The Factual Opinion

Fear Of A Black Panther: Part Three

This is the third in a multi-part look at "Panther's Rage". The first part was here at the Factual Opinion, the second at 4th Letter, written by David Brothers.

"Panther's Rage" Chapters 7-9
Originally Appeared in Jungle Action # 12-14
Written by Don McGregor
Art by Billy Graham, Klaus Janson, P. Craig Russell & Pablo Marcos
Published by Marvel Comics

As "Panther's Rage" begins its march towards conclusion, the separate chapters have a tendency to bleed together. Plot wise, they all follow a similar track: the Panther moves deeper into Wakanda's hinterlands, discovering truths about his country that he either didn't believe in, or was completely unaware of in the first place. Throughout the Panther's journey, his compatriots at home face their own, personal struggles. We'll get back to them, and that, later.

For now, let's talk about violence.



The basic plot of what T'Challa faces in the 7th through 9th chapters of "Panther's Rage" might most concisely be described as "Education Through Suffering". If you prefer your explanations with a bit less of what one might call "pithy bullshit", you've come to the wrong place, but you could also stick closely to the text on hand: as the Panther goes deeper into the unknown regions of his kingdom, he's forced into mortal combat with a continually heightened level of competition. He's ostensibly chasing Erik Killmonger, although you couldn't tell that from the way Erik laughs off his presence.

Instead, he fights. At first, it's against Erik--who bests him yet again, this time with the help of an acid-palmed associate named Sombre--but afterwords, it's against a pack of wolves. It isn't the first time that the Panther's fought animals in the story, it won't be the last, but it's these non-human battles where McGregor's smartest trick becomes apparent. There's limitations on how far the comic could've gone with the violence--I couldn't begin to specify what they are, but it was 1973 and we know that there were lines McGregor wouldn't have tried to cross--but if you examine the language and results of the battles that do occur, it's obvious how much more graphic all of the Panther's fights are against these non-human opponents. The three panels above depict the conclusions of each of those fights, and all three are lyrical journeys into flayed skin, claws ripping "into his chest and stomach", and a moment when "the panther's torn costume has become a dark cloth sponge that absorbs the warmth of his blood". Hell, when fighting the pack of wolves, T'Challa immediately spears one so that he can use its carcass as a weapon against the rest of the pack.

There's something at work here, and to get at it, we've got to take a look at something that might make you giggle.

There's no irony or humor in Don McGregor's descriptions of the Black Panther fighting a pack of hungry wolves, a bunch of albino demon gorillas, or even when he's up against a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That doesn't mean that it isn't funny, because it is funny, very much so. But it's not funny because it was intended to be, its funny because this is 2010, and having super-heroes fight dinosaurs is now considered something that's a bit quaint and archaic. That's not a criticism, exactly--well, not during the course of this paragraph. Super-hero comics have moved towards a sort of hyperbolic SWAT team realism and embraced a try-and-be-quirky conversationalist style because their readers and creators want them to be like that, and it's the height of foolishness to complain that super-hero comics shouldn't gear themselves towards whatever will please the group, considering how poorly they sell. They're almost always accidentally art, never by purpose--primarily products, designed to move, that's why there's always more next week. Their genius moments are rarer, and that's a good thing, otherwise you'd go broke chasing glory. Anyway, that's a one-off nothing, back to the point.

Snakes on a Plane.

Does it need further explanation? I'll try. See, if you're reading a super-hero comic that involves something on the magnitude of Hero Fights Dino, it's done with a wink nowadays, complete with a bloated solicitation that adopts a cringing "this is just between you and me pal, but The Hulk will be Taking Care of some Prehistoric Bizness, if you catch my drift", and of course, that's always followed by the requisite tweets from one of the creators the day of release that implies What A Bunch Of Gee Golly Craziness they were able to get past the suits down at the Corporate Frown Factory.

But it's Snakes on a Plane! You know it, they know it, anybody opening the comic knows it--it's that winking irony, the "we know you're a grown-up, but here's your chuckles anyway", it's the understated criticism of the act itself, as if there's some moral codicil that super-hero comics are graded against, and "fighting dinosaurs"--or giant albino demon gorilla tribes--is to be viewed as a lower grade of entertainment. (Specific examples of what people actually think of super-hero comics exist in abundance, but we're lacking in large consensus agreements; still, doesn't it seem that Grant Morrison's work in Batman RIP is generally viewed as being "smarter" than his "Batman fights Ninja Man-Bats" opener, despite the vastly more entertaining qualities inherent to the latter?)

How did this happen? That's a question I can't begin to answer--in part because I cannot, but more so that I simply do not care--but it's obvious that the attitude exists, laden as it is across every Avengers page where super-hero characters make fun of one another's costumes.

The thing is: we, readers, don't want the characters (or the creators) to be in on our dinosaur jokes. We'll tolerate it, sure, but at our core, we want them to take these things seriously, this fight that could never occur in their super-hero movies, so that we can enjoy it on both levels--the one where it matters to the story, and the one where it's just Fucking Ridiculous. The laugh is supposed to be ours, not shared in some digital salon with the creators in tow, seated amongst us on their marble slabs of authority. It's not a joke anymore, because we're all telling it together, and if there's only an audience, than we're not reading stories, we've drowned in sharing.

It's all a rub, so here's a payoff: there's nowhere else that these moments can work. Brett Ratner's a shitty action director, but it wasn't his fault that the "fastball special" looked crappy in the last X-Men film, it looked crappy because "realistic" comic book goofiness becomes a silly and strange thing that few people enjoy. Super-hero comic book characters aren't supposed to be like you and me (plus a gym), they're supposed to look like candy-colored explosions on paper, and when they don't--when they bend themselves into the contortions of realism that "mature readers" demand--they become hideously depressing beasts, inherently dopier than their gonzo counterparts. (At times, depression itself can work out its own gonzo advantage--witness the initial issues of Ed Brubaker's run on Captain America, where Steve Rogers is fastidiously portrayed as a depressive lunatic, shadow-boxing in his lonely Brooklyn warehouse of memory, or spend some time with Matthew Murdock, a character whose best stories are always built on a rock-solid foundation of Catholic-based self-laceration. But most of the time, the tact completely fails: examine the inability of everybody but Mark Millar (!) and Robert Downey Jr. to comprehend that being Iron Man might, despite what every current Marvel comic book keeps repeating, actually be fun.)

Is it a bit of a contradiction, what's being lambasted here? It shouldn't be, although the obtuse wording may make it so. It's actually pretty simple: in the decision to "grow up", super-hero comic books have tried to embrace a realism that their constituent parts--the fantasy, the costumes, the goof-shoes origins and stacks of cornball "history"--struggle against constantly. The discordant clamor of the two replaced the Serious Gravity of a dino punch-out with the winking gag, it replaced the screaming matches of expository soliloquies and "let's fox-a-trot over to that disco fire, Robin" with the hip-speak word deluge pages of a bunch of sub-Mamets, and it left the "Let's Get Radical" comics to those most inclined to understand its impact. It turned the silly parts serious, and it made fun of what it couldn't. (The success of Geoff Johns will always be in large part due to his ability to make his comics "matter" in terms of world comprehension, but there's something else noticeable about what he so frequently does: namely, that he seems to find nothing in the DC Universe to be the slightest bit funny.)

No matter--the reader has the advantage of being audience alone, no participation required. We don't have to fix this stuff, we just have to read it. Let's put it like this, and move on: Don McGregor was a hungry first-time Marvel writer when these stories came about. He'd left a secure job with far better pay to join the Marvel team, only to experience a dearth of editorial support and see his marriage collapse as a result. "Panther's Rage" and his work on Killraven were his attempts to prove his mettle at the company, this story a full-throated roar in hopes of getting the attention of readers. He put the character against a pack of wolves, then against massive white devil gorillas (catch that symbolism?) and then, finally, against an at-times terribly drawn T Rex. In the margins, his arch villain used crude oil to disrupt, corrupt, and ultimately capture the portions of Wakanda's natural world that T'Challa was too lazy to have ever known about. At home, the characters faced their own struggles, one against a swelling violence that eventually breaks into spousal abuse, the other against the terrors of an encroaching Western civilization, and two more in shared emotional combat with their own conflicting natures. Through it all, McGregor wrote long, copious sentences about the ever graphic damage a bunch of animals were doing to T'Challa, and at no point does he seem to have taken a breath and said "well, this is all a bit silly, isn't it?"

Not once. Instead, he plays it like some bastard version of Shakespeare, predating the soap-dripping mouth of Chris Claremont's Phoenix love poems completely, choosing instead to channel Robert E. Howard's barbarian violence through a Jack Kirby view of the world. If it didn't move as fast as it does, it might make one tone-deaf, and honestly, there's times when "Panther's Rage" hits the wall of monotony that jam-packed 70's comics always do when read in quick succession. If it reads strangely today, that's to its benefit--it shouldn't seem like something that just fell off the rack. It's nothing like what we have nowadays, because it does things differently. 

Maybe not better, but definitely, without a doubt, not worse.

-Tucker Stone, 2010

Fear Of A Black Panther: Part One

 

In 1973, Don McGregor and a scattershot team of artists began releasing a classic 13 part super-hero story that predated the "adult" stylings of Watchmen & the Dark Knight Returns by over a decade. "Panther's Rage" was a dark, dense American super-hero comic that featured African characters in every single one of its key roles, keeping with McGregor's plan that "all of the characters save one would be black".

One month ago, after over 36 years, the story was collected and reprinted for the first time.

This is the first in a multi-part look at that story. The second part is here.

"Panther's Rage" - Chapter 1-3
Originally Appeared in Jungle Action # 6-8, 1973
Written by Don McGregor
Art by Rich Buckler & Klaus Janson
Published by Marvel Comics

 "Why would an African chieftain decide to be a school teacher in Harlem?"
-Don McGregor, from his introduction to the Marvel Masterworks

Panther's Rage is a revenge story, about a man who comes home to find another man trying to steal his life, and what he decides to do about it. It's sort of about the selfishness of colonialism, and it's kind of about knowing (and honoring) one's heritage, but it's also about a guy who is really, really good at two things: being unwilling to die, and being a badass motherfucker. Depending on the way you define the second one, the first may be unnecessary.

(Let's back up for a second.)

Panther's Rage opens in media res, and the story of how the Panther got to this moment is only dealt out in blips of exposition--he was away, his country began falling apart, he's back now. By the fifth page, where the above panels come from, he's already failed. He managed to kick some ass (more on whose ass it was later), but he didn't do so quickly enough to save this old man, this old man who he didn't remember, this old man who, unlike quite a few others, still had faith in him.

Making the Panther a volunteer schoolteacher in Harlem wasn't an evil thing for the previous writer to do, but it was, as McGregor so pointedly acknowledges, a pretty stupid thing to do. T'Challa isn't an African-American looking for his place in the world, he's an African, all caps, but more importantly, he's the spiritual and political leader of an entire country. If he wants to dick around above the Upper West Side and teach poor kids, that's sweet, but what McGregor realized (immediately, and irritatedly), was that this effectively meant the character had abandoned Wakanda, and all of his people along with it. Whatever in-story reasons there were for that choice are never brought up in the comic--like the character, McGregor realized that no explanation would be acceptable. He left, they suffered. The "why" doesn't matter.

While the first chapter of "Panther's Rage" has to introduce most of the major players that the story eventually has, it isn't a slog of character introductions. Almost every character (with one notable exception) is introduced by way of side conversations surrounding specific plot developments. The Panther returns to his throne room, carrying the body of the old man above, and we meet W'Kabi (one of his leading warriors) and Monica (his current, American girlfriend). They have a brief conversation that defines the emotional place they're currently at (in so doing, it lays out the arc each of them will follow throughout), and then the Panther leaves, mistakingly thinking he can go and resolve the current situation overnight. On the way, we're introduced to yet another character, Taku, who will join W'Kabi and Monica in the spotlight for the rest of this 13 part story.

But there's somebody else that has to arrive. Somebody who--despite his infrequent appearances--will serve as the primary driver for the story that McGregor has to tell.

 
Erik Killmonger, the villain of "Panther's Rage" is one of the more complex villains that a super-hero comic can have, if you can forgive the outfit. His motives--to unseat T'Challa and take over as ruler of Wakanda--are standard stuff, as is the "we were close, once" relationship that McGregor includes. But here's the thing about Erik: he only exists because of the choices that Black Panther has made. The strength of the army he's raised to defeat his foe isn't dependent upon the super-powered asylum rejects that serve as his lieutenants, but on the very real feelings of abandonment and impotent contempt with which the Wakandan citizens have towards a leader who has been spending the better part of his time playing boyfriend to an American girl while dicking around in a land far from his own. Erik's methods are barbaric, murderous, they're just plain wrong, but his primary complaint--that T'Challa left his country behind--couldn't be more spot on. If the Panther had stayed at home, hell, if he'd even taken the time to institute some sense that he cared what happened while he was gone, Erik would've been another sole lunatic, decrying injustices that no sane person sees evidence for, standing in an empty hall, cursing at the moon. Instead, he found an army in search of a leader, and a war in search of a plan.

When they first meet, the Panther doesn't understand this. He doesn't understand Erik. Which is why, when Part One reaches its final page, he loses. He doesn't lose out of trickery, and he doesn't lose because of cheating. He goes up against Erik, he tries as hard as he can, and he fails.

These two pages come from Jungle Action # 7, serving as the recap and aftermath of the fight that concluded in issue 6. I'll get into another one of these title pages in more detail below, but for now: look at that prose! So ornate, so florid, so many BOLD WORDS and EXPLICIT DESCRIPTION. This isn't just about a man falling down a waterfall, this is about a man traveling to his to past to recall the lessons his father taught him, struggling for breath in the face of paralyzing terror, grasping to accept and yet still battling against the death that hungers for him, and all of it--while he may have only just realized it--because he wasn't good enough.

Having established the status quo, having introduced both reader and character to the villain he's created, the second part of "Panther's Rage" twists the knife. First, McGregor introduces the only white character that will appear in the series, an albino snake freak named Venomm, who will end up playing a key role in Taku's story, as well as the series proper. There's time taken out to give the villain a proper origin, (basically, he's Killer Croc with externalized reptiles) and then the Panther, who barely survived the waterfall and is now licking his wounds in his throne room, explains his past relationship with N'Jadaka, the man who has now become Erik Killmonger. Driving the stake of failure even further, Panther's revelation regarding Erik's past makes it clear that Wakanda didn't fail the man once, but twice--the first time being when no attempt was made to rescue former slaves captured during the raid depicted in the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four stories--and yet T'Challa still seems a bit unwilling to admit his own culpability in the villain's creation. (Later. Later!) From there, the comic plays to form; a new villain has arrived, the Black Panther has something to prove, and prove it he does. Venomm versus the Panther. This is how it ends.

There's a lot to like about Panther's fight with Venomm, the least of which that it's one of the rare fights in the comic where the battle is between two human beings, but as a whole, the four pages of snarling brutality that the action consists of are a bare shadow of the savagery to come. But the key moment of importance in the panels above aren't in what Black Panther is saying, they're in what he's looking at.

The fight that concludes above takes place on a ledge overlooking "An immense mining operation--bathed in eerie illuminosity, the valuable ore streaking through the stone walls radiating a bluish overcast". (Dig into that sentence. Purple as the costume!) This mining operation, run by Killmonger's men, worked by his "death regiments", has been operating under the Panther's watch, undiscovered by his own guards, right in the heart of his home. He had no idea. After returning to the country he abandoned, he failed to realize that the Kirby/Lee created mineral that gives Wakanda its economic power was being quietly stolen from underneath him. Even more than when he was easily bested by Killmonger, this is the moment when the depth of his failure is yanked from under his nose and shoved, forcibly, down his throat. When he lifts his eyes away from what that that ledge overlooks to make his promise, he's looking away not just in keeping with the stories melodramatic style, but because he can't make that that promise, or any like it, while staring at the extravagant magnitude of his blindness. He's whispering it because he knows that he can't live up to anything quite yet--based off what the next issue depicts, his next move after what you see above was to sneak out of the cave without capturing or shutting down the operation--and he's whispering it because he's not sure that he will ever be capable of living up to a promise again.

This is what happens when you walk away, the villains keep saying. This is why your friends stare at the girlfriend you've brought into your home with bewildered disgust. "You left us behind, and everything fell apart." they say. "You can blame us if you want..."

But it's obvious where the failure lies.

While all of the chapters of Panther's Rage have great title pages, the one above that opens Jungle Action # 8 is undoubtably the most inventive. Everything that takes place in the story--the Panther's exercises on the palace grounds, the appearance and initial attack by new villian "Malice"--it's all laid out in these two pages, hiding amongst the letters that title the story. I'd like to avoid the "this is better than that" comparisons as much as possible, but something like this forces my hand: nobody does title pages like this anymore. It's a masterful introduction to the story of Malice's attack on the castle, far more interesting than it would have been to just tack the words above similar drawings. Beyond that, it's fluid, musical comics, timed out to keep pace with the drums of the ritual depicted, a brilliant piece of "only in comics" extravagance in keeping with the no-whimsy-here attitude that pulses throughout.

Following the revelations of the last issue, T'Challa has returned to his palace, where he has begun the "rituals" that will grant him his "sacred Panther powers". It's all hogwash, of course--old medicinal stuff that supposedly gives the character greater strength, faster healing abilities--but even if it's not, the actual motive is what matters. What matters is that the character is returning; he's embracing the generations of heritage that he had left behind during his absence. These rituals--"boiling juice extracts", uneven, unrelenting combat, immense physical pain--are what his father and his people have done since Wakanda's inception. Even the characters most in doubt of T'Challa's dedication seem impressed, and that's exactly why he's doing it. He tried to go to war alone already, and he failed. But if he's going to restore the glory of serving him--and that's what the Wakandans are, his subjects, born to follow--then he has to prove to them that he deserves their faith. It's the Panther legacy that's kept them around, but the stories are no longer enough. They need something more, they need proof, and this archaic violence is the only acceptable option.

And yet, again, the degraded state of Wakanda is on display. Malice--the female villain depicted in the letters above--easily sneaks past the palace security, making her way to the castle jail. There, she eavesdrops on the gentle Taku as he attempts to make some kind of peace with the imprisoned Venomm. As Taku's quiet openheartedness begins to tear at the shields the bitter albino lives behind, his rescuer finds herself more and more disgusted. This is who she's here to save? "Some palace handmaiden made soft by palace intrigues"? As her revulsion grows, outside, the Panther rekindles the same feeling in his people.

Set upon during the heart of of the ceremony by the American girlfriend he brought with him, T'Challa--in full view of the very men this ritual was intended to win back--abandons his heritage yet again. After Monica interrupts what she views as "torture", T'Challa walks away, ending the ceremony prematurely. As he leaves, one of the older men, a man whose family has passed down these rituals for generations, roars at him, "you must not forget your responsibilities!"  To which T'Challa responds "Not even sleep allows me that comfort." 

But it does, doesn't it? The ritual is important, his country is important, defeating Killmonger matters--as long as his out-of-town girlfriend isn't upset.

Monica's role in Panther's Rage is a necessary one, but that doesn't make it particularly enjoyable. Outside of this story, she's a strong, independent woman, deserving of respect from the man she's currently seeing, but inside it, she's the physical representation of the choices that T'Challa has made to the betrayed people who live in Wakanda, the choices that resulted in the death and horror that has beset their country. That doesn't make what happened in Wakanda her fault--it isn't, not in the slightest--but it does make her presence, at times, difficult to swallow. She's a harpy, she's a fool, she's selfish, and she's stubborn, and while all of that is in keeping with what she represents, both in the story and in the way anyone might behave if everything they knew and understood was uprooted, transplanted around the world, and then told to accept, she's still an obvious Ugly American stereotype. She exists so that the Panther can struggle against his desire to be an individual (a role where he gets to be with her, romantically, with no other pressing concern) and his obligation to rule, which is a role that allows no time for the nurturing and even-handed fairness he abandons the ceremony to provide her with. He's her boyfriend, sure, but he's also the set-upon god and ruler of a country that desperately needs him, and in that struggle, there's only one acceptable choice.

The battle that ensues when T'Challa returns to the castle is a brief one, expertly depicted by Rich Buckler, and while it ends abruptly, with Malice easily escaping out of a castle window, there's a brilliantly nasty scene that foretells the coming tragedy that will strike W'Kabi.

And like that, Part Three ends. The worst, as any good melodrama demands, is yet to come.

Friend?

Things are going to get far, far worse.

-Tucker Stone, 2010