"With the sleekness of the jungle cat whose name he bears, T-Challa - King of Wakanda - stalks both the concrete city and the undergrowth of the Veldt. So it has been for countless generations of warrior kings, so it is today, and so it shall be for the law of the jungle dictates that only the swift, the smart, and the strong survive! Noble champion. Vigiliant protector. BLACK PANTHER"

In 1998, Christopher Priest began as the writer of a new volume on Black Panther for Marvel's "Marvel Knights" imprint; this was, I think, intended as a twelve-issue run and ended up lasting until issue #62 in 2003. Black Panther vol. 3 would introduce a lot of what will be familiar to contemporary viewers of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Dora Milaje, Everett K. Ross (played by Martin Freeman on screen), Wakanda vying for a place in contemporary geopolitics, and the Black Panther's more thoughtful, stoic demeanor.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #10
(script by Priest, art by Mike Manley)

Priest thinks through what it would mean for the Black Panther to be a king—he's not a superhero, though he is a fairly hands-on king. He's not going around recusing babies from trees or even punching supervillains, he's defending a nation from its threats, and he's doing so using political cunning even moreso than superpowers. In order to make this work, we mostly see T'Challa from the outside, usually from the perspective of Everett K. Ross, his liaison in the U.S. Department of State. Ross is meant to provide T'Challa with transportation and assistance during a quick trip to New York City, but ends up embroiled in T'Challa's machinations, which results in things like losing his pants to the demon Mephisto, becoming regent of Wakanda, accidentally offending Bill Clinton by roller-skating through the White House, and being exiled to a U.S. listening post in the Arctic.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #21
(script by Priest, art by Sal Velluto & Bob Almond)

The first twelve issues are almost certainly the highlight. The story is told out of order as Ross attempts to make some kind of sense of everything he's gone through, to little avail; with its out-of-order vignettes, all preceded by some kind of caption, it came across as an attempt to do Quentin Tarantino on the comics page. This is surely one of the most 1990s moves you could pull, and Priest and his ever-changing artistic collaborators pull it off perfectly. I was constantly laughing at the reversals facing Ross, as he confronts his own prejudices about Africa and the increasing series of absurdities he is faced with. Upon reading this series, it became very clear to me why Ross is played by Martin Freeman in the movies, because who does "put upon" better than Martin Freeman, but it also became clear to me that the movies had largely failed to take advantage of the character.

Priest's Panther instantly marked itself as the best run on the character I'd read thus far, taking the best aspects of Don McGregor's run in particular (though we don't spend much time in Wakanda here, Priest very much builds on McGregor's sense of it as a real, complicated place). You can very easily see why it kept getting extended, even though it was apparently always on the verge of cancellation. A revolving door of artists at the series's beginning soon gives way to Sal Velluto and Bob Almond, who illustrated thirty of the series's sixty-two issues, excellently capturing the humanity and the action alike. Priest is always coming up with new spins on old concepts, always keeping things fresh.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #25
(script by Priest, art by Sal Velluto & Bob Almond)

The Dora Milaje are not exactly what they became on screen, not an army of warrior women; here, they're wives of the king, one from each tribe in Wakanda as a way of maintaining political balance. They may only speak to the king (in Hausa) and must defend him with their lives. One of my favorite characters was Chanté Giovanni Brown, a teenager social justice crusader from inner-city Chicago who renamed herself "Queen Divine Justice"... and then learned that as the estranged descendant of a Wakandan tribal leader, she was a new Dora Milaje. I feel like we have really missed out by not getting her on screen.

That said, he perhaps sometimes keeps things too fresh. One gets the sense of a juggler continually adding balls to his act, forgetting to maintain balls he already launched into the air. (Okay, how's that for a metaphor?) Soon there's the Hulk (okay, the bit where Queen Divine Justice bonds with him is cute), and then Power Man and Iron Fist, and there's a crossover with Deadpool (ugh), and a flash-forward to a dystopian Black Panther, and all sorts of other stuff, and I found myself missing Ross and the supporting cast of the book's earlier days, whose stories had more faded away than actually come to an end. Though there's always a lot to like, from, say, issue #30 to 40 especially, I found myself a bit adrift in the book's overcomplications.

Also, suddenly a second T'Challa appears, one written and even drawn in the Jack Kirby adventurer fashion, complete with friend Abner Little. This is hilarious, especially given how much the two Black Panthers like each other, but the mystery of who he is and how he got there is drawn out too long and not really resolved satisfactorily. Like, we get all the answers we need, but the story just kind of fizzles out.

However, with the Enemy of the State II storyline, where Wakanda annexes part of Canada and T'Challa pits himself against Tony Stark, the book showed a marked improvement, again recapturing that energy and focus of the first twelve issues, and then there's a two-parter where the whole cast is inadvertently tossed through time into the Wild West, which is of course hilarious.

from Black Panther vol. 3 #51
(script by Priest, art by Jorge Lucas)

But, having got its mojo back, the book must have seemed in even more danger of cancellation than ever, for with issue #50, it's suddenly drastically retooled. T'Challa is missing, presumed dead,* and the main character is suddenly Kevin "Kasper" Cole, a New York cop who finds a discarded Black Panther suit and begins using it to take down corrupt cops, the whole series suddenly transforming into a seedy crime novel of sorts. Priest does an okay job with it, but it's just never as interesting as what he was doing. Unfortunately (aside from a terrible two-issue fill-in by the usually reliable J. Torres), Kasper is the main character for the rest of the run. He has its moments, but I found his character beats a bit repetitive, and, well, no one is reading Black Panther for a grounded crime thriller about corrupt cops. Kasper briefly counts as a new Black Panther, but by series's end, has become the White Tiger, endorsed by T'Challa and given the heart-shaped herb for his own superpowers.

I read the whole run on comiXology, having got it for free in a sale; it's also been collected as four trade paperbacks called Black Panther: The Complete Collection. The first three volumes collect all of stuff actually focused on T'Challa, and they are well worth your time to pick up. I have a lot of Black Panther comics to go, but it seems unlikely to me that any of them will top this.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

* Well, kind of. In one issue we're told he's supposedly dead, in another, we learn he's still a member of the Avengers!