The Evolution of Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ (2024)

The most tattooable image of Huey P. Newton was taken in 1967, when the cofounder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was about 25 years old. The photo, shot by Blair Stapp, finds Newton sitting on a round wicker chair, a beret on his head, a black leather duster on his back, a spear and a rifle in either hand. It is an image that projects strength and elicits feelings of pride. And when the first official poster for Marvel’s Black Panther was released, the resemblance was tough to miss:

io9

This only makes sense for a movie titled Black Panther, with a majorly black cast and a black director, arriving during Black History Month. The last leg of the promotional tour brought Michael B. Jordan to the cover of British GQ, glowering in pensive black and white styled in … a beret and a leather duster. The cover was lauded as a celebration of the legacy of the Black Panther party as an organization that inspired the black community to dignify and protect itself.

The less sexy way to read Jordan’s look for the GQ cover was as an advertisement. Like the dubious GQ cover, the story of the Marvel property itself has often been one of its capital-I Importance clashing with the fact of its profitability. The same could be said of almost every other piece of politicized culture we consume, from Moonlight to Star Wars to Kendrick Lamar. But the relationship between Black Panther, as a franchise, and the cachet of the real-world imagery on which it trades, is a complicated one. It’s also one that’s changed a lot since the character was introduced to the reading public 52 years ago. At times like this, it’s worth tracing the character’s origins. His alter ego was almost the Coal Tiger, and his story began clumsily.

In July 1966, an African chieftan gave Reed Richards a flying craft. The rest of the Fantastic Four, and indeed the world, had never heard of the man who would become the first black superhero of mainstream American comics. With the glossy cover of Fantastic Four no. 52, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, legends of the medium, introduced “The Sensational Black Panther!” To note, the inception and early stewardship of the character is very much the work of white guys. This is the first panel of the comic that introduced him:

Fantastic Four no. 52

It’s cringey to read in 2018, but it makes a kind of sense. The team is suspicious of someone from Africa having nice things, just like many white Americans would be in the 1960s. Africa was still represented as the big, primitive monolith that it was depicted as in the 1932 Tarzan movie cited by the Thing. Kirby and Lee worked against the notion with T’Challa, a warrior king with a genius intellect and deeper pockets than J. Paul Getty. His native Wakanda was a sovereign kingdom of impossibly futuristic circuitry and tribal customs, yet to be seen by the likes of the outside world, much less colonized.

A little more than three months after the debut of the Black Panther character, the Black Panther Party was officially founded in Oakland, in 1966. Which came first is kind of a chicken-or-the-egg thing. In 1972, with Fantastic Four no. 119, Marvel unveiled a new name for the character. I reached out to writer Roy Thomas, who penned the comic in which T’Challa pulled on his costume and explained why he’d suddenly started calling himself “the Black Leopard.”

“Since the debut of Marvel’s Black Panther had coincided, roughly, with the rise of the Black Panther Party, that had made Stan [Lee] and Marvel concerned that we’d become identified with that group,” Thomas said. “And we weren’t for or against it.”

Fantastic Four no. 119

“I wound up being the guy who wrote that story, in my first-ever Fantastic Four story (ironically set in Rudyarda, a fictitious stand-in for South Africa under apartheid), and I worked in an explanation of sorts,” he continued. “But Stan soon thought better of it, and I don’t think the Black Leopard ever appeared as such in many stories.”

Neither for nor against neatly explained the Black Panther’s politics at the time. Making the character be from a futuristic country in Africa was groundbreaking. But it also allowed the Black Panther character a certain distance from the civil rights movement that—wittingly or not—the series capitalized on. “The Black Leopard” didn’t stick, but the creators’ reticence toward directly commenting on the world in which Black Panther existed did. The Panther got his own series in 1973, written by a different white guy, named Don McGregor. Three years later, he took the Black Panther to the American South to fight the Ku Klux Klan, although that doesn’t totally make up for the fact the Black Panther’s first solo series was titled Jungle Action (yes, for real).

McGregor’s run was more considered than its name; McGregor explored the world Kirby and Lee created, and rendered Wakanda more human and alive by asking more questions about it: About how monarchical rule would be received in a modern era, about what citizens of an African isolationist country might think of a king who spends a lot of his time abroad with white people. In what ways would being a superhero be at odds with being a king?

Jungle Action no. 5

McGregor made T’Challa and Wakanda more complex, and he introduced villains who spoke like dissidents. In Panther’s Rage, McGregor’s first big story arc, the king returned home from kicking ass with the Avengers to find the legitimacy of his claim to the throne challenged. First by M’Baku the Man-Ape, a remnant from a bygone era, and then by Erik Killmonger, a radical new threat. In the film, Winston Duke plays M’Baku and Michael B. Jordan stars as Killmonger. People say that the collected edition of McGregor’s Panther’s Rage arc is required pre-film reading. I, on the other hand, would never tell you to read a book.

That is unless it’s one of the volumes from Black Panther by Christopher Priest: The Complete Collection. The next truly exciting thing to happen to the character didn’t occur until the late ’90s. Priest was the first black writer to touch the character, and he spent 62 issues, the first of which was published in 1998, explaining—to Marvel, to readers, to the world—everything that the Black Panther was capable of, all the things he could mean. “It seems, after Fantastic Four no. 52 and no. 53, everybody kind of forgot who Panther was and treated him like Joe Blow,” Priest told Newsarama in 2015. “King T’Challa is not Joe Blow.”

Black Panther no. 8

Priest’s run wasn’t fully appreciated in its own time, but he did revolutionize the character, creating the cool, dignified, master strategist we know today. New York Times best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom you may have heard has his own Black Panther series now, considers Priest to have “the classic run on Black Panther, period, and that’s gonna be true for a long time.”

Though he’s perhaps America’s foremost thinker about race, or the writer whom a lot of Americans look to for sharp thinking about race, Coates doesn’t spend much time on race in his own run. In early January, he told Deadspin:

“The question about race is ultimately just a question about power, it really is. It’s how human beings organize themselves around power, how they exploit, how they use it. That is at the heart of the comic book. … The dude’s in this mythical country Wakanda where everybody’s black. So obviously you don’t have the same context of race. But certainly the issues of power, of organizing power, are still there.”

That’s an incredible theme that immediately sounds important and promises broader commentary. This is the same person who wrote Between the World and Me—a book about the sobering reality of “progress” in the United States being achieved over mounds of black bodies—writing a comic about a black superhero called Black Panther. But it’s important to remember that it’s still a comic, based in a world that isn’t this one. Much like how the film version of Black Panther, while a watershed moment, is one part of a multiphase, multiyear plan laid out by Marvel and paid for by Disney.

Matching Coates’s expertise with the Black Panther was a no-brainer for Marvel’s recent push toward diversity and inclusion; Iron Man was black in the ’80s, but now Iron Man is also a woman. The Hulk is Korean American. Marjorie Liu penned the first gay marriage in comics for Astonishing X-Men in 2012; in 2014, Thor became the eighth Marvel title to feature a female lead protagonist. Coates wrote for The Atlantic in February 2015 about how comics can just do these things, for the simple reason that the cost of printing a 20-page issue isn’t as prohibitive as the cost of making a movie. He cites Alexandra Shipp’s role in 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse as Storm, a superheroine descended from a line of African priestesses who could wield magic, as an example of almost representative, but not quite. (Still, like Halle Berry before her, Shipp didn’t look like the dark-skinned Kenyan woman that was in the comics.)

Two years later we have Black Panther, and it’s fine if some elements of the rollout have been cynical, or downright awkward. We have a blockbuster movie with a black lead, and a black director, premiering during Black History Month. The Black Panther exists (if you ask Stan Lee) because Stan Lee noticed that there weren’t enough black superheroes and thought hey, let’s make some. But now the story has been carried to the silver screen in the hands of the people who are best equipped to tell the truest and most interesting version of it. It’s still a movie, and it won’t save us, so to speak. But it is, like I said before, a gigantically big deal. Started as a refugee from a Tarzan movie, now we’re here.