THE SONS OF THE TIGER

Okay, this is something I've wanted to read for decades. Back when I was a kid, Marvel used to cram every year's annuals with backup stories. In Spider-Man's case, that usually meant short tales starring characters in his orbit. Not necessarily always members of his supporting cast, but sometimes other heroes he ran into, but who didn't have their own series. One of these was the Prowler, who featured in two or three annual backups in the late eighties/early nineties. And one of the Prowler backups, "Jaded Perceptions" from 1993's SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #13, featured the Prowler's brother, Abe Brown, who co-owned a martial arts dojo with his friend Lin Sun -- and who, it turned out, had been a hero-type himself years earlier, alongside a group of his fellow martial artists.*

See, the Prowler's real name, long establsihed since Stan Lee and John Romita introduced him in the sixties, was Hobie Brown. And in the seventies, Marvel published a serial in their DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU magazine called "The Sons of the Tiger". (Bear with me here; this will all make sense in the end. I hope.) That serial starred a trio of martial artists: Abe Brown, Lin Sun, and Bob Diamond. So eventually, circa 1989, somebody at Marvel realized that they had this character named Hobie Brown and they had this character named Abe Brown. Both were black men. They had the same last name. Why not make them brothers?

Yeah, it seems weird on its face. Brown isn't exactly an uncommon last name that would make you think two characters of the same ethnicity sharing it simply had to be related. But if that hadn't happened, I never would've learned about the Sons of the Tiger. That story I mentioned, "Jaded Perceptions", features Abe and Lin explaining their backstory from DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU. And I don't know why, but twelve-year-old me just thought the Sons sounded really cool. Three martial artists with magical jade amulets doing kung-fu on the mean streets of San Francsico and New York (among other places) -- what's not to love? (It should be noted that I have long been a fan of "exploitation" cinema, but apparently I was a fan of it in comic book form before I even knew what it was!)

But I don't believe there were any footnotes in that story directing readers to DHoKF, though I could be mistaken on that. But in any case, back in the early/mid-nineties, I didn't have the cash to shell out for back issues of one of Marvel's black-and-white magazines. Still, the Sons captured my imagination in ways I can't quite explain. I devoured their entry in the OFFICIAL HANDBOOK OF THE MARVEL UNIVERSE. They also had offical stats in the MARVEL SUPER HEROES ROLEPLAYING GAME, and I brought them into our adventures there as recurring characters. I was enamored, for whatever reason, with the Tiger Sons.

Eventually, in 2015, Marvel secured the rights to Sax Roehmer's FU MANCHU characters, which allowed them to reprint their classic SHANG-CHI, MASTER OF KUNG FU series. They did so in 2016, collecting the entire run in a nice set of four Omnibuses (readers who've been around here for a while may recall that I "Unboxed" all four back then). And in addition to MoKF, Marvel also reprinted DEADLY HANDS in its entirety across two Omnibuses. I bought those as well, and they've been sitting on my bookshelf for all this time. (Honestly, I was shocked when I went back to find out when I received the first volume. I would've guessed two, two-and-a-half years, tops. I was flabbergasted to learn it had been four!)

Anyway, the above is my typically long-winded way to announce that it's finally time to crack open the DEADLY HANDS volumes and read the adventures of the Sons of the Tiger. And this momentous event, as you can tell from above, has been a long time coming! I'll be covering two or three chapters a week (remember, this was a relatively low-page-count serial in a magazine filled with other content) for the next couple months -- and I'm thrilled to be doing so! It all begins next Friday, so be here!

---

*The story mentioned here is not the one that established Abe as Hobie's brother, for the record. That happened in 1989's SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL. For a few years there, every SPECTACULAR annual featured a short story about the Prowler. All were written by Glenn Herdling, and most featured Abe in a supporting role (one was even titled "Sons of the Tiger", though it had nothing to do with the original Sons).

It's kind of funny when you think about it. Herdling got ten pages a year to tell a Prowler story, but he almost treated them like single issues of an ongong series! But for whatever reason, when the Prowler was given his own limited series in 1994, Herdling sadly didn't get the nod to write it, despite the work he'd been doing in those annuals to establish a status quo and cast for the character.