Marvel Masterworks: The Black Panther, Volume 1 by Don McGregor, Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, et al.

Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther, Volume 1: Collecting Jungle Action Nos. 6-24

Collection published: 2016
Contents originally published: 1973-76
Read: February 2023

Writer: Don McGregor

Pencilers: Rich Buckler, Billy Graham, Gil Kane, Keith Pollard
Inkers: Klaus Janson, P. Craig Russell, Pablo Marcos, Dan Green, Billy Graham, Bob McLeod, Jim Mooney, Keith Pollard
Letterers: Tom Orzechowski, Dave Hunt, Art Simek, Joe Rosen, Charlotte Jester, Karen Mantlo, Janice Chiang, Denise Wohl, Harry Blumfield, Irving Watanabe, Shelly Lefferman

The second installment in my series of Black Panther posts brings me to the Black Panther's first ongoing series, a run in Jungle Action by Don McGregor, which is made up of two stories: Panther's Rage and The Panther vs. the Klan! The first story takes T'Challa back to Wakanda after his sojourn to America, along with his girlfriend Monica, who I guess must be from some Avengers stories I haven't read. Panther's Rage inspired the Black Panther movie, as it's about an attempt by Erik Killmonger to depose T'Challa from the throne of Wakanda.

At the same time he wrote this, Don McGregor was also writing Killraven, of which I am a big fan, and this is very similar: wordy and portentous, perhaps verging into pretentious, with a large emphasis on character and theme. Like Killraven, it has a lot of the trappings of superhero comics, but it is not one. Panther's Rage is a war comic, a war in a nation, a war in a people, and a war in one man. He fights grotesque villains working for Killmonger, but it's more like a fever dream at times, surreal battles that are really there to illuminate what's happening inside T'Challa.

I'll take all the Black Panther vs. vicious monsters you've got.
from Jungle Action vol. 2 #10 (art by Billy Graham & Klaus Janson)

I can't say I always liked it. It gets a bit repetitive at times, and the ongoing plot doesn't move very quickly. Sometimes there were just so many words. The series had eleven different letterers across its eighteen issues, and I can see why: why do more than two issues of this when you can go letter some Captain America comic with half the dialogue and none of the narration? But Billy Graham and Rich Buckler capture power in their layouts and art, and sometimes the thing whole rises to poetry.

Monica wears the hippest outfits.
from Jungle Action vol. 2 #15 (art by Billy Graham & Dan Green)

McGregor builds up a recurring cast around T'Challa, and I look forward to seeing if future writers keep these people's lives going. Indeed, if the story has a single success, it's in convincing you that though Wakanda is a strange place, it is a real place. It is a country with people and history and geography and conflict. I suspect that will be its legacy.

Maybe my favorite part of the whole run: Killmonger's two dopey followers that the Black Panther is forever getting the drop on.
from Jungle Action vol. 2 #12 (art by Billy Graham & Klaus Janson)

This makes it all the more inexplicable that for its second arc, McGregor had T'Challa go to the American South with Monica to investigate the apparent suicide of her sister. The Ku Klux Klan plays a big role, as does a not-the-KKK organization, the Dragon Clan. Gone are all the characters and history he had so painstakingly built up; T'Challa himself suddenly feels less plausible as he for some reason never takes off his Black Panther outfit. There are still fun parts—Monica's solitaire-obsessed father—and interesting imagery, but the investigation moves at a crawl, and nothing has really happened at the point where the story suddenly ends because the book was cancelled for low sales.

The Dragon Clan outfits lack the effective simplicity of the real KKK.
from Jungle Action vol. 2 #19 (art by Billy Graham & Bob McLeod)

Don McGregor and his collaborators would be soon replaced by Jack Kirby. I will be curious if Kirby's return to the character he cocreated keeps any of McGregor's innovations, but I fear I already know the answer...

(Somewhat weirdly, Marvel would actually get another writer and artist to finish the Klan storyline in three issues of Marvel Premiere, over three years after Jungle Action was cancelled. Like, why? If it wasn't worth doing at the time, why was it worth doing years later? I cannot imagine a comics publisher nicely capping off a mediocre run like this now. Those issues of Marvel Premiere are in another Marvel Masterworks Presents The Black Panther volume, but alas that one is not on Hoopla.)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE