"Panther's Rage" is about T'Challa's failure as a leader

February 16, 2018 1:14 PM

Making the Panther a volunteer schoolteacher in Harlem wasn't an evil thing for the previous writer to do, but it was, as McGregor so pointedly acknowledges, a pretty stupid thing to do. T'Challa isn't an African-American looking for his place in the world, he's an African, all caps, and more importantly, he's the spiritual and political leader of an entire country. If he wants to dick around above the Upper West Side and teach poor kids, that's sweet, but what McGregor realized (immediately, and irritably), was that this effectively meant the character had abandoned Wakanda and all of his people along with it.

David Brothers & Tucker Stone write about Don McGregor's classic "Panther's Rage" for The Comics Journal.

"Panther's Rage" ran in Jungle Action, which started out as a reprint zine filled with the kind of cheap Tarzan knockoffs Marvel turned out by the dozens in the 1940ties. As was often the case with seventies Marvel titles, especially third tier ones like this, McGregor had to work with a quickly changing roster of artists. Among which was Marvel's first African-American artist, Billy Graham:

Graham can flipflop from Kirby sci-fi to hard realism between panels, and manages to make it all look cohesive. Embracing lovers, a broken marriage, a desperate run, and a little boy getting caught crying by the bank of a river all look exactly as they should.

He uses scale to great effect, he draws detailed backgrounds, his people look like actual people, his black people look like black people, and Kantu in particular is that kind of awkward and gangly mess of arms and legs that kids tend to be.

Parts of the article are drawn from a 2010 Tucker Stone post about "Panther's Rage".

posted by MartinWisse (11 comments total)

Vulture: How an Untested Young Comics Writer Revolutionized Black Panther
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:23 PM on February 16, 2018

Pretty stunning work. And this storyline is available again? It looks remarkable!
posted by rocketman at 3:54 PM on February 16, 2018

It's been available as a Comixology/Kindle e-trade for a while now, but no idea about the paperback version.
posted by kewb at 4:51 PM on February 16, 2018

David Brothers is great. If you're on Twitter and you're not already following him I highly suggest it.
posted by Artw at 5:04 PM on February 16, 2018 [1 favorite]

Is this where I can ask all my dumb Black Panther questions? The article made me go look and T'Challa turns up in comics months before the Black Panthers are formed according to wiki in October. Were they already well known enough pre-incorporation for comic book folks to have heard of them, or is it coincidence?
posted by Iteki at 5:01 AM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

It was a coincidence. There’s virtually no chance that Jack Kirby and Stan Lee—two middle aged Jews in New York City—would have been clued in to what was happening on the street in inner-city Oakland.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 10:10 AM on February 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

This was a pretty good read.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:07 AM on February 17, 2018

Is this where I can ask all my dumb Black Panther questions?

The 761st Tank Battalion aka the Black Panthers were a famous and feared all-black unit in WWII. Even racist old Patton loved the hell out of them - they moved quick and hit hard, and their motto was "Come Out Fighting!" I have to believe they had some hand in Kirby and Lee's character name. Not as certain about the Black Panther Party's choice of name.
posted by Slap*Happy at 12:38 PM on February 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

Relatedly, we have this profile of the issue and McGregor in Vulture: “How an Untested Young Comics Writer Revolutionized Black Panther”

That article links to this introduction McGregor wrote for the thirtieth anniversary of Sabre. It wanters a bit but has some interesting tidbits; an assertion that Marvel was planning for him to fail and being relegated to the back office, and that Taku and Venomm were gay in his original scripts but he cut the content because it’d have been impossible to run at the time, along with all the rest.

And of course that article has led me to this immense interview with McGregor in 2013 about Sabre that I really don’t have time to read but might be right up other people in this thread’s alley.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:55 PM on February 17, 2018

I had never heard of Don McGregor before reading Christopher Priest's recent post about the movie, in which he gives McGregor the lion's share of the credit for the original worldbuilding of Wakanda itself, and he's someone who would know (on a side note, his review is spoiler-free assuming you've seen the trailers, and well worth reading).
posted by Wandering Idiot at 8:39 PM on February 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Total Payment: $168
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:38 AM on March 6, 2018