Broken Frontier

After her initial three-issue run in Champions #36 and #37, and Flare #36, Heroic Publishing's all-new TIGRESS is set to make one more try-out appearance. That will hapen in September, in Champions #40, with a cover and a new twelve-page adventure by writer Wilson Hill and artist Dick Giordano. If that issue does well, look for adventures of the Tigress to begin appearing in her own magazine sometime in the latter half of 2008.

In the two-part Tigress origin story that appeared in Champions #36 and #37, readers met Kassidy Farrell, a young woman just out of high school, who while on summer vacation in Mexico found herself and several of her friends being hunted by a sinister cult of serpent-worshiping fanatics led by Seth Adams, the man who years earlier may have been responsible for the death of Kassidy's mother. With surprising speed and strength, Kassidy fought the cultists, but was brought down by a lethal poison dart. Kassidy's death led to her rebirth as an avatar of the cat-goddess Bast. And in her new incarnation as the legendary Tigress, Kassidy was able to defeat Seth Adams and his cultists, and rescue her friends.

Then, in a stand-alone story in Flare #36, Kassidy and her girlfriends traveled to Los Angeles, where Kass once again donned the persona of the Tigress and offered her services as a fledgling superheroine to chief Brad Parker of the LAPD. After working with a witchgirl who called herself Arcanna to solve a case involving murder and a mystic summoning gone awry, the Tigress was rewarded with her very own deputy's badge.

Now, the story in Champions #40 picks up where the story in Flare #36 left off, with a newly deputized Tigress getting ready to launch her career as an officially recognized superheroine. As she does that, our feline heroine is going to find herself bumping up against two of Flare's most dangerous enemies. She'll be taking on both the emerald energies of the winsome Whipperette, and the dark crimson magics of none other than Erik Schadel, the demonic ex-Nazi sorcerer who just might be Flare's father. Erik wants to get his hands on the Scepter of Charlemagne, a particularly powerful artifact said to grant its possessor temporal dominion over all of western Europe. He's using the Whipperette's special talents to do it. And against the combined power of a pair of villains even Flare herself has never been able to defeat, how can one little cat-girl possibly hope to prevail?

And this isn't the only story that will appear in Champions #40. In addition to this new Tigress tale, Roy & Dann Thomas's electrically powered heroes, Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt, will appear in the classic adventure, "At Last, the Secret," with story by Roy & Dann Thomas, artwork by Howard Simpson and E. R. Cruz. And to round out the issue, there's an all-new Flare mini-adventure, "Flare's Lost Costume," by Dennis Mallonee and Duval Stowers.

The CHAMPIONS comic book is currently scheduled to appear on an eight-times-a-year basis, featuring stories about a wide variety of Heroic Publishing's universe of characters. More adventures of Flare, Captain Thunder and Blue Bolt, and such characters as Icestar, Icicle, the all-new Giant, and Flare's electric litttle sister Sparkplug will appear in upcoming issues of Champions, along with stories about one or two completely new characters, in a series of tales that, if all goes well, will lead in issue #50 to the long-awaited return of the LEAGUE OF CHAMPIONS.

And you can bet that when the League of Champions does return, the Tigress will be a part of it, too!