Homeward Bound
When McGregor got the Luke Cage assignment, he took on a city he knew and a character he didn’t. The Black Panther was an entirely different matter. Created by Lee and Kirby in Fantastic Four 52, T’Challa (the Panther’s real name) had been around since 1966, as had his home country, the (fictional) African nation of Wakanda. Indeed, the Black Panther and Wakanda were introduced at the same time, with both of them destabilizing any preconceptions Reed Richards and his team might have brought along with them. Thanks to the discovery of vibranium, a meteor-derived metal with the capacity to still any vibrations, Wakanda was scientifically advanced, and, as the sole source of the metal, fabulously wealthy. T’Challa was crowned while still a youth, when a European plunderer named Ulysses Klaw killed his father in a failed attempt on the country’s riches. As both king and clan chieftain, T’Challa assumed the ceremonial garb of the Black Panther, along with the enhanced abilities granted him by a special heart-shaped herb.
After just a few more guest appearances in various comics, T’Challa left Wakanda for America, where he joined the Avengers. Given the geography of the Marvel Universe (not to mention the demography of its audience), the change in continents was probably inevitable. The only way T’Challa was going to interact with the other Marvel characters was going to be if he were in their proximity. As a result, Wakanda remained underdeveloped as both a backdrop and a cultural milieu. Nor did T’Challa himself benefit greatly from his broader exposure. His team adventures left him with little to do, while his character remained flat.
By the time McGregor began chronicling the Panther’s adventures in Jungle Action (yes, that name is just as bad as it sounds), he did not exactly have a blank slate to work with, but he did have a great deal of latitude. For a few years, at least, the Black Panther was entirely at the disposal of McGregor and his artistic collaborators. Expectations were low. Jungle Action, a bimonthly book, was never a best seller. Over the course of the first extended storyline, McGregor had a relatively free hand (although he did have to patiently explain to his editors why a book set in an isolationist African country that had never been colonized had virtually no white characters).
Decades later, Reggie Hudlin and John Romita, Jr. would start their new volume of Black Panther comics with a storyline called “Who Is the Black Panther?”, but it was McGregor and his collaborators who endeavored to answer that question first. Rather than simply retell T’Challa’s origin story, or ease the reader in with a one-off, introductory tale, McGregor immediately embarked on a multipart storyline that is a contender for the title of Marvel’s first true “graphic novel.” "Panther’s Rage” ran from Jungle Action 6 through 17, with an epilogue in issue 18, quixotically counting on the continued readership of a struggling book about a character with a small fanbase patient enough to follow a story from September 1973 through November 1975. To be fair, the serialization of the story was sufficiently episodic for someone to pick it up in the middle; new antagonists were introduced in almost every issue, and any given individual battle got wrapped up by the issue’s end. [1] As with Killraven, it took some time for McGregor to get a permanent artist, but he was fortunate enough to have Rich Buckler for three issues and Gil Kane for one, before finally working with Billy Graham, whose nine issues of the intial storyline were the beginning of a collaboration that would last long after Jungle Action was canceled.
Perhaps a better implied title for McGregor’s Black Panther comics is not “Who Is the Black Panther?” But “Who Is the Black Panther for?” Jungle Action’s reintroduction of the Black Panther was also a reintroduction of Wakanda, to which T’Challa had just returned after a long absence with the Avengers in America. The Black Panther’s duties here are theoretically clear: he exists for Wakanda, and Wakanda is going to demand a great deal from him. The unfinished second storyline, “The Panther vs. the Klan,” brings him to the Georgia hometown of his girlfriend, Monica Lynne, where the Panther serves an entirely different purpose (and different constituency). [2] The Panther is central to each story, but the lens focusing on him varies.
In the days before the “graphic novel” came into vogue, common mainstream comics parlance was to call an extended, multiple-part story an “epic.” There are many features to such stories that make “epic” an apt term, from the larger-than-life scale of many of the overarching conflicts to the creation of a long story out of several individual battles (issues). But if we recall Mikhail Bakhtin’s opposition of the “epic” and the “novel” (with the latter much more concerned with individual subjectivity and the former keeping its “closed-off” characters at a distance), “epic” becomes a problem. The epic does not work as well with a human scale, nor is it a genre that typically lends itself fo introspection. In the case of “Panther’s Rage,” however, the epic designation has real merit. A story of long-delayed homecoming and a country on the verge of civil war, “Panther’s Rage” an idiosyncratic combination of The Iliad and The Odyssey that reverses their temporality. First the hero comes home (not to his faithful wife, but with his future fiancée), then the war begins. [3]
There’s a lot going on in Wakanda
With all of these epic and mythic structures as the backdrop (not to mention the political and palace intrigue that fuels the plot), pinning down the Panther’s subjectivity is a bit of a challenge. Like Luke Cage, T’Challa at times seems to be a pretext for the narrator to put his physical sensations of pain and peril into words, but without letting us see much of the Panther’s actual thoughts,. The Panther’s subjectivity is thus described or conveyed more than it is actually presented. His inner conflicts play themselves out through allegory, making the Panther’s Rage a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress. Thanks to McGregor’s fondness for hokey wordplay, T’Challa fights (among others) Venomn, Lord Karnaj, and Malice. The challenge’s to the Black Panther’s reign and to Wakanda’s prosperity are spelled right out in the villains’ names.
“Panther’s Rage” exploits the homology of king and country implicit in both these Greek epics, as well as their fundamental sense of cosmos (as above, with the gods, so below, with the humans). In T’Challa’s case, that means that the multiple competing demands on his time and attention (Wakanda, the outside world, Monica) play themselves out on the level of national politics, while the ongoing sense that the country is being torn apart is enacted again and again on the tortured body of Wakanda’s king. The combined threat and allure of breaking with the past is played out in three different father-son relations that end in (partial) orphanhood: the memory of T’Challa’s father T’Chaka that haunts the Panther’s rule; Killimonger’s bitterness, stemming at least in part from the unfair treatment and death of his own father, and the little boy, Kantu, whom T’Challa saves early in the saga, but who loses his own father, and eventually plays the deciding role in the physical conflict between the Black Panther and Killmonger.
Note
[1] Even so, this was an unusually high level of continuity. By comparison, during that same time-period, 27 issues of The Incredible Hulk (167-194) were scripted by four different writers (Steve Englehart, Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, and Len Wein); depending on how one counts them, these represented 19 different stories (although one should note the artistic consistency provided by Herber Trimpe as penciller for every single one of them).
[2] In the 1980s and 1990s, McGregor returned to the character two more times (though not to the KKK storylines, which had been wrapped up by others). In “Panther’s Quest” (1989), a 25-part story serialized in 8-page installments for a weekly anthology title, T’Challa goes to South Africa to find his long-lost mother, while in the four-part Panther’s Prey (1991), T’Challa brings Monica back to Wakanda with the intention of marrying her. Drawn by Gene Colan and Dwayne Turner respectively, they are an important part of McGregor’s work on the Black Panther, but are outside the scope of the present study.
[3] T'Challa and Monica finally get engaged in the McGregor-penned ministers Panther’s Prey (1991). They were supposed to get married in McGregor’s next Panther story. No follow-up was published, however, and when Christopher Priest brings Monica back for his run, she is embittered over T’Challa’s breaking of their engagement. McGregor has only written one more Black Panther story to date, a short piece in an anniversary issue, about T’Challa visiting a cancer-stricken Monica on her deathbed.