October 1965: The Truncated Trial of Tiger Boy

Sometimes you wonder what on earth they were thinking.

Harvey Comics cover-featured a new superhero, Tiger Boy, in Unearthly Spectaculars 1 (Oct. 1965). But inside, all we got of him was a five-page story called Will Power that seemed as if it was left over inventory from some defunct fantasy anthology title.

Written by Otto Binder and illustrated by Doug Wildey, the tale introduced us to Paul Canfield, a teenager who finds he possesses seemingly omnipotent psychic and transformational powers. But when he defiantly displays them to his parents, they’re unimpressed. The whole family turns out to be political refugees from Jupiter, something they’d never told him.

Tiger Boy’s next trick was to vanish for a year.

He reappeared in Unearthly Spectacular 2 (Dec. 1966) in another five-page story, this one illustrated by the ever-impressive Gil Kane. 

Having learned to loathe humanity in the interim, Paul nevertheless deploys a rapid-fire variety of forms — Tiger Boy, Steel Man, Rubberman — to capture bank robbers.

Back home, his parents tell him that the humans he hates aren’t all bad, and that he should use his powers to help them. But they also warn him that he has a sister who wandered away when their spacecraft crashed, and that if he should ever encounter her while he’s in one of his special forms, both of them will be destroyed. 

Talk about a depressing family reunion.

Tiger Boy never appeared again. A total of 10 pages spread out over a year is hardly an auspicious launch pad for a new superhero.

“With the exception of a few Black Cat reprints in the early 1960s, Harvey Comics, which mostly stuck to its tried-and-true ‘kid with quirk’ formula (e.g., Wendy, Little Dot), was a late entrant into that decade’s superhero trend,” noted comics historian Don Markstein. “When the company did embrace it, in 1966, it was with a plethora of short-lived titles that stands today as an oddball blip in the medium’s history.”