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Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, [Roy Thomas, Don McGregor, Christopher J. Priest, Reginald Hudlin,] Joe Robert Cole, and Ryan Coogler, 2018 |
One thing that I missed when a pestilence descended upon the land and the school where I was teaching moved to distance learning was overhearing the chatter among my students before class started. One morning I heard one of my sophomores ask another, “What are we doing in history today?” “Watching Black Panther,” came the reply. Sophomore humanities courses were “cored”, meaning that the same set of students stayed together for both English and history; this was supposed to allow English and history teachers to coordinate their curricula. I had mentioned to this class’s history teacher that I was teaching Things Fall Apart, so I guess he figured that between the two of us we’d have both Nigeria and Wakanda covered.
I didn’t need to watch a movie to have Wakanda covered. In 1998 Marvel launched a Black Panther comic, and I liked the first few issues enough that I kept mentioning them as examples of what I was trying to do with my new interactive story Photopia. (I actually misremembered them as having influenced Photopia, but it turns out that that’s chronologically impossible.) This was not the first series starring the Black Panther, however, so let’s circle back to it. The Black Panther had debuted 32 years earlier, in Fantastic Four #52. The story goes that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby surveyed the superhero comics scene in 1966 and realized that, in Kirby’s words, “nobody was doing blacks”, which they viewed as a colossal oversight that had to be remedied posthaste. And you can’t say that they didn’t set out to create an A‑lister! The Black Panther was fast-tracked to take over Captain America’s spot on the Avengers, but in a way, that was one of the worst things that could have happened to him, because Avengers writer Roy Thomas thrust him into Cap’s role as the level-headed, low-powered acrobat among a bunch of hot-heads with real powers. But Stan and Jack had established the Panther as far more than that. Yes, he had superhuman athletic prowess, but they also established him as one of the world’s foremost intellects, with engineering expertise on par with that of Tony Stark. More to the point, he was King T’Challa, possessed of immense wealth and power as the monarch of the world’s most technologically advanced country, Wakanda. (Putting the most technologically advanced country in the MU on its poorest continent was the sort of twist Stan Lee loved.) To do what Roy Thomas did and turn T’Challa into a hand-to-hand fighter with a side gig as a Harlem schoolteacher… that’s like turning Reed Richards into Flatman.
When T’Challa was returned to Wakanda, it was not to restore him to the Lee/Kirby concept; rather, a newcomer to Marvel, Don McGregor, had complained about a series called Jungle Action, saying that its stories were about “white men and women saving Africans or being threatened by them” and that “it was a shame that in 1973 Marvel was printing these stories”. And so McGregor was assigned to write Jungle Action to see whether he could do any better. He could write anything he wanted, he was told, with the one restriction that his story had to be set in Africa. McGregor responded by writing a thirteen-part epic stretching over three years of publication time, widely regarded as sophisticated in that prose-heavy 1970s style, introducing Erik Killmonger as a new arch-nemesis for the Panther and reimagining Wakanda as a place with less Kirbytech and more, well, jungle action. And then, abruptly, the Kirbytech was back, as Jack Kirby himself returned to Marvel and took over both the art and writing chores on a relaunch of the Black Panther series, this time under the Panther’s own name. This first volume of Black Panther saw T’Challa joining up with a monocled dwarf named Mister Little (“Sizzling meteors!”) and a bellicose princess named Zanda (“Servile buffoon!”) in pursuit of a time machine called King Solomon’s Frog. Kirby drew everyone like he was still working on New Gods, and the whole thing was bananas. The series was quickly canceled, and that was pretty much it for the Black Panther for about twenty years. Oh, sure, he’d make cameos in other titles two or three times a year. He got a limited series in 1988, the second official volume of Black Panther; it wasn’t terrible, but it had so little reason to exist that today I can’t help but wonder whether it was published just to keep the trademark active or something. Eight years later, Marvel went bankrupt. As it emerged from bankruptcy a couple of years later, the company started up an imprint called Marvel Knights, farming out four of its secondary properties to a studio headed by Joe Quesada to see whether deviating from the Marvel house style might attract some new readers. One of those properties was the Black Panther. His series was to be written by Christopher J. Priest.
If you wanted to talk about comics online in the late 1990s, there was really only one place to go: Usenet. Sure, Altavista might have been able to dig up a web forum for you with five people posting on it, but Usenet had a critical mass of users that kept all the comics groups hopping, and those groups had attracted a fair number of professional comic book writers as well. Kurt Busiek hung out on rec.arts.comics.marvel.universe, for instance. So did Peter David. And so did a guy named Christopher J. Priest, though I wasn’t sure why. I’d vaguely heard of him, but only as a DC Comics writer; my understanding was that he was best known for his work with Milestone, a DC imprint whose mission was to introduce more African-American characters. But yeah—I’d followed Marvel Comics since 1983, and had never seen Priest’s name in any Marvel book I’d ever bought—not in the credits, not in the Bullpen Bulletins, nowhere. And then I saw a mention that Priest had in fact written a comic I owned: Power Man and Iron Fist #125, the last issue of the series, which had been a leveling-up experience for me as a kid—the dialogue in particular was more sophisticated than what I was getting in the other comics I was collecting at the time. (One character’s exit line to another: “Ho‑kay, Keating. Just remember the down side to playing hardball… if you get hit in the head, you get brain damage. Have a party.” This was not how the West Coast Avengers talked!) But, but, that comic hadn’t been written by this “Priest” guy—look, right there in the credits, it says “James C. Owsley”! And that’s when I did some poking around, and discovered that Christopher J. Priest and James C. Owsley were the same guy—he’d changed his name in 1993. And then came a post in which he claimed credit for another of my all-time favorite comics, Amazing Spider-Man Annual #20… which was credited to a “Ken McDonald”! It turned out that Marvel had a house rule that you couldn’t be the writer and editor on the same book, and since James C. Owsley was listed as the editor, he’d had to use a pseudonym for his script. So this guy was not only one of my favorite posters on the Usenet forum, but had apparently been two of my favorite writers back in my tween years! I quickly hit the comics shops and bought up as much of his past work as I could find, and it was great—and then I discovered his current series, Quantum and Woody, and it was even better. So I had high expectations for his Black Panther series—and he surpassed them. Yes, his reinvention of the character was interesting, but it was the plotting that really did it for me: the chronology was so mixed up that initially I didn’t even know what I was looking at as I read, but gradually I pieced together who the characters were, what the events I’d just witnessed meant, and soon I couldn’t imagine it any other way. The details had been related in exactly the right order for maximum effect. And it was hilarious! The story beats would have garnered big laughs on their own, but the captions narrated by new character Everett K. Ross—a sort of cross between Alex P. Keaton and Chandler Bing—took the comedy into the stratosphere. After the first four issues I spent the next several years referring to Christopher J. Priest as my favorite writer in any medium.
But let’s talk about that reinvention. It took twenty years for Priest’s vision to come to fruition, but right from the start, he maintained that the Black Panther didn’t have to be “the colorless, humorless, often clueless guy standing in the back row of the Avengers class picture”—he could be Marvel’s Batman. Batman was a billionaire able to whip up gadgets ranging from “batarangs” to Batplanes? T’Challa was, effectively, a multi-trillionaire, with the tech chops to build anything from a smartphone (nine years before smartphones appeared in the real world) to a fleet of battle cruisers capable of operating both underwater and in outer space. (He also had the chops to turn his ceremonial panther outfit into a streamlined version of Iron Man’s armor, which Priest’s version of the character promptly did.) Batman was a master strategist who, with the oft-cited “time to prepare”, could defeat literally anyone, even Superman? Over at Marvel, that too was who the Panther was, and Priest gave him contingency plans against Galactus. Yes, he could still “leap out of windows dressed in a kitty cat suit”, but Priest’s Panther was more likely to defeat the bad guys by making some phone calls: say, helping a struggling Latin American government with some agricultural logistics in order to get its economy back on track, thereby cutting off the funding of the enemy organization whose financial arm soon found itself caught in short positions. Oh, and Batman was a taciturn figure in a dark costume with ears and a cape? How was that not enough for Marvel to make the Black Panther its Batman long before Priest entered the picture? In any case, Priest spent four years doing his take on the character, and a small cult following loved it, but sales weren’t great, and he actually spent a year doing a radically different take imposed by editorial before the book was canceled. But a marker had been set down, and by 2018, yep—the Black Panther is now Marvel’s Batman. An A‑lister? Hell, he’s been leading the Avengers, running an intergalactic empire… and headlining a movie that made one point four billion goddamn dollars. Too bad the movie isn’t very good.
First, it is primarily a compendium of chaotic loudness-war action sequences. That is my chief criticism of all these MCU movies, of course, but I think that in this case the problem was compounded by the fact that the secondary entertainment on offer is the sheer spectacle of Wakanda. The comics I have read featuring Wakanda have generally juxtaposed high tech (Kirbytech in particular) with a (frequently dubious) take on traditional African garb and architecture, but haven’t really synthesized them. But those comics came out between 1966 and 2003. The volumes of Black Panther and its spinoff titles that have come out since then have never really grabbed me, so perhaps one of them nailed the Afrofuturist vision we see in the movie, and I just wasn’t aware of it. There was one called World of Wakanda—maybe that one was devoted to visuals that weave together a Rift Valley village with a green-tech utopia. Or maybe the aesthetic on display in the movie is original to the filmmakers. In any event, it looks… well, it looks like computer graphics. Ellie says that what she hates about modern movies is that they all look like they’re taking place on a hard drive, and normally I am not quite as sensitive to that sort of thing as she is, but the Black Panther movie looked strikingly fake to me. I am often oblivious to greenscreen, but here there were several scenes in which I found myself thinking, “Pfff—that background was pasted in, and not especially well.” So combine that with the loudness war, and, well, let me put it this way. A year or two back I kept seeing references to a videogame called Overwatch, so I pulled up a video of someone’s playthrough, and I just couldn’t make heads or tails of it. It was just indistinguishable streaks of color whipping around at lightning speed while ten thousand explosions went off every second. If you can process that, then I guess the action sequences in these movies might be for you. They are not for me.
So why watch them? To see comics I have loved, either by imprinting on them as a kid or admiring them as an adult, come to life. Sadly, these versions of the Black Panther characters bore little resemblance to the ones I had bonded with. Again, in Priest’s series, the engine that drove the series was that T’Challa was the tight-lipped mastermind who always looked to be overwhelmed by enemies on several fronts, but turned out to be five steps ahead of everyone; Ross wasn’t on T’Challa’s strategic level, but he was one of the few people smart enough to at least follow what the Panther was doing, and unlike the Panther, was enough of a motormouth to let us in on it. There’s nothing like that here. Movie Ross, thirty years older here than in the comics, is just some dopey ex-military guy, and we see no mind-melting master plan from Movie Panther. And that’s because, as is the case with so many of these movies, the filmmakers make the mistake of thinking that they have to start with the origin. As the movie gets underway, T’Challa hasn’t even been coronated as king. So he doesn’t have everything figured out—he’s just beginning to get acclimated to his new role. I guess the filmmakers thought this would make him more relatable. But he’s not supposed to be relatable! He’s supposed to be formidable. The relatable characters are the newcomers to the Panther’s world—in the Priest comics, that meant, first, Ross, and then Queen Divine Justice. Setting this movie at the start of T’Challa’s reign made it feel like the training-wheels version of the story.
As for that story—it’s the standard Killmonger arc, which goes, “Oh noes! The rightful king has been overthrown by a usurper!” This foregrounds one of the fundamental problems with the concept of the Black Panther: he’s supposed to be a hero, but he’s also a king, and monarchy is evil. To me, this is one of the great tensions at the heart of the modern Marvel pantheon. The fact that the Black Panther has in recent years been promoted to A‑lister status—Marvel’s Batman—means that the way he fits with the other A‑listers is as central to the MU as the way Superman and Batman fit together over at DC. And while Spider-Man may be the face of Marvel Comics out here in the real world, inside the Marvel Universe, the icon among icons is Captain America. When the biggest heroes in the MU get whisked off to Battleworld to fight in the Secret Wars, it takes less than a page for everyone to line up behind Cap. Kurt Busiek has written that “the greatest strength of the superhero genre” lies in “the ease with which superheroes can be used as metaphor, as symbol”, citing Captain America in particular as an example of “the self-image of a nation” personified. And the United States was founded on the notion that kings are bad. We fought a war to be free of them. Shouldn’t Captain America therefore have a fundamental problem with Wakanda in general and the Black Panther in particular? Shouldn’t an American audience? We are still agreed that kings are bad, right? Though I suppose that if I’m looking for a film that supports leadership granted by democratic election rather than by birthright, I probably shouldn’t be looking for it from a company whose corporate parent holds coronations for its princesses on American soil. Still, being prompted to root for the return of the rightful king felt gross, because there’s no such thing. “See, despotic power should be held by this guy because he’s the son of the previous king, not merely his nephew!” This in 2018. For fuck’s sake.
I suppose I should mention the philosophical dispute that accompanies the power struggle, as shallow as its treatment is—because, yeah, it’s kind of cheating to spend 134 minutes in your history class showing a movie on the basis it that mentions colonialism for about 45 seconds. The debate here is between T’Challa’s father T’Chaka, who maintained his predecessors’ policy of keeping Wakanda hidden from the world, and Killmonger, who demands that Wakanda flex its technological might to (a) establish hegemony over the world and (b) put people of African descent on top in countries outside Africa where they have faced discrimination. It is a thesis and antithesis begging for a synthesis, reflecting the ideology that in any dispute the truth must lie right in the middle. Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t! If one side says 2 + 2 = 4, and the other says 2 + 2 = 6, that doesn’t mean that the real solution must be 5. In any case, T’Challa decides to reveal Wakanda to the outside world, but to do so via positive outreach (specifically, gentrifying Oakland) rather than via conquest. Not only is this a pretty obvious resolution—the equivalent of wrapping up your adventure game by making the player decide among “1. IGNORE WOUNDED CHILD”, “2. KILL WOUNDED CHILD”, and “3. HELP WOUNDED CHILD”—but it doesn’t even have the drama that would come with the protagonist deciding that he’s been wrong and changing his mind. Training Wheels Panther wasn’t right or wrong, because he was too new to the throne to have settled upon any policies yet. “It’s my first day!”
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