Black Panther in the 1990s
By the late 90s, the Black Panther series hadn’t seen a full on-going series since the 1970s. Between that time, there were a few limited series in the 80s and 90s, but not much else. T’Challa as a character was being under utilized this entire time.
By 1998, Marvel had just underwent bankruptcy protection and was looking for ways to shake up their publishing line. They needed some hits real bad. Taking a page from the semi-successful Heroes Reborn run, Marvel decided to outsource some of their properties to other comics creators to see what they could do to bring some new life to some of their characters. They chose Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Event Comics. They were given Black Panther, the Punisher, Daredevil and the Inhumans. These books were published under a brand new imprint called Marvel Knights. This also brought in a new crop of writers and artists who either hadn’t or had very little experience working with Marvel in the past.
You had Gath Ennis, Steve Dillon, Brian Michael Bendis, movie director Kevin Smith, and many others.
On Black Panther, the writer they chose was Christopher Priest, aka Jim Owsley (or just Priest on occasions). Before he changed his name, Owsley had been working at Marvel since the late 1970s, mostly working as an editor on books like Conan the Barbarian. Some of his early writing gigs were on the Falcon and Power Man and Iron Fist. Over at DC he did work on Green Lantern. He was involved in editing Impact Comics and was deeply involved with Milestone Media, an all Black comic publisher. Their Milestone universe became an imprint over at DC Comics.
Priest was a Black voice in an industry that — at the time — was prominently white. However, I don’t feel that he really got to give his stories a Black voice until after his association with Milestone. In the middle of the 90s comic boom here was an imprint that spoke to Black readers and gave them actual representation in the medium. It did pretty well considering it was published in a sea of new publishers, imprints, and fictional universes that came out of the speculator bubble of the 90s.
When he was given the assignment to write Black Panther for Marvel Knights it was a pretty big deal. This was a first time that a Black character from Africa was going to be written by a Black writer. It’s crazy to me that it took Marvel almost 40 god damn years to do that, but those were the times I suppose. Priest’s work on Black Panther has been foundational. Priest would go in to say in the letter pages in issue #12 that the series wasn’t about race. However, it kind of was. At least in the sense that Priest added an authenticity to the African lore that permeates the T’Challa and his world. Prior to this, Lee and Kirby’s Panther was steeped in the stereotypes of “white savior” jungle movies of the 1950s and early 60s. While writer Don McGregor treated the character with respect and did a very good job presenting Africa authentically, it was still another white writer.
Which is not to say a white person can’t write Black Panther, hell that’s pretty much all who touched the character for decades prior to Priest’s run on the book. Getting a Black writer to work on the character hits different. A white writer is only going to be able to do his best guess as to how to write about the Black experience. A Black writer has lived it.
One thing that Priest wasn’t shy about was addressing Black stereotypes in Black Panther, this was usually done through the foil of character Everett Ross, T’Challa’s very white milquetoast US liaison. Apparently at the time that this series was published there was a bit of a backlash regarding the use of stereotypes leading to Priest (in issue #12 again) to have to remind readers he himself is Black. Which I wanted to say is a weird thing he’d have to do, but then again, even in 1999 people didn’t research shit. Google was a thing back then FFS. But when it comes to the outrage machine, preconceptions are king.
That all said, as a white guy myself, I’m not going to wade into how Priest chose to deal with race, stereotypes, and other issues in the pages of this book. Not my place. I haven’t lived that experience so I’m not going to weigh in on what Priest chose to write about and how.
What I can say is that this series is fucking excellent. It’s a fun story to read. While the Black Panther is reserved and serious, the narrative of the series manages to be light and playful even when the stakes are high. The first major arc of the series is all about a villain named Achebe staging a coup of Wakanda and taking over the country while the Black Panther is exiled in America. Despite the very serious subject matter, there is still time for jokes and some fun. It relieves some of the tension as the story develops. At the same time, it does a complete 360 on you where you go in thinking T’Challa is being naive about literally everything going on around him to discovering that the dude was playing fucking 4D chess with everyone. It’s a masterful first arc.
Priest’s run on Black Panther also introduced concepts and characters that have been foundational not only to the comic book, but also became the blueprint for the Marvel Studio films Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Characters and concepts that he created, character who breath authenticity and real African culture into the franchise. It’s hard to think of a Black Panther comic without the Dora Milaje, Zuri, or Queen Ramonda. These characters have only been around for a little over 20 years but they feel like they’ve always been there. Hell, even Everett Ross feels that way for that matter.
I think that’s one of the important things that Priest brought to the table: A strong supporting cast. Something that was severely lacking in past Black Panther books. To date, there had only been one recurring character that really stuck, Monica Lynn. The rest of the Black Panther cast was usually a revolving door of Wakandans with silly names whose recurrence depended on who was writing the character at the time. I also feel that there wasn’t much effort to create lasting characters because past writers didn’t have much knowledge of African culture. It’s hard to create a convincing Wakandan if you don’t breath an air of authenticity in to the character. Most of these writers only had time to focus on the Black Panther himself.
The other thing about the Black Panther mythos is that Wakanda itself is a character. It’s got history, it has customs, culture. While someone writers, notably McGregor, did some world building when it came to Wakanda, I don’t feel it was enough to really make the place feel real. Sure, Wakanda is a fictional place, it doesn’t exist, but it’s an allegory for real place in Africa. If you were to compare it to say DC Comics’ various fictional cities — Metropolis, Gotham City, and the like — Wakanda was a place, but it wasn’t as developed. Metropolis and Gotham may be fictional cities, but there is so much lore surrounding both that there is not only a sense of geography, but there are landmarks, a history, things that make these places seem almost real. Sure, that took decades of world building, but I’d argue that writers were always eager to build on those fictional places and explore their history. Wakanda not as much. Priest didn’t start expanding on Wakandan lore, but he certainly got the ball rolling to deeply explore and expand upon what was already there. To the point where Wakanda the nation has gotten it’s own series as I write about this. The place is endlessly fascinating and there is so much story telling potential that expands beyond T’Challa and the Black Panthers, ripe for exploration.
While the series started off under the Marvel Knights imprint, the book was moved to the mainline publishing arm starting with issue #13. In his write up in the letter pages of issues #12, Priest said that it was so the Marvel Knights editorial could focus on other things as Black Panther was doing fine on its own. Indeed, when you look at the slate of books for the year 2000 and onwards, the Marvel Knights imprint was going to pump out a lot more books, mostly limited series, but still quite a lot for such a small team. Maybe there was more to it than that, but as is often the case trying to find information on this era of comics is kind of hard to come by.
Priest’s run on Black Panther is unequivocally the starting off point for anyone who wants to learn more about this character. While I can appreciate some aspects of what was written about the character before 1998, it pales in comparison to what Priest and the team of artists he worked with bring to the table. Yes, even better than Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s interpretation of the character.
Speaking of the artists on this book, it features some of the best. The first four issues are lovingly drawn by Mark Texeira, who I am not usually a fan of. Mostly because the majority of his work for Marvel that I’ve seen was from the 90s and he drew his character with these weird impossibly wide triangular torsos that never looked good to me. Here though, Texeira refines his work, tones down the swollness of the characters and delivers some of his cleanest work I’ve ever seen. You have Vince Evans on issue #5, retelling the Black Panther’s origin and recontextualizing it for the era — something that will become a bit of a recurring issue when comes to the Black Panther — all be it the least contradictory reimagining. Joe Jusko beautifully rendered issues #6-8. Issue #8 is quite a treat because Jusko does a flashback portion of the story that is done in the Jack Kirby style that is a perfect imitation. The next two issues were drawn by Mike Manley which, not going to lie, is not the best addition to this run. A little too cartoony compared to the artists he’s bookended between. It’s kind of a jarring change in visual composition that it’s pretty distracting to read. No more is this apparent when you look at issues #11 and 12 which were drawn by the ever talented Mark Bright. Ending things off for the decade was artist Sal Velluto, who would become the regular artist for nearly 40 issues of the title moving forward. I’ll talk about him in more depth when I get around to indexing the Black Panther comics of the 2000s, whenever that’ll be.
Anyway, if you haven’t read this volume of Black Panther, do yourself a favor and correct that as soon as possible.
