"With the sleekness of a jungle beast, the Prince of Wakanda stalks both the concrete of the city and the undergrowth of the veldt, for when danger lurks he dons the garb of the savage cat from which he gains his name! The BLACK PANTHER!"

from Black Panther vol. 1 #3
(script & pencils by Jack Kirby, inks by Mike Royer)

With the cancellation of Jungle Action, the Black Panther was available for Jack Kirby to take over upon his return to Marvel in the late 1970s, giving the character his first self-titled series. Black Panther vol. 1 lasted fifteen issues from 1977 to 1979. It's not clear to me reading it if Kirby even really knew what had been done with the character he co-created after him; there are some footnotes pointing the reader to information from the Black Panther's appearances in Avengers, but in the Kirby-written issues I didn't notice a single reference to anything written by Don McGregor.

This run is much-derided but to be honest, even weak Kirby is still great stuff. It is a bit of a jarring transition to go, as I did, straight from Jungle Action vol. 2 #24 to Black Panther vol. 1 #1: one minute, T'Challa is being beat up by white supremacists in the American Deep South, the next minutes, he is travelling in the company of a monocled dwarf adventurer named Abner Little in search of a frog statue than can send people through time. Abner is one of a group of collectors of rare artifacts, and T'Challa must work with him—despite Abner's own ruthlessness—to stop other collectors, especially Princess Zanda, from exploiting the frog... and to send a hyper-evolved human being from the year six million back to its own time!

from Black Panther vol. 1 #2
(script & pencils by Jack Kirby, inks by Mike Royer)

In the first issue, I was faintly baffled; by the second, I was on board. Sure, this wasn't nothing like the dark poetry of Don McGregor... but one of the big reasons I love superhero comics is how they can constantly reinvent themselves. Kirby is the king of weirdness and the continuing strange turns of the collectors story arc (issues #1-7) are a delight: soon T'Challa and Abner are infiltrating a hidden enclave of immortal samurai! Like, why not? This isn't peak Kirby, but like I said, even middling Kirby is fun to read. (This must have seemed so old-fashioned in 1977-78, though.)

The second story arc shifts the action back to Wakanda; T'Challa mentions he's been gone a long time, so presumably he hasn't been home since before the "Panther vs. the Klan" story arc that began in Jungle Action #19. A regent named N'Gassi has been ruling in the Panther's absence, but General Jakarra, T'Challa's half-brother, has begun a coup. With T'Challa still away, N'Gassi summons distant members of the ruling family from around the globe: a medical student, a racecar driver, and so on.

from Black Panther vol. 1 #12
(script & pencils by Jack Kirby, inks by Mike Royer)

Again, people seem to deride this, but I kind of liked it. The idea of T'Challa having an estranged half-brother is a good one... though admittedly not much is done with it, and nothing carries over from  McGregor's vision of Wakandan politics to Kirby's. But the idea of these pretty ordinary people having to learn how to work together to defeat a vibranium-mutated Jakarra is a great one. (Unfortunately, however, they dub themselves "the Black Musketeers.") Meanwhile, T'Challa keeps encountering delay after delay in reaching Wakanda. One or two of these would have been fine, but they do pile up to beggar belief. I did, however, love the one where he ends up trapped by a science fiction film shooting in the Sudanese desert: a very topical reference to Star Wars.

The last few issues of Kirby's run are a bit of a fizzle, as with Jakarra defeated, a new villain is introduced, who sucks the life force from people. And then, I guess, Kirby must have abruptly left the title, as issue #13 wraps up that storyline, but is by a totally different creative team in a totally different style: Jim Shooter, Ed Hannigan, Jerry Bingham, and Gene Day. I didn't like how they had the Black Panther fail to rescue most of the people the villain had captured.

from Black Panther vol. 1 #14
(script by Ed Hannigan, art by Jerry Bingham & Gene Day)

The new creative team (minus Shooter) continues on for the series's last two issues, which abruptly change the set-up. Now T'Challa is setting up an embassy in the United States to bring an end to Wakandan isolationism, and he ends up working with the Avengers to battle the villain from his very first appearance, the Klaw. I didn't feel like the Klaw's plan made a lot of sense even by supervillain standards, and it was very jarring to me for T'Challa to be palling around with the Avengers. (I know he'd appeared in a lot of issues of Avengers by this point, but I haven't read most of those.) I get that Klaw is Black Panther's first villain, but... he kind of sucks, right?

Hannigan does bring back a couple characters from McGregor's run: Monica, Kevin, and Windeagle cameo, foreshadowing a much-deferred resolution to the Klan storyline. Unfortunately, issue #15 was the last of Black Panther vol. 1. This storyline would eventually appear in three issues of Marvel Premiere, but those weren't in the comiXology sale I got all my Black Panther comics from and don't appear in any of the collections available on Hoopla, so I won't be reading them. (Other reviewers, however, have not been kind. It does seem pretty baffling that Marvel actually tied up a three-year-old storyline from a series cancelled for low sales!)

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Faster than a DC Bullet: Sandman Mystery Theatre, Part XI: The Sandman

Comic hardcover, 300 pages
Published 2009 (contents: 1942-74)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2011

The Sandman

Stories and Art: Joe Simon & Jack Kirby
Additional Inks: Mike Royer

In 1941, DC gave the Sandman a new costume and a new sidekick in an attempt to revive a fading character by making him more like a superhero-- they even ditched Wesley Dodds's girlfriend Dian. It probably would have failed, had not Joe Simon and Jack Kirby taken over the character in 1942, fresh off their success creating Captain America for Marvel. Every story the two of them collaborated on is here. They're goofy, sure, but they're also really quite good-- they've got art by Jack Kirby, you know! Kirby and Simon's layouts are dynamic, with stretching borders and crossing the gutter and just all-out dynamism. The Sandman no longer uses his gas gun or mask here (alas), but the name is kept appropriate with the use of dreams in the stories. Frequently, characters are motivated by their dreams (or even lack thereof), and all the villains in New York City dream of the Sandman. In fact, when Wesley Dodds is replaced by an impostor, Sandy figures it out because "Dodds" mentions dreaming of the Sandman!

Some are better than others, of course, and as you might imagine from a book featuring twenty-four different stories, it eventually gets repetitive. Some are just dumb, but there are a lot of neat ones, too. I also enjoyed the glimpses of World War II propaganda; the Sandman and Sandy exhort the reader to buy war bonds, but even better is the comic about Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito reading The Boy Commandos. They get flat-out terrible at the end, but I think those ones might not actually be by Simon and Kirby-- though I'm basing that on the most fleeting of evidence! It's just weird to think that these adventures happened to the same guy as Sandman Mystery Theatre. And it's even weirder to think that that version of Wesley Dodds hung out with an obnoxious snot like Sandy. (Okay, he's nowhere near as bad as Green Arrow's kid sidekick Speedy.)

Also included is the first issue of the 1974-76 series about the second Sandman, Garrett Sanford, which reunited Simon and Kirby for the last time ever. It's weird and doesn't quite hang together-- what is General Electric's plan, anyway?-- but the concepts and visuals are as captivating as always. You can see why Roy Thomas brought back this version (and even game him a name, which Simon and Kirby did not), and why Neil Gaiman nicked some of the concepts for his Sandman series.