Don McGregor

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

After Don McGregor's Black Panther run from Jungle Action was cancelled back in 1976, he actually got invited back two more times: he did a story called Panther's Quest published in Marvel Comics Presents in 1989 and a four-issue prestige miniseries called Panther's Prey in 1991. This "Epic Collection" collects both of them, along with five short Black Panther tales by other creators from the same era.

Panther's Quest sends the Black Panther into South Africa in order to find his mother, missing since childhood. Sure, we did apartheid in a thinly fictionalized version of South Africa in the immediate previous Black Panther storyline, but why not do it again in the real place? This story ran twenty-five biweekly installments of (usually) eight pages... and it is interminable. Like, eight pages will go by and all that's happened is Black Panther has punched a guy. One thing I liked about McGregor's Panther's Rage was how it really made you feel the difficulty of what the Black Panther did, but this goes too far with it, because everything is immensely difficult, everything is enormously slowed down, it never feels like we're getting anywhere, being crushed under the weight of McGregor's enormously wordy style. Being set in South Africa means we again lose the worldbuilding that made Panther's Rage so interesting, too. It has it moments, including some nice side characters in South Africa, but ultimately, a tedious slog with little to say.

Panther's Prey almost has the opposite problem: this is made up of four forty-page installments and is all over the place. Wakanda is modernizing, connecting with the outside world more—this is nicely demonstrated by the appearance of a food court selling pizza. But with the benefits of connecting to the outside world also come the downsides, and someone is smuggling crack into Wakanda and vibranium out... using an army of cyborg pterodactyls, of course! The story follows this main storyline, but also T'Challa's mother acclimating to life in Wakanda, what Monica Lynne's been up to in the U.S. since we last saw her in Jungle Action (McGregor ignores her later appearances), the guy organizing the drug smuggling operation, and updates to various members of Black Panther's Wakandan supporting cast. There's a lot of nice moments here but overall not much actually seems to happen despite the fact the story runs over one hundred and fifty pages. Black Panther doesn't even meet the villain until about ten pages from the end, and beats him by luck in about six seconds. And in the end, crack is still a problem in Wakanda! Way to cheer me up, McGregor.

The other stories here are nice to have for completism's sake, but not very memorable.

What's interesting to me reading Black Panther in terms of publication chronology is to see the development of the character I know from the movies. His mother, Raimonda, debuted in this volume, but she's not the imperious ruler of screen, but a South African woman romanced by T'Challa's father who returned to her homeland after her husband died. Many elements of the mythos have yet to appear at all. There's also still no sense of cohesion: McGregor doesn't really acknowledge that anyone used the character other than him since 1976. (Can't imagine why the "Black Musketeers" don't come up in discussions of T'Challa's family!)… (more)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

This is the Black Panther's first ongoing series, a run in Jungle Action by Don McGregor, which is made up of two stories: Panther's Rage and The Panther vs. the Klan! The first story takes T'Challa back to Wakanda after his sojourn to America, along with his girlfriend Monica, who I guess must be from some Avengers stories I haven't read. Panther's Rage inspired the Black Panther movie, as it's about an attempt by Erik Killmonger to depose T'Challa from the throne of Wakanda.

At the same time he wrote this, Don McGregor was also writing Killraven, of which I am a big fan, and this is very similar: wordy and portentous, perhaps verging into pretentious, with a large emphasis on character and theme. Like Killraven, it has a lot of the trappings of superhero comics, but it is not one. Panther's Rage is a war comic, a war in a nation, a war in a people, and a war in one man. He fights grotesque villains working for Killmonger, but it's more like a fever dream at times, surreal battles that are really there to illuminate what's happening inside T'Challa

I can't say I always liked it. It gets a bit repetitive at times, and the ongoing plot doesn't move very quickly. Sometimes there were just so many words. The series had eleven different letterers across its eighteen issues, and I can see why: why do more than two issues of this when you can go letter some Captain America comic with half the dialogue and none of the narration? But Billy Graham and Rich Buckler capture power in their layouts and art, and sometimes the thing whole rises to poetry.

McGregor builds up a recurring cast around T'Challa, and I look forward to seeing if future writers keep these people's lives going. Indeed, if the story has a single success, it's in convincing you that though Wakanda is a strange place, it is a real place. It is a country with people and history and geography and conflict. I suspect that will be its legacy.

This makes it all the more inexplicable that for its second arc, McGregor had T'Challa go to the American South with Monica to investigate the apparent suicide of her sister. The Ku Klux Klan plays a big role, as does a not-the-KKK organization, the Dragon Clan. Gone are all the characters and history he had so painstakingly built up; T'Challa himself suddenly feels less plausible as he for some reason never takes off his Black Panther outfit. There are still fun parts—Monica's solitaire-obsessed father—and interesting imagery, but the investigation moves at a crawl, and nothing has really happened at the point where the story suddenly ends because the book was cancelled for low sales.

Don McGregor and his collaborators would be soon replaced by Jack Kirby. (Somewhat weirdly, Marvel would actually get another writer and artist to finish the Klan storyline in three issues of Marvel Premiere, over three years after Jungle Action was cancelled. Like, why? If it wasn't worth doing at the time, why was it worth doing years later? I cannot imagine a comics publisher nicely capping off a mediocre run like this now. Those issues of Marvel Premiere are in another Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther volume, but alas that one is not on Hoopla.)… (more)