Who is Daredevil’s White Tiger superhero in Marvel Comics?

Daredevil isn’t just back in Disney Plus’ Daredevil: Born Again. He’s bringing more members of the Marvel Comics community with him, with the late Kamar de los Reyes in the role of Hector Ayala, the White Tiger.

Born Again skates lightly over White Tiger’s powers and backstory in its premiere episodes — just enough to leave a viewer either tantalized or confused. He’s got superpowers from some amulets? How did he get them? Which superpowers? What’s the meaning behind his tiger theming?

The answer to those questions is: Yes, it’s three amulets; he found them in the garbage; they give him strength, stamina, agility, and instant mastery of martial arts; and he’s a tiger because tigers are, you know, a powerful shorthand for Asian themes in Western art.

And for that to make sense, you need to know a little more about how Marvel Comics responded to the blockbuster success of martial arts movies in the 1970s.

Who is Daredevil’s White Tiger?

There have been multiple White Tigers over the years, but Daredevil: Born Again features Hector Ayala, the first White Tiger and Marvel’s first Latino superhero. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Hector’s family moved to New York City at some point during his adolescence. While attending Empire State University — the fictitious Manhattan college most name-dropped by Marvel Comics writers — he discovered the three amulets of the Sons of the Tiger in a garbage-strewn alley.

Upon donning the head- and paw-shaped amulets, he discovered his new powers and his new destiny as the White Tiger, using them to battle street gangs and crime syndicates.

Hector was created by legendary comics figures, writer Bill Mantlo (co-creator of Rocket Raccoon) and artist George Pérez (co-creator of the New Teen Titans, revitalizer of Wonder Woman, artist of Infinity War), at the very beginning of their careers. And he was created for an audience that was martial arts fans first, and comics fans second.

In 1975, the year of White Tiger’s debut, Mantlo and Pérez were working on the comics sections of The Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, a magazine for the martial arts fan produced by Marvel Comics’ then-sister publisher, Magazine Management. Chasing the interest that had propelled films like Five Fingers of Death and Fist of Fury to the top of the American box office, Deadly Hands published interviews, editorials, guides, and reporting (though you probably wouldn’t call it a rigorous examination of the martial arts tradition, at least not by today’s standards). And it also featured martial arts adventure fiction in each issue, in the form of ongoing comics stories, printed in black and white.

Though Deadly Hands left the Marvel branding off its covers in favor of emphasizing its martial arts specificity, its comics naturally featured Marvel characters, both those that had originated in the comics — like Iron Fist, Shang-Chi, Colleen Wing, and Misty Knight — and original characters like Mantlo and Pérez’s the Sons of the Tiger. The Sons of the Tiger were a trio of multicultural friends who used three amulets (one tiger’s head and two claws) to pool their strength, giving each of them the power of three martial artists in one body. Who doesn’t love a “By our powers combined!” kind of adventure?

But by ’75 Mantlo and Pérez felt like they’d kind of done all they could do with the Sons and wanted to move on to something different. So they penned a story where the three friends had a falling out over a girl — typical 20-something drama — and discarded their magical amulets in the trash. After all, Spider-Man did it with his costume in 1967! This was a fine Marvel tradition!

Their new character, Hector Ayala, found the amulets, and the rest was history — or at least a brand-new hero for them to work with in the pages of Deadly Hands.

Pérez, himself a native Nuyorican, recalled that it was Mantlo’s suggestion to make White Tiger Puerto Rican. “Figuring that we had pretty much dredged the well of ideas for the Tiger Sons,” he told Marvel.com in 2019, “we wanted to go in a different direction and, since he was working with a Puerto Rican artist from the Bronx, Bill suggested creating a character utilizing my experience and background. And, as simply as that, the White Tiger was born.”

The artist admitted that “Bill was probably more aware of the significance of creating the first Latino Super Hero to star in his own series” than Pérez was. “That said, I did feel a special connection with Hector Ayala — whose name was one I chose based on some neighborhood friends — since it was a novelty for me to draw from my own life experiences to create Hector’s inner city world, both visually and atmospherically,” he said, noting that he drew Hector’s face after his own brother, and Hector’s mother after his own mother.

Who else has been the White Tiger?

Hector Ayala has had several successors since his debut in the 1970s, notably two of his younger relatives: his younger sister, Ava Ayala, and his niece, Angela del Toro.

Any other weird White Tiger stuff in Marvel history?

Well… for a year or so in the late 1990s, the current White Tiger was — let me check my notes here — an actual white Bengal tiger that the High Evolutionary “evolved” into the form of an adult human woman martial arts expert. The tiger did not like this very much, found human emotions difficult, and was eventually returned to her original form and the wild. So that’s nice.