Black Panther

Black Panther, comic strip superhero created for Marvel Comics by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. The character first appeared in Fantastic Four no. 52 (July 1966).

Origin and early stories

Seeking to address the dearth of Black characters in comics, Lee and Kirby created T’Challa, a member of the royal family of the fictional African country of Wakanda. Wakanda was depicted as a peculiar mix of futuristic technology and traditional life, a dichotomy produced by the presence in the country of Vibranium, a rare and nearly indestructible meteoric ore. After the death of his father at the hands of the villainous Ulysses Klaw, T’Challa claimed the throne as well as the mantle of the Black Panther. Upon becoming the Black Panther, T’Challa was exposed to a mystical herb that enhanced his strength and agility to near-superhuman levels. After meeting the Fantastic Four, T’Challa decided his powers would be put to best use in the service of all humanity, although Wakanda traditionally had been closed to the outside world, and so he flew off to New York, leaving his people behind.

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The Black Panther joined the Avengers in 1968, where he became a mainstay for the next several years. Although the character predated the revolutionary political organization of the same name, Marvel briefly changed the Black Panther’s name to the Black Leopard in an attempt to dissociate the two. A short time later he was back to being the Black Panther again, and in 1973 he headlined his own book for the first time. The “Panther’s Rage” story arc ran for two years in Jungle Action, a series written by Don McGregor and drawn for the most part by the African American artist Billy Graham. Reflecting the times’ interest in African roots and Black consciousness in general, the strip returned T’Challa to a Wakanda riven by infighting and sedition, where he managed to balance superheroics with musings on colonialism and democracy. For the duration of the tale, the strip featured an all-Black cast, something that had never before been attempted in mainstream superhero comics, and the innovations continued in a later story, which saw the Panther take on the Ku Klux Klan.

Poor sales prompted Marvel to cancel Jungle Action before the Klan story was finished, and it was replaced in 1977 with a new Black Panther title by Jack Kirby. This new direction was as far from the gritty realism of McGregor’s tales as it is possible to imagine, as it featured a time-traveling frog statue said to belong to King Solomon, the Yeti, and a group of Wakandan nobles known as the Black Musketeers. This title too was short-lived. Sporadic appearances over the next two decades kept the Black Panther in the Marvel firmament, but he was increasingly marginalized. Miniseries in 1988 and 1991 were solid, if unspectacular, attempts at revitalizing what was effectively a lapsed franchise. The first tackled apartheid, and the second dealt with the Panther’s search for his mother, but neither led to anything substantial. With Black characters no longer a comics novelty and with role models such as the characters of Milestone Comics—which had more relevance to their readers than a wealthy African king—it seemed as if the Panther’s time had passed.

Black Panther in the 21st century

In 1998 writer Christopher Priest reintroduced the hero as part of the slightly more adult “Marvel Knights” line, in a critically acclaimed series that continued until 2003. For this reinvention, a now aging T’Challa returns to the urban jungle of New York in a deftly written political thriller that balances intrigue with no small amount of humour. Priest’s run on the comic introduced the Dora Milaje, a team of female bodyguards drawn from all the tribes of Wakanda. Film director Reginald Hudlin was the initial writer on both the Black Panther series that ran from 2005 to 2008 and the next one, which ran from 2009 to 2010. During this time T’Challa was briefly married to Storm of the X-Men, a union that joined Marvel’s most prominent male and female African superheroes. T’Challa also became a member of the Illuminati, a secret group of the brightest and most powerful members of Marvel’s superhero community.

National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates was tasked with writing the relaunched Black Panther comic, and the debut issue was one of the best-selling comics of 2016. The Black Panther entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) later that year in Captain America: Civil War, a blockbuster that cast Chadwick Boseman as the Wakandan prince. The character subsequently experienced something of a renaissance, with the success of Coates’s flagship title leading to the release of Black Panther: World of Wakanda, a series that explored Wakanda’s other heroes, and Black Panther & the Crew, a street-level story set in Harlem. Each of those titles was canceled after just six issues, however, because of low sales.

Black Panther in film and other media

Director Ryan Coogler helmed Black Panther (2018), a dazzling spectacle that saw Boseman return to the screen in the role of T’Challa. Perhaps the MCU’s best-reviewed film to date, Black Panther examined race, gender, and power issues through an Afrofuturist lens and featured an ensemble cast that included Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Forest Whitaker, Angela Bassett, and Letitia Wright. The Black Panther and his fellow Wakandans figured prominently in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), the two-part blockbuster culmination of 10 years of filmmaking in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Boseman’s death in 2020 seemed to cast doubt on the future of the Black Panther film franchise, and Marvel confirmed that the role of T’Challa would not be recast. Grief and mourning were central themes in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), which featured the MCU debut of classic Marvel antagonist Namor and saw the mantle of the Black Panther passed to a new Wakandan champion.