Last week, I mentioned that I was thinking of covering White Tiger since, you know, he popped up on Daredevil: Born Again. Granted, I covered a very different White Tiger ages ago, but this one is the original.
He’s also dead in the comics. Very, very dead. Or he was last time I checked. Who can say, really?
White Tiger, originally, was one Hector Ayala. First appearing in Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu #19 in December of 1975. The product of writer Bill Mantlo and artist George Perez (yes, that George Perez), Hector was essentially Marvel’s first Latino superhero. One day, he found the apparently discarded amulets of the three Sons of the Tiger. Who are they? I have no idea, but Hector was being set up to become the lead character for Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu, and as it was a black-and-white comic, Perez basically designed a costume that was Spider-Man’s without the detail. Anyway, Hector found the amulets and realized that if he combined the three, it greatly boosted his strength and martial arts skills. Donning the aforementioned costume, he took on the name “White Tiger.”
As White Tiger, Hector fought a lot of street-level crime, but from what I’ve seen, he was often mistaken for bad guys and even had his own superhero identity stolen by baddies from time to time. A villain named Lightmaster revealed Hector’s identity to the general public, and he was later shot and nearly killed. By then, Hector realized the tiger amulets had an addictive quality and he used a go-between to return them to the Sons of the Tiger. Again, whoever they were.
Yes, I know I can look those guys up. Maybe they’ll appear in this space in the near future.
As it is, White Tiger would be arrested for murder and killed while trying to escape prison during Brian Michael Bendis’s Daredevil run, so his appearance in Born Again, as played by the late Kamar de los Reyes, isn’t without precedent. Also, it isn’t that surprising that Bendis popped some character from the 70s out for some reason, this being the guy who did a lot of stuff with Spider-Woman, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist as members of the Avengers.
However, that wasn’t the end of the White Tiger name! First, Hector’s niece Angela del Toro took over the role. Later, his teenage sister Ava Ayala took the role, and she was popular enough (I suppose) to become part of Spider-Man’s teenage team on the animated Ultimate Spider-Man, only Ava was Hector’s daughter on the cartoon instead of his kid sister.
Anyway, that’s the White Tiger. One of them anyway.
Don’t ask me about the one that was an actual white tiger mutated by the High Evolutionary.
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