★★★☆☆ The freedom of low expectations

Black Panther (Penguin Classics Marvel Collection)

Don McGregor, Rich Buckler (illustrator), Billy Graham(Illusitator), Stan Lee, Jack Kirby(illustrator), Ben Saunders (Series Editor)

The Marvel character Black Panther came into existence in 1966, in two issues of Fantasic Four. Those two issues (written by Stan Lee and drawn by Jack Kirby) are included in this collection, and not to put too fine a point on it, they're stupid. But they introduced T'Challa, King of Wakanda, a fictional technologically advanced African nation.

He was lying around, waiting to be used when in 1973 a new author, Don McGregor, voiced a complaint about the Marvel comic Jungle Action, which he describes as "a collection of jungle genre comics from the 1950s, mostly detailing white men and women saving Africans or being threatened by them." He thought it was a shame that Marvel was printing such Dreck in 1973 and said so. It is a Universal Truth that if you complain about something, you own it.

Thus McGregor was given Jungle Action, in the expectation that the title would fail.

McGregor decided to write a series, "Panther's Rage", set in Wakanda in which almost all the characters were black. This was Not Done at the time, and he knew it. He knew that if he told editorial about his plans, he would be told "No". But he also knew that no one was paying a lot of attention to him. He gambled that he could get away with it before anyone got around to telling him to stop. He managed to find artists, most importantly Billy Graham , who stood behind what he was trying to do. Eventually the fan letters saved him.

Jungle Action did eventually die. McGregor's personal life became complicated and he had to give it up. But the Black Panther lived, and even today Black Panther and Wakanda are a part of the Marvel Universe.

Now, as for the actual content, I am sorry to say I did not love it. McGregor is no Ta-Nehisi Coates. McGregor's writing style is florid, and quickly gets old. The story of "Panther's Rage" is a sort of Vision Quest that goes on far too long. Still, "Panther's Rage" is the source material for the much better Ryan Coogler film and deserves respect for that.

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