'When Three are called and stand as one...
As one they'll fight, their will be done...
For each is born anew... the Tiger's son!'
Yeahhh....it's not exactly In Brightest Day, In Blackest Night is it?
The Sons Of The Tiger should've been great, being as they were exploitation heaven, spun from whole cloth as if Bruce Lee, Jim Brown and John Saxon had all stepped out of Enter The Dragon to find themselves in their own six-fisted series in the back of Deadly Hands.
It all started well, with Dick Giordano doing the origin, but as time went on, the thiness of the characters became obvious: Angry black brother Abe Brown was ANGRY and BLACK, all the time, whitebread movie star Bob Diamond was shallow, vain and unlikeable, and placid and philosophising oriental Lin Sun was, well, placid and philosophising. The Sons were a collection of cliches rather than actual characters.
Even champion rescuer of flung-together concepts Bill Mantlo struggled with the team, putting them through a seemingly endless series of adventures against their ill-defined nemesis' The Silent Ones, and culminating in a gloriously wrong-headed cosmic showdown that made absolutely no sense whatsover for a strip about a group of street-level Kung Fu fighters.
However there was the odd good piece along the way, for instance there was a prison riot story, which though as fraught and over the top as Marvel got in the '70's, at least felt like the exploitation movie spin-off The Sons should've been.
And the semi-last episode, where Mantlo throws the towel in and lets The White Tiger take over the strip, is good too. There's a cameo from he and George, and even if Perez still hasn't quite got the hang of Kung Fu moves, preferring instead to ape Kirby, there's a sense that this is a breakup that actually matters, and a fight that genuinely means something. The team continued to make cameo appearances in their own strip, but the glory days were over, almost before they'd begun. It's a shame, as The Sons Of The Tiger should've been great, if they'd only stuck to their original concept, and for all that, I do still kind of like them, but more for what they could've been. How's how they broke up.
