Fortunately, not all of Marvel's books have the demented quantity of adverts.  A few have been packaged with sanity.  One of them is White Tiger #1, which somehow ducked the bullet and came out with a mere eight pages of advertising.  Not surprisingly, the result is a comic you can actually read.  How novel.

Marvel have promoted this book mainly on the strength of novelist Tamora Pierce, who writes fantasy books for young adults.  In fact, this book is co-credited to Pierce and her husband Timothy Liebe, who doesn't normally get credited on her work and is presumably chipping in a little more than usual.  Still, it's a smoothly readable first issue, however the workload was broken down.

As a fantasy author, Pierce isn't the most obvious choice to write a White Tiger series - an urban superhero spun off from Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev's Daredevil.  The original White Tiger was one of those short-lived kung fu heroes from the 1970s.  Bendis introduced FBI agent Angela del Toro as his niece who inherited his magic martial arts medallion and became the new White Tiger.  Then he pretty much forgot about her.

White Tiger always struck me as a character who was somewhat out of place in Bendis and Maleev's Daredevil.  While Bendis likes to think, sometimes with justification, that he's developing the superhero genre for a new era, much of his Daredevil run is really a crime book with superhero trappings.  There's some play on the idea of Daredevil's dual identity, but you could do a similar idea with any sort of local vigilante.  It simply doesn't feel like a superhero book, or at least not a superhero book which is interesting in the usual trappings.  So there's something a bit out of place when you have a character arc about Angela del Toro becoming a superhero, putting on a costume and all that jazz.  It feels like it belongs in a different title.

Perhaps it's a good thing, then, that they've given her a solo book to run with the concept of a novice superhero, in a different stylistic environment.  Of course, the notion of a novice superhero isn't original; Marvel's current version is Gravity, who fills the role quite nicely.  White Tiger belongs more in the urban niche... but then, if anything this feels like a traditional superhero book compared to Daredevil, rather than anything especially urban.

They may have been aiming for something differnet.  Artist Phil Briones has mentioned in an interview that his editor asked him to try for gritty and hyper-realistic to match the spirit of Daredevil.  What they've ended up with is something straightforward, but far from gritty or hyper-realistic.  It's done perfectly well, but you couldn't say it has much in common with the parent book.  If anything, this feels like a much more conventional superhero title.

(Incidentally, Briones is French, and he's usually credited as Philippe Briones.  "Phil", of course, sounds a lot less foreign.  Brazilian artists do this all the time - for example, Roger Cruz's real name is Rogerio de la Cruz Kuroda, Mike Deodato is actually Deodato Taumaturgo Borges Filho, and Joe Bennett is really Benedito Jose Nascimento.  Isn't there something slightly uncomfortable about this?  I suppose it's all in the proud tradition of Jewish creators like Lee and Kirby changing their names, but then again, maybe I don't want to think too closely about the implications of that parallel.)

Anyway... it's an eminently solid comic, telling a decent story about an inexperienced superhero in entirely acceptable fashion.  There's nothing wrong with it.  But it's not terribly memorable, and if anything it's one of the more "house style" comics I've read in the last few years - especially when you consider Marvel don't really have a house style any more.  It's perfectly alright.  It just doesn't have much identity of its own, and a new character really needs one. 

Rating: B

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