The Black Panther (1973–1976): Rewriting “The Black Experience” in Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan

Abstract

Produced at a point of significant change in literary representations of what was called “the black experience,” the comic book series Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan each represent an ambitious collaboration between Don McGregor, the white writer of the series, and Billy Graham, the black series artist. As a revision of “black experience” novels published by Holloway House during the early 1970s, this comic book series significantly alters the ways in which mourning, memory, and mental fortitude are represented in a world of almost entirely black characters. Fighting villains who create phantasmic illusions that evoke self-doubt, The Black Panther, one of three black superheroes introduced by Marvel comics during the 1960s and 1970s, brings to light and then revises traumatic historical memories. The hero’s journey around the provinces of Wakanda, a black kingdom in Western Africa, requires the Panther to defeat a variety of villains and their proxies and to posit an alternative to revolutionary self-hatred. We learn from this journey that tradition and modernity can coexist and that traumatic memories need not repeat themselves endlessly. Instead, they can be revised and incorporated into narratives that celebrate the power of the disciplined imagination to imagine a better future.

Panther’s Rage, an epic twelve-issue series of the Jungle Action comic written by Don McGregor and illustrated by Billy Graham between November 1973 and September 1975 (McGregor et al. 2016) has been described as an important “cultural marker” that that demonstrates how “comics in the 1970s and beyond could be considered [as] serious literature” (Burroughs 2018). Republished in Marvel’s Epic Collection series, it is printed with three additional contributions: a two-issue introduction of the Black Panther in The Fantastic Four (July and August 1966), an Epilogue (November 1975), and a four-issue mini epic in which The Black Panther battles the Ku Klux Klan (January 1976 to July 1976). Panther’s Rage features one of Marvel’s first black superheroes, The Black Panther. Concerns over race were a large part of the cancellation of the comic book in 1976, before the conclusion of the series The Black Panther Takes on the Klan (Jungle Action). In particular, McGregor faced criticism for being “too close to the black experience” (Borenstein 2023, p. 16). The “the black experience” transmitted specific literary meanings during the 1970s, and those meanings were a source of considerable discomfort to those who believed that comic books should serve as a source of social and cultural regulation. This essay explores a main source of discomfort: McGregor’s subtle use of tropes from novels of “The Black Experience” published by Holloway House Publishing in the 1960s and 1970s. I argue that paying attention to the literary context in which the Black Panther comic appeared means paying attention to novels published by Holloway House. The plots of Marvel’s first black superhero to appear in his own comic, Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, emerge from Holloway House’s main author, the best-selling, prolific but largely unknown writer Donald Goines, a pimp turned writer who published fourteen books with Holloway House between 1971 and his death in 1974 (Manditch-Prottas 2023, p. 8). McGregor’s writing for the Luke Cage, Hero for Hire series often follows the conventions established by Goines, albeit from the perspective of the superhero as a redeemer figure rather than from the perspective of the “hustler” or “player” who needs to be redeemed or, more often, challenged, confronted, and defeated. Although Goines wrote about criminals, he did so with a sense of nuanced interiority that separated decency-oriented criminals from pathological criminals. While the Luke Cage series preserves this important distinction between a “decent” street orientation and a pathological orientation, the contrast is given a more extensive and expansive range in McGregor’s work on The Black Panther. In 1972, shortly after Goines’s second novel, Whoreson, was published, McGregor was given full range as the primary (and only) writer of Panther’s Rage. He was joined by Billy Graham, the only black person working for Marvel. Graham produced most of the artwork, especially ink and pencil work, for the Black Panther series. He also created all of the pencil and inking work for the Luke Cage series. Working in tandem, McGregor and Graham were given complete control over the Black Panther series, and they worked in good faith to represent new possibilities for representing race in comics.

Marvel’s first prominent black superheroes, The Black Panther (1973, first introduced in 1966), Luke Cage, Hero for Hire (1972) and The Falcon (1969), bridged significant gaps in Marvel’s reading public. Creating a black superhero as a role model for black readers was certainly one goal of the Black Panther series, but some critics dismiss Marvel’s efforts by invoking (often in broad terms that erase the nuances of popular entertainment for black people in the 1970s) genres they see as appropriative and exploitative, as in the following summation:

Like the anti-heroes of the Blaxploitation genre, [black] superheroes’ ties to traditional heroics were always in question: Captain America’s partner The Falcon began life as a pimp/gangster named ‘Snap’ Wilson; Luke Cage gains his powers after being experimented on while in prison (albeit for a crime he did not commit); and Black Lightning is as wanted by the police as the villains he fights.

(Cunningham 2010, p. 54)

Cunningham’s emphasis on the proximity of anti-heroes and heroes draws attention to black street contexts during the early 1970s in helpful ways, although what is for Cunningham a mythologized past replete with stereotypes was, during the heyday of Holloway House publishing, a viable and popular publishing nexus for Black writers and readers.

Perhaps one of the most important goals of the Black Panther series was to expand this nexus and its frame of reference for “the black experience” from the world of “the street” in Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and the Falcon into a world in which black people had sovereign control over both the physical and psychological landscape. Holloway House novels represent the emergence of an anti-hero’s sovereignty over the world of the street, but the arc of conquest and brutal control in these novels (Sargent 2010) is offset by an inevitable narrative of incarceration or violent death that triggers an important narrative of redemption. An almost super-human conquest of the world of the street becomes an opportunity for reflections in which the psychological strength required to dominate others is translated into an ability to endure the isolation and loneliness of prison with fortitude and even optimism.

Donald Goines’s second novel for Holloway House, Whoreson (1972), for example, embeds moments of reflection in a narrative that is otherwise relentlessly violent and cruel. As he ascends through the world of pimping and racketeering, Whoreson Jones finds himself needing to discipline his mind as well as his pimps and whores. Alone for one of the first times in the novel, he thinks “Loneliness was a part of life I was not used to [….] my thoughts were troubled as I pondered the future. I kept trying to push the idea from my mind” (Goines 1972, p. 114). When he is first incarcerated, he realizes, “I was confronted with the problem of making my mind accept the fact that I would be behind these forbidding gray walls until my sentence was served” (Goines 1972, p. 179). Prison teaches him “patience” and “calm endurance” (Goines 1972, p. 184), and the management of his mind rather than his pimps and whores eventually enables him to reach a point of redemption at the end of the novel. His prior habit of dwelling on the resentments, bitterness, and betrayals of the past changes, during his final incarceration, into an optimistic possibility for a future shaped by love rather than by hate: “The lonely nights that were before me wouldn’t be lonely anymore. There would be no need to reach down inside myself in the darkness, seeking strength, fighting back the tears of loneliness and despair” (Goines 1972, p. 291). Instead,

I knew there would be a real home somewhere in my future, and a house full of love [….] I bit my lip and tried to remember the old toast an old con had once told me. It fit me to a tee: “The jungle creed, said the strong must feed, /on any prey at hand. I was branded a beast, and sat at the feast, /before I was [ever] a man.” Yes, that was it, and that had been my problem. I had been introduced to too much game at too young an age. As I stared through the bars, I began to see myself more clearly. In the past four hours, I had finally grown up [….] I knew where I was going now. Maybe I didn’t know when I’d get out, but whenever I did, there would be another way of life waiting on me. One I didn’t know anything about, except that there would be truthfulness between me and my woman, and deceit would be a thing of the past.

(Goines 1972, pp. 296–97)

While some readers might regard the replacement of a narrative arc of domination with an arc of redemption as formulaic and simplistic, Candace Love Jackson argues persuasively that criticism of Goines’s style ignores the most important dimensions of his work: finally, someone was writing about “the black experience” in terms that spoke to those who lived it, especially to those with the most time on their hands—prisoners. She argues that “these delineations of the Black underworld are collectively contributing new literary representations of the African American experience in America that readers and scholars should no longer ignore” (Jackson 2004, p. iii). The entertainment factor of the novels could be found in their narratives of domination and violence. The pedagogic force of redemption, however, punctuates these narratives, providing moments of reflection to balance the stimulations of violence and sex. Mental fortitude, the gradual internalization of optimism, self-respect, and respect for others are essential to what we might call the “anti-hero’s journey” in Goines’s novel.

These features are on display in The Black Panther Takes on the Klan in ways that highlight the differences between representations of an urban “black experience” in novels by Goines and representations of historical consciousness in McGregor and Graham’s comic book. Whereas Goines depicts a world in which “the black experience” is composed around narratives that are driven by the fight for self-respect and bounded by the walls of prison or the confines of the urban ghetto (a world in which hope is internalized, individualistic, but not, as we will see, opposed to history), McGregor and Graham offer a world in which the virtues of the Panther’s violent struggle for self-respect can be inherited in ways that enable fantasy to rewrite history. McGregor wanted white readers to experience a world that was, at least visually, a world of black people and to follow a hero who was less a “leader” of his people than an exemplary model of self-governance of mind and body. This psychological power can be experienced by all readers to some degree, and for McGregor and Graham it had significant power to alter the ways in which readers experienced history. For example, in the final episode of the Ku Klux Klan four-issue coda to The Panther’s Revenge, “Death Riders on the Horizon” (22 July 1976), the Black Panther is internalized—absorbed completely—into his American partner Monica Lynn’s imagination. While Monica’s mother tells the story of the lynching of her great uncle Caleb in 1865, Monica imagines the Black Panther saving Caleb and defeating The Soul Strangler, a supernatural emanation of the Ku Klux Klan’s power to reach across history and strangle cultural memory into silence.

Cultural memory, rather than a code of the street, connects The Black Panther series with Goines’s Holloway House novels. In fact, cultural memory shapes the entire Black Panther series; as T’Challa says, “Ancestry and history vanish because the new generations seldom consider it important to hear the lives and events of those who shaped them. And if those personal histories die untold … They are lost to us forever” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 336). In reimagining Uncle Caleb’s lynching as the Black Panther’s victory over The Soul Strangler, Monica says she is “conjuring my own mythology” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 349). She is not erasing or revising traumatic history; rather, she is extending the Black Panther’s power of mental strength and self-possession into history so that the present is marked by a recognized and acknowledged trauma. The traumatic memory does not dominate her imagination, but instead becomes one of many possibilities, some traumatic and some liberatory, for imagining the present.

Acknowledging and remembering history, although familiar to many people today, was not standard practice when this issue of The Black Panther was published. T’Challa’s warning about untold stories was answered by Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which was published later in 1976 and became a tremendously influential miniseries the following year. This attention to historical contexts was particularly important for the ways in which it integrated the traumatic experiences of Black people with the traumatic experiences of other people, especially Jews. In fact, in Never Die Alone (1974), Goines establishes a direct connection between the development of Holocaust memory and the development of black consciousness. Goines’s interest in Holocaust testimony and history is a significant literary development, as he weaves together the narrative of a white Jewish reporter, Paul Pawlawski, and King David (also known as King Cobra), a black racketeer who leaves Paul with a diary of his life. In a scene that offers a metacommentary on the difference between writing inflammatory anti-Jewish and anti-black propaganda and writing inflammatory urban “black experience” narratives, Paul confronts his newspaper editor, who has demanded that he write a race baiting article about miscegenation among young blacks and Jews:

Paul was seeing Germany all over again, seeing the men with the black shirts yelling at the crowds about the “dirty Jews.” Rabble-rousers from the word go, but their shouting and screaming finally paid off. People had listened, then turned their heads when the killings began. It was this kind of man who was responsible for his mother and father being dead.

(Goines 1974, p. 34)

Paul draws comparisons between violence against Jews and the potential for a renewal of lynchings of black people in the South, and he tells his editor, “I think the South has enough problems without me writing something that would inflame some ignorant bastard so that he got drunk and took out his anger on some poor black bastard who doesn’t have the slightest idea of why it’s happening to him” (Goines 1974, p. 34). Once he reads the diary that King David has bequeathed him, Paul finds that he has far more in common with the black underworld than with his racist publisher and the newspaper’s racist readership. The inflammatory function of Goines’s own novels is thus contrasted with the inflammatory function of racist presses. One invites discussions of justice. The other leads to murder.

As he explores his characters’ journeys of consciousness, Goines moves towards ideas of “Black Consciousness” as defined by the South African writer Steve Biko, who writes, “part of the approach envisaged in bringing about ’black consciousness’ has to be directed to the past, to seek to rewrite the history of the black man and to produce in it the heroes who form the core of the African background” (Biko 1978, p. 29). This statement speaks directly to Don McGregor’s portrayal of the Black Panther’s power to shape readers’ historical imagination and represents a significant extension of Goines’s confrontations with trauma. McGregor faced considerable criticism over the Klan series, as many readers were unwilling to acknowledge both the history of lynching and the threat of rising Klan membership during the 1970s. He remembers the controversy with a characteristic sense of wry humor: “there was an uproar about the Klan. My response was, ‘Hey, you wanted white people, I gave you white people. There’s no satisfying you folks’” (Borenstein 2023, p. 16). McGregor’s comment underscores his commitment to the blackness of Wakanda and to the need to recognize racist violence in the United States. As Monica Lynn puts it, “There aren’t any splints for the mind. And sometimes we are not even aware that anything is broken” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 149). Recognizing the effects of history on the mind and engaging in the slow process of healing is in fact the main work of the series.

When critics contest that McGregor’s world is a “race neutral” world they therefore miss the comic’s deft translation of the violent world of “the street” and “the jail” that dominated Donald Goines’s Holloway House novels into a mythical black African kingdom, Wakanda, that is as much a psychological space as it is a physical one. In Wakanda, concerns over power and racial justice are approached elliptically rather than as part of a “Blaxploitation” aesthetic that was popular in 1970s culture. Instead of defining “the Black Experience” as an urban experience, as the Holloway House novels do, The Black Panther series offers readers a complicated world in which traditional village life and sophisticated technological institutions exist side by side. Coexistence does not lead to integration, however. For example, the Central Wakandan Medical Center is described as follows: “The examination rooms blend African sculpture with modern equipment. Tribal herbalists work alongside skilled surgeons … but the efforts at easing the cultural clash have not entirely succeeded” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 173). A shot of vitamins, described by the doctor as “a new kind of poultice”, might begin healing the body of a woman who has become malnourished after her husband has been killed by Killmonger’s militia, but it will not address the damage that has been done to her mind. For that healing to happen, the Black Panther’s imaginative redemptive vitality is necessary.

This imaginative vitality can be seen as an extension and expansion of the redemptive energies that mark Goines’s novels. Instead of a street or jail setting, however, this vitality is set against the context of civil war that Billy Graham’s art presents in its full tragic form. Jungle Action 11, September 1974, titled “Once You Slay the Dragon,” is centered around a scene of war that fills two full pages with a single panel. Headlined “War cannot be contained within boundaries. Nor can it be easily directed. War, at times, is very cosmopolitan” (McGregor et al. 2016, pp. 142–43), the double panel resembles footage of Vietcong and South Vietnamese soldiers fighting to take charge of a village during the Vietnam War. It is followed by a twelve-panel page that illustrates the grief of Taku, T’challa’s security chief, as he carries the body of a young boy who has been killed by Killmonger’s soldiers (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 144). Graham’s artwork evokes scenes from Vietnam and Biafra that would have been familiar to readers. In the final panel, T’Challa says to another member of his security force, “oft-times, once you slay the dragon …. Its blood stains more than your hands” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 145). Wakanda, threatened by civil war, reminds readers of other civil wars, extending the range of “the black experience” to Biafra and Vietnam, where the psychological effects of war reached millions of Americans through television.

Wakanda also offers an opportunity for Billy Graham to present some of the most stunningly beautiful artwork ever seen in a Marvel Comic book. After an encounter with Salamander K’ruel in “Thorns in the Flesh. Thorns in the Mind” (Jungle Action: The Black Panther 15, May 1975), T’Challa is exhausted. He has battled a villain whose power strips his victims of agency, filling them with “self-deception” and “self-doubt” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 206) and creating a world that is “alien and uncomprehendable” to “the reasoning mind” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 207). T’Challa survives the encounter by drawing on past memories of his father and his mental training, and in the next issue, Graham follows McGregor’s intense psychological portrait with a superb presentation of healing. Monica and T’Challah are depicted in the second page riding beautiful sea turtles (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 219). In the next page, they rise to the surface on bubbles of air (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 220), and the following pages depict a gorgeous sunset that highlights their love for one another (McGregor et al. 2016, pp. 221–23). McGregor’s heightened prose emphasizes the Panther’s victory over self-deception and self-doubt, as he writes, “Wakanda becomes a palpable backdrop, a canvas marking the route of a copper sun, a chart for a midnoon zephyr flirting with the trees. They hold on to each other’s hand as if to confirm the other’s reality” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 222). As they do, T’Challa says to Monica, “you are beautiful,” and she says in reply, “you are beautiful too” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 223). The scene of reciprocal tenderness is beautiful.

It is this world that Erik Killmonger seeks to destroy. Killmonger is a violent revolutionary who destroys outlying river villages and murders their inhabitants with casual ease. His attempts to invade Central Wakanda require a more subtle approach, that of psychological warfare. These are the most interesting issues in the series, as they create a contrast between surface and depths, or as Douglas Wolk puts it “T’Challah’s domain, the surface of Wakanda” and “literal and metaphorical underground spaces, occupied by the dead and Killmonger’s insurgent “death regiments” (Wolk 2021, p. 214). Like many super villains, Killmonger translates grief and trauma into a quest for revenge, and like many super villains he uses the tools of psychological warfare. T’Challa, on the other hand, is part of a larger narrative of mourning that places self-governance and emotional clear-headedness at the core of a ruler’s experience. This narrative of psychic warfare frames the first six issues in the series, running for a full year, from September 1973 to September 1974. The villains—Venomm, Baron Macabre, King Cadaver, and Sombre—are Killmonger’s proxies. Their elaborate strategies of mind control are essential to the narrative arc of Panther’s Rage, which, as we remember, ends with Monica Lynn’s psychic victory over the Ku Klux Klan. This narrative arc of deception, self-deception, fear and doubt mirrors concerns in the 1960s and 1970s about “total mind control” and speaks to concerns about propaganda campaigns today (Lifton 1961, 2019). These villains are what would have been termed at the time “freaks.” Venomm, the most sympathetic villain and the only white character in the series, has had his face badly scarred by acid. Baron Macabre leads a legion of the dead, commanding them to rise from the ground to terrify the farmer M’Jumbak and then strangle him to death. King Cadaver has been mutated by radiation into a hideous monster with “flesh that has the texture of mold forming on a culture dish” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 126), but his voice is far more dangerous than his gruesome deformed face and enlarged head. T’Challa confronts King Cadaver’s gruesome face in a roomful of mirrors and recoils.

But it is King Cadaver’s voice that shocks him. For it is a voice that belies his grotesque abnormality. From lips wet with saliva and torn raw in the blistered face comes the voice of an orator—soft and pleasant—with a politician’s elocution—a gently persuasive tone that probes, insistently probing for the Panther’s identity, ripping into his psyche, threatening to tear that very identity from him, eyes and mouth working toward one purpose, the eyes stealing across the ego-valleys, id centers, and super ego reservoirs, while the voice calms and coaxes, corrosively eating away at the Panther’s resistance (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 123).

Yet resist the Panther does. His mental strength not only shatters King Cadaver’s mirror world, it breaks the death mask that Baron Macabre uses to strike fear in those who think he leads an army of the dead. His face is normal, and his army of the dead, who seem rise up from their graves, are really ordinary soldiers who use a system of tunnels and prepared ground to create the illusion that is so terrifying the people of Wakanda (and, frankly, to readers of the comic).

As they create these narratives of freakishness, McGregor and Graham revise story lines from the work of the novelists Chester Himes and Donald Goines. Both writers were leading black novelists in the 1970s, but because their audience included a reading public composed partly of prisoners and criminals, acknowledgement of their important contributions to literary have been overlooked. Two of the core features of Himes’ and Goines’ prison novels involve the battle against mental phantasms and psychic freakishness and the battle to maintain a successful form of self-governance in the face of physical and mental suffering. While there is no record of McGregor’s and Graham’s reading habits, Himes’ and Goines’ novels were readily available at corner drugstores in most areas where black readership was high. Odie Harris describes these novels as a “Pan African Occult” (Gifford et al. 2013, p. 237). The macabre and phantasmic are all too real in this genre, and one of McGregor and Graham’s significant advances is to suggest that what appears ghoulish is in fact a con, a trick designed to intimidate and cow people into submission.

Some readers look to external contexts as they consider the ways in which comic books approach themes of fear and terror. Anna Peppard, for example, argues that sexualized battle scenes risk conflating the Black Panther with the snakes, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and gorillas with whom he battles, commenting that

The ability of superhero comics, in particular, to graphically incarnate cultural fears and fantasies in the bodies and bodily conflicts of fantastic beings in fantastic places makes them vital sources for investigating popular mythologies, and, potentially, creating new ones […] Whether the investigation of such worlds reveals conservative or liberating messages, it can always tell us something valuable about the challenges that continue to face every effort to imagine heroic black bodies that can, must, and should be both more than that, and exactly that.

(Peppard 2018, p. 81)

We do not, however, need to infer or impose “cultural fears and fantasies” when considering T’Challa’s battles of the mind with Venomm, King Cadaver, Baron Macabre, Thornn, and Specter. The fears and fantasies are right in front of us, and they all force readers to confront tensions between irrational morbidity and rational self-command. Most commentators overlook these battles, but they are central to the Black Panther’s journey from a self-doubting outsider to a powerful hero who enables readers to both confront histories of racism and to imagine alternative futures. Instead of dismissing a revisionary past in which the Black Panther conquers the Klan as an escapist fantasy, MacGregor and Graham suggest that these fantasies, when layered over a traumatic past, translate the otherwise outlandish physicality of the comic book into mental exercises that readers can themselves perform. None of us can move like T’Challa, but we can all think like him. His journey, as we will see in the next section, is a journey for us all back into a past that we can revise into a positive future marked not by fear and hatred but by love and self-knowledge.

The Black Panther’s heroic journey is both physical and political. Yet his summary of the journey suggests a more sociological approach than the one taken by McGregor and Graham. Burroughs informs us that by “the end of the story, the reader has been around most of Wakanda with its monarch, and now knows its geography, including its ethnic enclaves and religious minorities, as well as its culture and class distinctions” (Burroughs 2018). True as this may be, it is not the main focus of the series. As we have seen that focus is largely on the defeat of villains and their coercive psychological power. Physically, T’Challa circumnavigates Wakanda, visiting every province and territory in his quest to defeat Killmonger. In doing so, he embarks on a journey far away from “the street” and “the jail.” Wakanda is a world in which black people are sovereign leaders or revolutionaries. The sovereign leader is a revision of the “good” hoodlum of the “black experience novels” of Holloway House. He is a figure who is looking for justice as much as cash or power. The revolutionary villain and his proxies are revisions of the “bad” hoodlum organizations whose objectives are to overthrow the existing social order in favor of authoritarian brutality. Unlike the “good” or “decency oriented” hoodlum (Anderson 1999, pp. 73–75) who uses violence as a means to an end, the revolutionary hoodlum is a sadist who delights in terrorizing and torturing people. It is no accident, I think, that the series begins with the Black Panther interrupting a scene of torture. The physical dimension of the Panther’s journey involves the regulation of violence.

The second dimension of the hero’s journey is mental. T’Challa’s journey is as much a journey of the mind, of managing emotions and controlling the imagination, as it is a physical journey into every province of Wakanda. The activation of memory, in fact, is a key factor throughout the series, since the present is always influenced by past traumas, past victories, and past hatreds that inform T’Challa’s dedication to Wakanda and its people. The entire narrative of “The Panther’s Rage” is shaped by tensions between Wakanda’s past, the past of the American South, and the eruption of past traumas into the present. On a practical level, T’Challa must govern during a time of insurrection. On a psychological level, he must maintain control over the terrifying illusions of the mind that Killmonger uses to fragment Wakanda’s people and T’Challa’s mind. On an emotional level, he must balance his personal life with his life as a leader and his loyalties to his counsellors. The series begins with T’Challa’s return to Wakanda with Monica. The return is immediately traumatic as the first Jungle Action issue (Jungle Action #6 September 1973) opens with T’Challa’s discovery of a caged old man who has been nearly tortured to death. As he carries the man’s body back to his village, he reflects,

Once, he was acutely attuned to this land … once, he was part of it and it was part of him … but now he is aware that there has been a subtle, undefinable change … and he is no longer an integral part of his heritage! The knowledge of this and of the destroyed humanity he holds in his arms is reflected in his walk. A somber wake forms this silent procession, all mute with one emotion” MOURNING!

(McGregor et al. 2016, p. 51)

The next day, he discovers that a river village has been destroyed and its people massacred: “It is the scene of a massacre, the slaughter of a gentle people who lived off the tepid waters … and who have now died there! The pain and hurt and loss are a shattering reality—the destruction of a leader’s dream” (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 53).

Set against this background of heartbreak and destruction, T’Challa’s love for Monica Lynne, a “songstress, a minor-grade Aretha Franklin” and former social worker (McGregor et al. 2016, p. 52) who has joined him in Wakanda from the United States, is more significant than it might first appear. Her presence bridges the distance between the contemporary world of the United States and the imaginary world of Wakanda. Monica knows about grief. Her past is suffused with loss. Her empathy enables T’Challa and other characters to express the loss, guilt, and sorrow that follow the aftermath of Erik Killmonger’s massacre of a Wakandan village. While critics argue that the series highlights conflicts between the successful performance of black identity and a harmful objectification and sexualization of black bodies (Peppard 2018; Taylor 2007), Monica’s vivid historical imagination and T’Challa’s exemplary ability to control his mind are of much greater significance than their bodies.

Indeed, at the heart of the series, and at the heart of the hero’s journey, the themes of overcoming trauma and managing mourning dominate. Killmonger, who commands the “Death Regiments,” reminiscent of Nazi Storm Troopers, which slaughter Wakandan villagers, is traumatized by the murder of his father and his own enslavement at the hands of Klaww, a white prospector who tries to take control of Wakanda’s valuable resources. These events are presented retrospectively, and they contrast with T’Challa’s own traumatic narrative, as his father is also murdered by Klaww. Whereas Killmonger is enslaved by Klaww and upon liberation (by the Black Panther, no less) vows to subjugate and rule Wakanda, T’Challah fights back, even as a boy, to protect Wakanda’s people. His journey back and forth between boyhood and manhood is essential to the plot of the series. As he remembers the development of his own self-command over fear, we see another boy, one whose father M’Jumbak has been terrified and then murdered by Baron Macabre, moving through the panel. This boy saves T’Challa by using his balance, not his strength, as he pushes Killmonger off a cliff. Just as T’Challa avenges the death of his father, so does the boy who saves him.

In many respects, the journey of inherited vengeance from one character to another is as important as the physical and psychological journeys that make up the bulk of T’Challa’s engagement with Wakanda. If mourning and trauma are to be confronted in serious ways, the mind must have the ability to manage fantasies of revenge.

The Black Panther series stands out for three main reasons, all of which are activated during this tour of Wakanda. First, The Black Panther is unusual in that he has no super-powers. His mental and physical agility, strength and fortitude are the product of intensive training, validating ritual ceremonies, and a concoction of heart-shaped herbs that provide him with a natural source of power. Because his power does not stem from extraterrestrial, mechanical, accidental (especially industrial accidental), or supernatural causes, he is especially vulnerable—a more human hero than the superheroes whose powers to withstand pain stagger the imagination. As Todd Burroughs puts it, “this non-superhero Panther was now a kind of warrior-priest who could endure suffering as well as any Hindu yogi” (Burroughs 2018). Secondly, The Panthers Rage’ addresses in subtle ways the upheavals of black life in America between 1973 and 1976. These three years witness a shift from an interest in revolutionary thinking (such as that of the armed political group The Black Panthers) to a fascination with the imaginative possibilities of space exploration, on one hand, and an investment in conventional political power, on the other. Tensions between tradition and innovation move away from Marxist-influenced thinking to activism within institutional contexts, especially learning contexts within and beyond academia, regarding black intellectual culture. The Panther’s Rage reflects this shift. Finally, The Black Panther is not simply the first black comic book hero. His return to Wakanda in the first Jungle Action comic book offers readers an entrance into an almost entirely black world. This shift is important artistically, as Billy Graham’s inking, art, and coloring replace Jack Kirby’s Soviet realist-influenced characterization. It might be said that whereas The Black Panther looks like a medium-gray version of an icon of “blackness,” Sidney Poitier, in his Fantastic Four appearances, he and the other characters in The Panther’s Rage are representative of a range of African-American people whose presence in mainstream American real life, rather than simply on the screen, burgeoned during the 1970s.

The series is liberating in many respects, in that it offers readers the experience of full immersion in the world of Wakanda, an almost entirely black cast struggling with insurrection and self-governance, and a superhero whose mental fortitude surpasses his physical powers. Yet it is also restricting, in that the physical and psychic terrain of Wakanda is marked by the Panther’s intense suffering as he moves to liberate one region after another from the revolutionary stranglehold of Erik Killmonger, a villain who has forsaken his Wakandan name, N’Jadaka, in favor of a Nordic pseudonym. This tension between liberation and suffering makes for an uneven sequence of stories, although the beginning and the end of the series offer a coherent and compelling literary narrative. The series begins as the Black Panter fights a war of psychological propaganda against three villains of the occult: Baron Macabre, King Cadaver, and Spectre. The series ends with a coda set in the rural Southern United States in which the Black Panther enters into the psyche of a family who have borne the historical trauma of a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan for generations. Mental liberation from trauma and superstitious fear thus mark both the beginning and the end of the series. The middle issues of the series are more uneven, running from outlandish battles against dinosaurs, to compelling battles against the Panther’s mythical competitor, the White Gorilla, to evocative family dramas of estrangement, abuse, and separation as the family of T’Challa’s second in command disintegrates while his chief security officer develops a strange attachment to the prisoner Venomm, the only white character in the series. Although, as Douglas Wolk argues, McGregor’s stories were both “enormously ambitious and thoughtful” and marked by a “poetic verbosity [that] sometimes makes them a chore to read” (Wolk 2021, p. 212), it is possible to consider “poetic verbosity” as a more of an attractive asset, rather than as an impediment to meaning, for some readers. Psychological complexity takes time to develop, and it does not always emerge as the pithy and glib battle jibes that are a feature of so many battle scenes in Marvel comics.

For example, McGregor’s willingness to entertain freakishness and to combat psychological forms of thought control in the series would have been popular with a wide variety of new readers, especially black working class and lower middle-class readers and readers, male and female of any class, in prison. When Jeffrey A. Brown argues that Marvel’s black superheroes are ‘closely identified with the limited stereotypes commonly found in Blaxploitation films of the era’ (Brown 2000, p. 4), he favors film over the important emergent literary form of Goines’s ‘prison novels’—novels that were written for an audience that included, but was not exclusive to, men and women in prison. These are not easily dismissed as “blaxploitation” novels—as illustrated above, they are serious, fraught, violent, often grimly humorous and sexually explicit explorations of black life in urban and prison contexts (Wiltse 2023).

In fact, it is deeply disturbing that the very reasons why this comic would be significant to readers—it creates an alternative world of the imagination and stages intense dramas of psychological strength—have been used to justify a court ruling that denied prisoners in Pennsylvania access to reading material in prison. In 1987, William J. Coyle argued in Libraries in Prisons: A Blending of Institutions that many prisoners’ interests are “intensely antisocial, pathological, and supportive of criminal life-styles,” such that library services “geared to interests of inmate users might well be more detrimental than beneficial to constructive change.” (qtd. In Sweeney 2010, pp. 41–42). Megan Sweeney’s commentary is particularly insightful for comic book studies, and it is worth quoting at length:

In critiquing libraries that cater to prisoners’ interests, Coyle singles out a Pennsylvania prison’s “unabashedly recreational” collection of novels by Donald Goines and Iceberg

Slim, two African American authors now considered the fathers of contemporary urban fiction. Coyle’s particular disdain for these works reflects his assumption that such narratives—which foreground rebellious black masculinity and draw on their authors’ experiences with racism, ghetto living, drug addiction, and imprisonment—could never promote “constructive change.” In his view, appropriate materials for a prison library include newspapers, magazines, trade journals, nonfiction books, career information, and directories. Prison librarians should give “no consideration” to materials that are “essentially recreational,” and “virtually all fiction might thus be excluded.” Leaving little room for the possibility that fiction can foster change, or that readers can make creative uses of all kinds of materials, Coyle reasons that it is wasteful to fund recreational books that do not “contribut[e] substantively to the change process.

(Sweeney 2010, p. 42)

Comic books are often considered as “essentially recreational” reading, yet that recreational space is often full of meaning and important to the reader’s identity (Kaluzna 2024). While helping to maintain a sense of identity apart from the identity of the institution of the prison is a crucial that comic books can play, they also enable readers to develop multiple identities that challenge the impositions of identity that are part of being in any culture. These multiple identities are often internalizations of superhero talents, along the lines of Monica Lynn’s internalization of T’Challa’s powers.

Sometimes, reading itself is the superhero power that we should “take away” after we read comic books. As Darnell, one of the lifelong readers of comic books interviewed by Jeffrey A. Brown, puts it

People just don’t get it […] They think comics are just for little kids and geeks, that if you still like them there has to be something wrong with you. It just ain’t worth the grief to let them all know, I don’t want my girlfriend to think she has hooked up with some Momma’s boy loser. Besides [he looked sideways at Bruce, who was laughing at his insecurities], I’m more like the anti-Superman, you know, unlike mildmannered Clark Kent, who is really Superman. I’m more like super-Darnell, who has this hidden comic book fan side as his secret identity.

(Brown 2000, p. 103)

The Black Panther comic promotes “constructive change” and the power of reading by emphasizing mental and physical fortitude, aspects of existence that many readers, including those in prison, can interpret and shape in their own ways. By converting the “prison novels” published by Holloway House into a comic book series that is both literary and accessible to a wide range of audiences, Don McGregor and Billy Graham changed the terms by which “the black experience” could be read, opening readers’ minds to a combination of confrontations with the racist past of the United States and depictions of imagined futures in which “the black experience” can be an experience of triumph over vengeful revolution, corrosive psychological warfare, and the self-doubts that can plague us all. Importantly, as suggested by Jeffrey A. Brown in his discussion of Milestone Media comic books, a “black-owned and controlled” company that began publishing in 1993, comic books facilitate the widening out of experience, especially comic books that feature black superheroes who are, as one reader quoted by Brown puts it, “different, ya know, and not just because of the color of their skin” (Brown 1999, p. 41). That sense of difference is apparent in Panther’s Rage in many ways, and it is T’Challa’s psychological victories that stand out when we move beyond the physical dimensions of his journey. Those psychological victories enable readers to replace a preoccupation with “white man’s justice” with a more hopeful and yet historically grounded analysis of “black man’s grief,” to quote from the title of one of Donald Goines’s most popular books, White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief (Goines 1973). T’Challa’s journey, which is intensified in Monica’s journey into her own family’s past, begins with grief. The movement of that grief through Wakanda creates a mental fortitude that does not allow room for cynicism but instead encourages hope. The comic book is an action comic book, but McGregor and Graham produce almost as many panels that illustrate the stillness of thought as they do panels that demonstrate the motion of a superhero’s body. Ultimately, the action involved in the journey is emotional and imaginative, and it produces the possibility for new histories to emerge in the future.

Those new histories emerged in the second decade of the 20th century through Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Black Panther graphic novels (Coates 2017, 2018) and through the World of Wakanda series, featuring Roxanne Gay and Yona Harvey (Coates et al. 2016). Highly successful film versions of the comic book solidified the standing of The Black Panther as a significant figure in the twenty-first century imagination. It is hoped that discussions of these new forms of the Black Panther series consider the connections between the original series and forms of publication and reading that were significant to an emerging readership of all races, but especially of black comic book readers, during the first half of the 1970s. The Black Panther’s journey has been a long one, and as it continues in digital and graphic novel form its original themes of imaginative fortitude continue to develop in new ways. Rooting that journey among the novels of “black experience” published by Holloway House offers readers new possibilities for understanding and appreciating the growth of comic book readership in the 1970s.