Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Saturday, September 8, 2018

FIGHT COMICS #81 (JULY 1952)

Comic book publisher Fiction House Magazines had a good thing going with various jungle adventures featuring Tarzan knock-offs -- both male and female, adult and child.  Among their jungle heroes were Sheena, Kaanga, Camilla, Fantomah, Wambi the Jungle Boy...and Tiger Girl.

Tiger Girl was created by an unknown writer and artist Robert Webb.  Looking at her, she could have been a sister to Sheena Queen of the Jungle.  Both were beautiful, courageous, blonde...Sheena wore a leopard skin outfit (just barely) and Tiger Girl wore a tiger skin outfit (also just barely).  Good Girl Art thrived among the pages from Fiction House.

Tiger Girl was originally called Princess Vishnu.  Her name and her tiger Benzali place her smack dab in India, although her adventures took place in the Congo.  Consistency was never a problem in these stories.  Tiger Girl's constant companion was the turban-wearing Abdola (who is sometimes a Sikh and sometimes a Hindu and often not categorized).  Tiger Girl was sometimes characterized as the Golden Queen of the Jungle, as opposed to Sheena who was just plain Queen of the Jungle.  She protects a wide swarth of the Congo, encompassing many tribes.  She is an expert with a whip and has a "tiger ring" which somehow gives her extra strength when she looks at it.

By the way, she started out as a redhead but by the end of her run was a pure-dee blonde.  Maybe the hot jungle sun had something to do with it.

Tiger Girl premiered in Fight Comics #32 (1944).  Appearing in every issue, she grabbed the cover illustration in issue #49 (April 1947) and held onto it until her final appearance in Fight Comics #81.  The cover of that issue shows Tiger Girl strapped upside-down to a tree while an angry tiger (presumably Benzali) leaps over her body to get at her captor.  Following her stint at Fight Comics, Tiger Girl moved to Jungle Comics for a dozen issues and to one issue of Jungle Adventures; many of these appearances were reprints.  She was never able to advance to a comic book title of her own.

In the issue linked below (her last appearance in Fight Comics) Tiger Girl does battle with an army of Arab slave traders -- the Skullbone Legion -- led by the evil Sidi Ben Hassam.

The issue also has a text story (bless those postal regulations) in which Tiger Girl saves a tribal village from a raging forest fire set by evil hunters determined to drive the natives out of their hunting grounds.  We know that anyone who picks on people under Tiger Girl's protection will get their comeuppance.

There is more to this issue than Tiger Girl.

Rip Carson of the Golden Dragon Squadron is out to stop a Red Chinese plot to use drugged American captives as suicide pilots over Korea. 

Boxing champ Kayo Kirby must show an unethical fighter that cheating and blustering are not welcome in the sport.

And teen-age Smoky Joe is on his first round-up, determined to prove that he is as good a cowboy as his late father was.

All in all, a pretty interesting issue.

Enjoy.


http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=72404&b=i

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