{"id":7204,"date":"2020-11-13T00:56:44","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T04:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=7204"},"modified":"2020-01-04T19:38:24","modified_gmt":"2020-01-04T23:38:24","slug":"tac-009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2020\/11\/13\/tac-009\/","title":{"rendered":"TAC 009"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I tried to look up why and how The White Tiger could be \u201cMarvel\u2019s most controversial creation\u201d and came up empty. But he was created by newly-minted TAC writer Bill Mantlo, so it was only a matter of time before he found his way here, probably. One of the all-time boring character designs, this. You couldn\u2019t even give him some stripes? I can only guess this is because he debuted in black and white and fought people in the dark, to make him stand out, but even then\u2026 little ears? Stripes? A logo? Claws? Anything? Nothing. He looks like he bought all the pieces to make a superhero costume and forgot to decorate them. Ah, well, here he is. Al the jumping around the timeline has already shown us he\u2019ll become a regular cast member and how he\u2019ll eventually leave the book, but let\u2019s see how he came in, courtesy of Mantlo, Sal Buscema and Mike Esposito. Spider-Man is arriving at ESU just in time to hear the university\u2019s president tell a crowd of protesters that the night school is shutting down no matter what they say.
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Well, that\u2019s cool, check out Mantlo going to bat on social issues. We can tell by that \u201cCarajo!\u201d that we\u2019ve just met Hector Ayala, The White Tiger.
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Grimly relevant stupidity from the president up there even though this book is 40 years old, as well as grimly relevant \u201cwatching and doing nothing\u201d from unnamed extra #2. Soon, a distraught Peter Parker is headed into the library, worried about the future of the school, and soon followed by green-suited goons. All this is watched by Hector, who knows the Erskine Papers are in there, and suits up as The White Tiger to stop the goons.
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Well, that\u2019s not what we expected. Peter gets caught off-guard twice by his assailant, and winds up buried under a toppled bookcase with an injured arm. Meanwhile, The White Tiger catches up with the aforementioned green-suited goons and beats them up in short order. But then Peter rushes out, still inexplicably refusing to get into his Spidey suit, and The White Tiger backhands him without looking. Then he\u2019s shocked by seeing hie just hit a regular student, and the goons begin to flee. Then the knocked out guard comes to and accuses WT of beating him up, which he finds confusing since that obviously wasn\u2019t him, and then he flees himself. The college president declares a state of emergency on campus (Can he do that?), and Peter slips away. Soon, Spider-Man breaks into The Daily Globe to read up on The White Tiger so Mantlo can reference his handful of adventures in Deadly Hands of Kung-Fu before Spidey finds a reference to the police detective WT hangs out with.
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\u201cBlackbyrd\u201d (Never not awkward!) listens to Spidey, then hails a cab, and he and Spidey head to ESU. En route, Blackbyrd recaps that the Sons of the Tiger, who we saw in MTU awhile ago, split up, and threw away the magic amulets that gave them their power. And that they were found by Hector, who learned that all 3 amulets made him super powerful. Yeah, this guy just tells Spidey The White Tiger\u2019s real name. Then he recaps WT\u2019s past adventures in slightly more detail than the previous recap (Why is this happening twice?), letting Spidey\/us know that WT\u2019s battles put him at odds with an evil group that, of course, turned out to be run by his own brother, who was killed.
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In this era where Marvel Comics have less than 20 pages of story every month, The White Tiger\u2019s meager backstory sure ate up a lot of them. Meanwhile, White Tiger confronts Professor Vasquez from earlier, who\u2019s just found his office has been tossed and The Erskine Papers are in his desk. White Tiger wants to know what\u2019s up, but also:
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Be here next time for what promises to be an entire issue of Two Heroes Over A Misunderstanding!
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I tried to look up why and how The White Tiger could be \u201cMarvel\u2019s most controversial creation\u201d and came up empty. But he was created by newly-minted TAC writer Bill Mantlo, so…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[107,784,52,37,121,2,199],"class_list":["post-7204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1970s","tag-bill-mantlo","tag-blackbyrd","tag-mike-esposito","tag-sal-buscema","tag-spectacular-spider-man","tag-spider-man","tag-the-white-tiger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7204"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7216,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7204\/revisions\/7216"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}