Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration by Ytasha L. Womack

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration
by Ytasha L. Womack

I was doing some citation-checking for the academic journal I work for, and one of the essays I was editing cited Ytasha L. Womack's book Afrofuturism; looking her up led me to discover she had recently written this coffee-table book about Black Panther. Given my current project to read through Black Panther comics, it seemed like the kind of thing I ought to read, and so I requested my local library purchase a copy.

Originally published: 2023
Read: February 2024

Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration is divided into seven chapters. Not counting backmatter, the book runs about 160 pages, and it reads quickly, as it is profusely illustrated; I got through it in one day. The first chapter is the longest, a fifty-page history of the comics character from Lee and Kirby through McGregor and Priest up to Hudlin and Coates. Chapters two through six each take an aspect of the character and his world and contextualize it in African culture, African-American history, and Afrofuturism, exploring concepts such as black panthers, African religion, utopia, warrior women, and so on.

It's neat but I often wanted more depth. Even at fifty pages, the history of the character just skims the surface. The other chapters are much shorter, and I often found myself thinking there had to be more to say about, for example, Black Panther and actual African religion, than we were getting here. But perhaps then this wouldn't be the book that it is—I am a hardcore comics fan and a literary scholar, and I don't think this book is aimed at either of those small audiences, much less both of them!

As a comics fan, I found some aspects of the books a little frustrating; references to specific issues don't always give dates, and there are, for example, six different issues called Black Panther #6, so clarification is pretty important. Sometimes comics are cited by story arc titles, which isn't very precise.  At one point the book says Reginald Hudlin wrote Shuri, but he did not; he wrote Black Panther vol. 5, which starred Shuri. At another, a page of art clearly from 1991's Black Panther: Panther's Prey #2 is mislabeled as being from 1966's Fantastic Four #52. Imagine mistaking Jack Kirby for Dwayne Turner! Most consistently and most annoyingly, there is a lot of beautiful cover art included throughout the volume, but this goes uncredited more often than not.

I do feel like I'm nitpicking a bit here. This book, after all, is probably not really for me, who has read (thus far) every Black Panther comic published from 1966 to 2006, but for someone who has seen the films and wants to know more about where the character came from. I think Womack's book is particularly valuable in its positioning of the character in the history of Afrofuturism and similar movements; there's a lot of good details here about the genre, and a lot of directions an interested reader could go if they wanted to know more. I found the discussion of "protopia" particularly valuable. And the book contains a lot of beautiful illustrations, both from the comics, and from the wider social world that the book seeks to illuminate. Just know that if you're an intense fan and/or an academic, there might not be as much here as you might hope for.