so active as an Avenger, but still pretty active as a California police officer.

Was subjected to the following act of discrimination: in late 1989-early 1990, when John Byrne was writing West Coast Avengers, where Greer was a regular, she went insane, devolving into…well, a cat-like, animal state, and Hank Pym had to shrink and incubate her (yes, he did). In the 19th issue of Ms. Marvel's second series, the Puppet Master makes her into one of his subjects. And then, in "New Avengers" she's beaten up by a minion of Jigsaw's in revenge for stopping his boss.

What’s wrong with how this was done? It was fairly reflective of the problems that littered the WCA during Byrne’s run on it for about a year – the women were almost all ineffective or unconvincing in their roles, reduced to mere window-dressing, as in the case of Janet Van Dyne, or, as in Tigra’s case, rendered trivial and insane, and needing to be locked up. Ugh.

Thank goodness that Byrne was soon taken off the title (before it happened, he wrote a joke panel in one WCA issue where he explained a continuity glitch), and Roy and Dann Thomas, who’d returned to do some more work at Marvel, did their best to repair all the damage Byrne had done that year.

Unfortunately, Greer was not done any favors when she became one of the pawns in Civil War, and then a marionette of the Puppet Master's, which almost seems out of character for Phil Masters, and certainly wasn't being done any favors when she was assaulted by one of Jigsaw's enforcers who used a pair of levity boots and an invisibility cloak. Mainly because Tigra would surely have been able to detect his arrival with her heightened senses, and thus the invisibility wouldn't have been that effective.