Black Panther: Newly Reprinted Stories from the Panther's Prey Omnibus

Black Panther: Panther's Prey Omnibus

Collection published: 2026
Contents originally published: 1977-96
Read: April 2026

I recently finished my reading of all of Marvel's Black Panther comics that have been released for free on either comiXology or Hoopla... but also recently, Marvel has put out the Panther's Prey Omnibus, a mammoth 1,236-page collection containing every Black Panther–related comic from 1977 to 1996. Mostly it's taken up by the Jack Kirby run, the Gillis/Cowan/de la Rosa miniseries, and Don McGregor's Panther's Quest and Panther's Prey. Sprinkled in among these stories, though, are a number of guest appearances and one-offs that have not previously been collected. Or, at least, that I haven't read. (With only two exceptions, the new-to-me stories all come from the 1978-80 timeframe.) In this post I'll be writing up and reviewing just those new-to-me stories from the Panther's Prey Omnibus.

"Conjure Night!"/ "Voodoo and Valor!", from Marvel Two-in-One #40-41 (June-July 1978)
plot by Roger Slifer, dialogue by Tom DeFalco and David Kraft, art by Ron Wilson & Pablo Marcos, letters by Irv. W & Annette K. and Joe Rosen, colors by Phil Rachelson and F. Mouly

These two issues come from Marvel Two-in-One, which I think was a series where in each issue, the Thing teamed up with a different superhero. In the first issue collected here, the Thing teams up with Black Panther (duh), while in the second, Brother Voodoo, but it concludes the story begun in the previous issue and still has a decent-sized role for T'Challa. They were released during Kirby's run (between #9 and 10); SuperMegaMonkey's Marvel Comics Chronology places them after Kirby's run came to an end in issue #13, before the last two issues by other writers.

I actually liked the glimpses of the bits of drama we got of the Thing's life; the other highlight of the story was actually getting to see T'Challa as inner-city teacher (an idea coined for The Avengers, I think, which was quietly dropped later on... because really, it makes no sense). The actual story here is pretty nonsensical; a lot of the drama revolves around a list of prominent black citizens of New York City... a list that no one can find a copy of even though it was published in the newspaper! Then there's a bit where the Thing lands an airplane with one hand while holding one of its wings on with the other! There are a number of creators whose other work I have enjoyed involved in this (The Omega Men's Roger Slifer, Justice League Europe's Pablo Marcos), but none of them are doing their best work. Or even their mediocre work.

"The Razor's Edge!" / "The Killing of Windeagle!" / "Journey through the Past" / "The Ending, in Anger!" / "Battle Royal!" / "Like a Proud Black Panther..." / "The Left Hand of Silence!" / "Cry-- Vengeance!", from Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #87 (Nov. 1979), Marvel Premiere #51-53 (Dec. 1979–Apr. 1980), The Defenders vol. 1 #84-86 (June-Aug. 1980), and Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #100 (Dec. 1980)
written by Steven Grant, Ed Hannigan, and Chris Claremont (with John Byrne); penciled by Gene Colan, Jerry Bingham, Don Perlin, and John Byrne; inked by Frank Springer, Gene Day, Alan Gordon, Tex Blaisdell, Jim Mooney, Pablo Marcos, and Bob McLeod; lettered by Robins, Diana Albers, M. Higgins, and A. Kawecki; colored by G. Wein, Bob Sharen, G. Roussos. and Robbie C.

from Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #87
(script by Steven Grant, art by Gene Colan & Frank Springer)

The next story is a Spider-Man team-up from Marvel Team-Up; the omnibus places this after Black Panther #14-15, but as SuperMegaMonkey points out, it must actually precede those two issues. since Marvel Premiere #51-53 continues straight on from Black Panther #15. It is pretty dire. I don't know what's up with writers who invent lame villains who even the characters in the story call out for being lame. Why cut your own story off at the knees like that?

The three issues of Marvel Premiere continue straight on from the cancelled Black Panther ongoing, with the same creative team of Ed Hannigan and Jerry Bingham. These issues are a bit of an oddity. So, Don McGregor's original run on Black Panther in Jungle Action was abruptly cancelled mid-story in 1976; in 1977, it was replaced by Jack Kirby's ongoing, which completely ignored everything McGregor had been doing. When Kirby left Marvel and Hannigan and Bingham took over in 1979, they began a story to explain what had happened to all the story threads and characters abandoned when McGregor was fired... but then their book was cancelled too, so the issues ended up published in Marvel Premiere instead. All of that is to say, this is a wrapup to a cancelled story that was itself cancelled! And it finished in 1980, over three years after the story it was designed to wrap up! Intellectually, I admire that Marvel actually bothered... but in practice it's a terrible story and they probably shouldn't have bothered. Memory loss is a hacky explanation for it all, and there must have been a better way to handle this. Did Monica and her boyfriend (who I think all later writers just forgot about) really sit around for years before trying to figure out why T'Challa abandoned them? It admittedly has been a long time since I read the original Don McGregor run, but the explanations given here surely do not line up with it in any way, shape, or form. I feel like there's no real conclusion here anyway; just a bunch of fights and then people are like, "Oh the story is over now."

from The Defenders vol. 1 #86
(script by Ed Hannigan, art by Don Perlin & Pablo Marcos)

The other issues here are more team-ups: a three-issue arc of The Defenders featuring Black Panther and a one-issue story of T'Challa meeting Storm of the X-Men. The Defenders arc is by Ed Hannigan again; it has some good ideas but I feel like Hannigan's writing jerks around from idea to idea and the choices the characters make range from arbitrary to stupid. I found these a struggle.

Issue #100 of Marvel Team-Up is the story that established a preexisting relationship between T'Challa and Storm. I hadn't realized that had happened all the way back in 1980 in a story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne; I don't think it made its way into an actual Black Panther comic until much later, I want to say not until Reginald Hudlin's run in 2006. It's a short ten-pager about an enemy from Storm and T'Challa's youth popping back up in the present; the backstory is fine, the present-day stuff is kind of silly. But this small story had a profound impact on the future of both characters.

"Panther's Pest, Part 231 of 8!" / "Of Kings...and Bright, Shiny Things...", from What the--?! #9 (Oct. 1990) and Over the Edge #6 (Apr. 1996)
written by Don McGregor and Ralph Macchio, penciled by Mike Harris and Robert Brown, inked by Tom Palmer and Mike Witherby, lettered by Joe Rosen and J. Babcock, colored by Marsha McGregor and Glynis Oliver

from What the--?! #9
(script by Don McGregor, art by Mike Harris & Tom Palmer)

The first of these stories is a ten-page humor comic satirizing Panther's Quest... written by Don McGregor, writer of Panther's Quest! Though not every joke landed, and I didn't really care for the art, I appreciated McGregor's ability to laugh at himself. If you've ever read a Don McGregor Black Panther comic, there are some good jokes here.

The other story is a Daredevil team-up from 1996; I thought this might be a humor comic too at first thanks to the ridiculous art, but no, that's just how they thought comics should look in 1996. I don't know why people keep getting Ralph Macchio to write Black Panther stories because they're almost always bad. In this one, Black Panther attends an extradition hearing for Ulysses Klaw that's attacked by Killmonger;  Foggy Nelson is representing T'Challa, so Daredevil is close to hand when the attack begins. Guess what: the introduced-just-moments-ago best buddy of T'Challa turns out to be traitor. Kid has like one line of dialogue before this "twist"; I feel like Macchio wasn't even trying. The art often fails to communicate basic essential information.

The moral of this story is probably that none of these issues were probably really meant to be (re)read on their own like I did. As seasoners to the omnibus, things meant to show you you're getting your money's worth because they haven't been collected before whereas most of the other stuff here has been, they probably work just fine. But as a main feature, they're very much lacking. 

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Marvel's The Transformers Year One, Part I: The Enemy Within! (US #1-3 & 33-34 / UK #1-6 & 9-17)

From November 2015 to May 2016, I read the Transformers comics included by IDW in some Humble Bundles; this included The Transformers Classics vols. 1-4, which collected issues #1-50 of the US Marvel monthly Transformers comic.

Later, from December 2020 to April 2021, as part of my readthrough of the Doctor Who Magazine comic, I read IDW's The Transformers Classics UK, vols. 1-5. (The two are connected via the character of Death's Head, who travelled from the Transformers universe to the Marvel one via the Doctor Who one.) These collected the UK-exclusive comic strips up to issue #173 of that comic. (I subsequently tracked down some Titan collections to fill in the rest of the UK run, which took me from January 2022 to March 2023.)

The thing is, though, that about half of the UK comic was actually reprints of US material, and the UK material was designed to fit around it; basically, as the UK comic was 11 pages weekly, they didn't have enough content if they only reprinted the monthly 22-page US book. So UK stories expanded the US saga, as seamlessly as possible. 

Yet, the UK strips have only ever been reprinted on their own, not with the surrounding context of the US strips they are meant to fit into even though they are kind of weird and jumpy if you don't have US strips to hand! So as I read a UK strip, I had to strain to vaguely recall what had happened in a US strip I had read five years previous. And eventually I got beyond the point where I had even read the US strips.

So I decided that someday I would read them all in something approximating chronological order. When IDW dropped the Transformers license, I purchased all the remaining collected editions I would need on comiXology.

But by the time I actually got around to reading these books, I didn't need to! In 2025, new Transformers comic publisher Skybound crowdfunded a massive collection of the complete runs of both the US and UK strips... in internal chronological order! The Til All Are One Compendium takes up four absolutely massive hardcovers, but obviously I couldn't pass them up. 

So now that I've finished Black Panther, that will be my next "filler" comics project, reading either a US issue or the equivalent of one every day. (Early on, the UK strip was usually eleven pages; later, things got more complicated.) I won't be using the order given in the TAAO compendiums, though, because of course I've worked out my own. (I don't have a problem with theirs; indeed, I think some of their choices probably read more smoothly than mine!) Like all of my reading orders, it aims to balance chronology with narrative experience, incorporating flashback and flashforward stories where they make sense, not where they happen.

I'll be writing them up in batches of seven, so that I do one writeup a week. Thus here we start off with the first three issues of US comic (reprinted in the first six issues of the UK comic), and the first two UK-original stories, (supposedly) set during those US issues...

"The Transformers" / "Power Play!" / "Prisoner of War!" (part 1) / Man of Iron / "Prisoner of War!" (part 2) / The Enemy Within!, from The Transformers US #1-3 & 33-34 (Sept. 1984–Jan. 1985 & Oct.-Nov. 1987) / The Transformers UK #1-6 & 9-17 (20 Sept.–1 Dec. 1984 & 12 Jan.–4 May 1985); reprinted in The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (2025)

plot by Bill Mantlo; scripts by Ralph Macchio, Jim Salicrup, Steve Parkhouse, and Simon Furman; pencils by Frank Springer, John Ridgway, and Mike Collins; inks by Kim DeMulder (with Mike Esposito), John Ridgway, and Mike Collins; lettering by Higgins & Parker, Janice Chiang (with others), and Richard Starkings; coloring by Nelson Yomtov, Josie Firmin, and Gina Hart

 

from The Transformers US #1

The US Transformers series began with what was intended to be a four-issue miniseries, though it's obvious that by the time issue #4 was written, that plan had already changed, as issue #4 sets up a number of ongoing plots. The first two issues have a lot to do, setting up the basic premise of The Transformers for an audience totally unfamiliar with it; plotter Bill Mantlo and scripter Ralph Macchio really pack in the exposition. The opening, about Cybertron, is fine... I find the big panels containing ten characters all telling each other their names and gimmicks much more contrived! This speaks to what will eternally be my issue with the Transformers comics: there are often just too many characters. And because new toys are always coming out, new characters always have to be worked in, so no one ever remains in the spotlight for long. (It's probably no coincidence that my two favorite Transformers series, Beast Wars/Machines and More than Meets the Eye/Lost Light, have limited casts.)

 

The moments that shined for me, then, were the ones that kept things focused on a smaller cast: I liked the emphasis on Ravage here, Megatron's loyal servant (something that continues into the following UK stories), and I appreciated the emphasis on the human characters to keep things focused and grounded, though it's surprising (both given the big emphasis on him here, and given what future versions of this story have done) that there's not much of an ongoing connecting between Buster Witwicky and Bumblebee after this. 

from The Transformers UK #9

Things get a bit complicated if you're trying to reach chronologically. The first UK story, Man of Iron (released in UK issues #9-12), represents a status quo that really only existed for the opening US story (released in UK issues #1-8), so it must somehow take place during its events, even though there's no noticeable gap. I followed the placement advice of the Transformers wiki and read it during issue #3 of the US comic, after p. 10. This almost kind of works, but does mean you have to assume Buster's dad Sparkplug is slaving away as prisoner of the Decepticons while everyone goes to England! Man of Iron is great, a story about the Autobot/Decepticon war affecting the life of a kid, almost entirely told from the point-of-view of that kid, and thus the Transformers are alien and inscrutable and brutal. (Surely it is one of the peaks of what the fan writer "Broadside" calls Budianskian storytelling.) I have read it twice before, since IDW collected it in both Transformers Classics and Transformers Classics UK, as it was the only UK story to also appear in the US strip. In its original US appearance, it came after issue #32, where it was quite a jarring change of tone, but reading it here, I found it flowed a lot more smoothly. We just don't know the Autobots that well yet, and the tendency of the Decepticons to engage in wacky plots involving car-washes and graffiti hasn't taken off yet; they are still ruthless attackers from an alien world.

 

After this, we segue back into the second half of US issue #3, where Spider-Man teams up with Gears to rescue Buster's dad. This is fine but weird. Later, the idea these comics took place in the Marvel universe would be quietly and wisely forgotten.

 

from The Transformers UK #14

Chronologically, things are still difficult, because the UK story The Enemy Within! (#13-17) supposedly also takes place during the original miniseries, but Megatron mentions Spider-Man, so evidently after US #3, where there is even less of the gap. Put that aside, though, and I found this one of the stronger stories of this first run. We have two parallel stories: in one, the Autobot Brawn malfunctions and begins attacking humans; once he's been recaptured and repaired, he needs to prove himself to his comrades. In the other, Starscream tries to plot against Megatron but is found out by Ravage; he needs a way to bring himself back into the Decepticon fold. Once again, I really like the emphasis on the loyal but sinister Ravage. In general, I'm happy to see Mike Collins artwork... but the wimpy arms of Brawn (which I assume are toy accurate?) belie his given name!

 

Overall, I think what is interesting is that I found myself much more sympathetic to the US material than I remember being first time around. Maybe I haven't read enough for the antipathy to set in, but I also think I have a stronger sense of what it's going for and thus appreciate its successes more. We'll see if I still think that way when we get to the car wash!

 

This is the first in a series of posts about Marvel's The Transformers. The next covers US issues #4-8 and UK issues #7-8 & 18-30.

Review: The Transformers Classics, Vol. 4 by Bob Budiansky, Jose Delbo, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, 296 pages
Published 2012 (contents: 1988-89)
Acquired August 2014
Read May 2016

The Transformers Classics, Vol. 4

Written by Bob Budiansky, Ralph Macchio
Pencils by Jose Delbo, Alan Kupperberg, Frank Springer
Inks by Dave Hunt & Don Hudson, Danny Bulanadi, Dave Elliott
Letters by Bill Oakley, Kurt Hathaway, Rick Parker
Colors by Nel Yomtov

At this point, you either love Bob Budiansky's approach to Transformers, or you don't. I don't. Characters with ill-defined gimmicks are just piled on again and again. I know this isn't all his fault, but I still have to read it, and I don't like doing so. The one bright spot for most of this book is Ratbat, Decepticon fuel auditor, the only evil leader awesome enough to gloat about his account books:

If I were a Decepticon, I would clearly be Ratbat. I gotta get me a Ratbat toy.
from The Transformers #41 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Jose Delbo & Danny Bulanadi)

But the Headmasters clog up an already overcrowded book, and there's not too much to inspire here, until the very end. The four-part "The Underbase Saga" starts off kind of dumb when Jesse infiltrates a Decepticon base disguised as a beach to rescue Buster, who has become a total waste of a character by this point. (I think he spends this whole volume as a hostage.) How the Decepticons could get away with this strains belief, even in this comic.

What does she even get out of a relationship with Buster, anyway?
from The Transformers #47 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Jose Delbo & Dave Hunt)

It all becomes worth it, though, for Starscream ascending to ultimate power. Previously, he's been a big nonentity in this series, but I always enjoy a good supervillain-on-the-way-to-godhood rant.

If enjoying this is wrong, I don't want to be right.
from The Transformers #50 (script by Bob Budiansky, art by Jose Delbo & Dave Hunt)

It's not Bob Budiansky's best story, but it is his best in a long while, and a fitting subject for the climax of fifty issues of The Transformers.

In Two Weeks: Though there are three more volumes of The Transformers Classics, that was the last in the IDW Humble Bundle, so I'm skipping ahead quite a bit-- to what happens after the war in Regeneration One!