Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #958 - Kirby's Black Panther
Hi Mom,
Despite being buried in work, extra buried because I was sick last week, so I did not maintain my usual pace, I took a break and went to see Black Panther today, Sunday, long after the time stamp on this post (more like 4 p.m.).
I feel I earned this break as I worked many hours both Saturday and Sunday before quitting for special events (Saturday night Liesel and I went to a Chinese New Year party).
I will not offer a full review yet, and I am building a curated repository of interesting articles, but I will say that the Black Panther lives up to the hype. It is as good as they're saying. I am glad I stopped working long enough to go see it and enjoy it.
So, here, for more of the comic book connection, material from the man who created the character: Jack Kirby.
Don't be disturbed by Kirby's use of "a black" and "blacks" in the quote below. He was not racist. And he loved this character. He did a great deal of the ground work for the character's heritage and African ancestry, and he did so with pride, respect, and great love.
In all the wonder and hype surrounding the film, let's not forget Jack Kirby's role as the characters creator, and though many have followed and contributed wonderful stories and elements to his lineage and development, Kirby is KING.
Jack Kirby's Black Panther
More than a half-century after Marvel Comics introduced the first black superhero in issue 52 of The Fantastic Four, the media is heralding the arrival of the first black superhero on the big screen: And it's the same character.
This is a reflection of two things, how painfully slow we make progress in the United States (if we make it at all), and how ahead of the curve Jack Kirby was.
Kirby, with Stan Lee, created the Black Panther in the mid 1960s acknowledging that Marvel had black readers, but no black characters.
Kirby, in his own gruff manner (he was a World War II combat vet who chain-smoked Roi-Tan cigars), put it this way:
"I came up with the Black Panther because I realized I had no blacks in my strip. I’d never drawn a black. I needed a black. I suddenly discovered that I had a lot of black readers. My first friend was a black! And here I was ignoring them because I was associating with everybody else. It suddenly dawned on me — believe me, it was for human reasons — I suddenly discovered nobody was doing blacks. And here I am a leading cartoonist and I wasn’t doing a black."
“I really think my father created and introduced the Black Panther because it was the right thing to do at the time,” said Kirby's son Neal. “It broke all the stereotypes—a black super hero with a scientific brain. It’s no secret that my father was very socially liberal, and I think he saw this as his personal way of making a statement and ‘joining’ the civil rights movement.”
Kirby initially named the character the Coal Tiger and did this character design. However, this was quickly changed to Black Panther - a name that pre-dates the black rights movement group of the late 1960s.
Black Panther made his first appearance in Fantastic Four #51 in a story plotted and penciled by the artist and scripted and edited by Lee.
The character made appearances in Captain America and The Avengers and in a solo, backup strip in Daredevil before landing his own series, in Jungle Action, starting in 1973. This was a memorable run, not created by Kirby, but scripted by Don McGregor with art from Rich Buckler, Gil Kane, (not that) Billy Graham and others.
Kirby, who'd been working for DC Comics for several years, returned to Marvel in the mid-1970s and did a 12-issue stint on a new Black Panther series, which he wrote, drew and edited, from 1977-78.
Here's a selection of art from that series and from Kirby's 1960s work on the character.
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