Various Tiger Men have stalked through the comics, but none have really roared. I always found that somewhat surprising.
After all, some of the most famous superheroes are “animal people” — Batman, Spider-Man, Catwoman, Hawkman, Wolverine, the Black Panther. And thanks to the legends of lycanthropy, wolf men litter the popular cultural landscape.
And hardly any animal can be counted as cooler than the tiger, a strikingly beautiful apex predator that’s the largest species among the Felidae. Tigers have been known to grow to almost 13 feet and weigh up to nearly 700 pounds. Tarzan’s creator Edgar Rice Burroughs liked tigers so much that he even put them in Africa, where they aren’t.
But Tiger Men, for whatever reason, have been largely one-shot wonders. Typical of the breed is I Was the Burma Tiger-Man in DC’s My Greatest Adventure 59 (Sept. 1961).
Jungle adventurer Joe Jeep is nearly killed by a man-eating tiger in the Southeast Asian country we would now call Myanmar. He is revived and transformed into a tiger man by an elderly wise man’s magical brew. After nearly being shot by his own men, Jeep uses his animal powers to battle the man-eating tiger. But it’s Jeep’s human cunning that finally carries the day.
In 1946, Fiction House published a remarkably similar Tiger Man as a feature in Rangers Comics. The character, who had been nearly killed in Burma, was resurrected by being imbued with the spirit of a tiger (which also instantly added 30 pounds to his frame and made him grow two inches)
Although non-costumed (apparently because the publisher did its best to avoid superhero trappings), he possessed a magical ring that glowed to warn him of danger and fought crime with an orange-striped Tiger-Plane, a Tiger-Car, a Tiger’s Den, and so forth. His name was Robert Benton (not to be confused with the Black Terror, whose secret identity was also Robert Benton. Superheroes really started to crowd each other in the Golden Age).
In 1962, DC’s House of Secrets 56 gave us a traveler magically transformed into The Tiger-Man of the Desert.
The Burmese Tiger-Man was followed in 1965 by My Twin — The Tiger Man in DC’s Tales of the Unexpected 90, a story that supplied us with two tiger men, this time in an Indian jungle.
More bizarre than usual was 1941’s The Case of the Armless Tiger Man in Marvel Mystery Comics 26. Marvel’s wingless superhero the Angel defeated that Tiger Man, a Nazi saboteur who’d lost his arms in a German factory.
Batman has encountered both heroic and villainous tiger men. In Batman 93 (Aug. 1955), the Dynamic Duo travels back in time to save a scientist’s reputation and discovers a “caveman Batman” — Rog, who is secretly Tiger Man. Then, in World’s Finest 119 (Aug. 1961), Superman, Batman and Robin are seemingly under the thumb of a new superhero called Tigerman. However, the character turns out to be a hoax the heroes have dreamed up to outfox the criminal Purple Legion.
Batman also fought the tiger-costumed aquatic criminal Tiger Shark in 1947, and Captain Comet faced an anthropomorphic Tiger-Man in Strange Adventures 34 in 1953. Conan the Barbarian braved the Talons of the Man-Tiger in 1976.
Probably the most successful of the lot was the Atlas/Seaboard Comics superhero Tiger Man, published in 1975.
Geneticist Dr. Lancaster Hill is able to give himself the agility and strength of a tiger, and goes into business as a costumed hero in the black-and-white magazine Thrilling Adventure Stories. Violent and perhaps a little ahead of his time, Tiger Man rampaged through three issues of his own title before the short-lived publisher folded.
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