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

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The Black Panther (1973-1976): Rewriting “The Black Experience” in Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan offers a generative reading of Don McGregor and Billy Graham's Panther's Rage storyline. Linking McGregor's writing to the "Black experience" work produced by Donald Goines, Chester Himes and Iceberg Slim is promising, but remains underdeveloped in the draft. Conversely, the author's close reading of the Panther's Rage storyline is incredibly generative, particularly their attention to the psychological aspects of the writing and art. To that end I was curious why the author skirts a serious engagement with Malcolm X and African decolonization. Malcolm's attention to both Black dignity and Black internationalism shaped Black cultural production in the 1970s. So while the author correctly notes that McGregor anticipates Roots, Panther's Rage was also engaging the implications of African independence. This should be made clearer.

Some of the claims the author makes about McGregor, Goines and Himes would apply better to McGregor's work on Luke Cage than on T'Challa. The author might solve this incongruity by detailing the generic tropes of a Goines novel. Indeed, while a reader who had never come across a Black Panther comic would have a clear sense of what a typical comic represented, there is no articulation of ANY Goines text. I belabor this point because I was quite intrigued by the possibilities of this comparison and thus was disappointed to see the author cite the expectations of prison libraries rather than any of Goines many novels. While the plot of Goines debut Dopefiend (for example) seems miles away from the adventures chronicled in Panther's Rage, both are about the psychology of power in an indifferent world as the author astutely suggests. But I only made this connection because I happen to have read both texts. Most readers will have no clue as to this overlap. 

I am fixating on this lack in the essay because I find the rest of the article quite strong and nearly ready for publication. I would ask the author to think more carefully about McGregor's relationship to the Vietnam war, as the torture by Killmonger and his allies seems to track that of the My Lai massacre and other stories of abuse. McGregror's characterization of T'Challa as a reluctant warrior, which the author clearly establishes here, might be contrasted with the rampant and callous militarism of Killmonger. Again the article gestures towards this but does not make this connection explicit despite its careful description of T'Challa's psychological state.

I am excited to see this article in its final form as I think it will contribute to an overlooked period of cultural production.  

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1

Thank you for your thoughtful comments and insights. I have worked to address your suggestions, and I find that the process has helped my teaching in significant ways, if I may say so.

I have included more extensive discussion of and quotations from Goines's novels, and I have worked to integrate those examples into the overall argument about the Black Panther comic series. In revision, I have stressed the ways in which MacGregor and Graham create an alternative to the “street” version of “the black experience.” I have added sections that engage directly with the psychological dimensions of Goines’s novels Whoreson and Never Die Alone.

I worked hard to consider the historical context, and I found that Steve Biko's Black Consciousness ideas were more appropriate to the series than any other larger philosophical frame. This was a delightful discovery, as I had been very much concerned with Biko years ago. Although I was not able, for reasons of space, to incorporate much of this thinking, I hope that I have at least provided a lead for future readers to follow and expand/explore. The differences between T'Challah and Killmonger seem more apparent to me now that I have had a chance to think about Goines' "decency-oriented" criminals (who are horribly brutal but interested in the world outside of the street) and the psychopathic criminals who come under intense criticism in his novels. I hadn't been aware of the importance of that distinction until I reread much of Biko's writing. 

I hope this shows up in the revision -- the period between 1973 and 1976 seems more and more to me, in retrospect, as a crucial period in Black reading and publishing. I used to teach either Toni Morrison's Sula OR Song of Solomon, but now after rethinking this essay along the lines you have suggested, I realize that teaching these novels together, and teaching the significant differences between them, can offer students some insight into the development of Black fiction from a more protean early 1970s incarnation into the more recognizable "cultural memory" work that we still consider -- that work started, I think in the mid 70s. This, to me, is the difference between The Panther's Rage and The Black Panther Takes on The Klan.

But that would be another article that might include some disappointment that the Black Panther movies don't consider the Panther's rage against the Klan. I honestly thought they would when I went to see them!

My intention in the essay is to open a conversation about the kind of reading that we might do and that we might think about doing (and that others might do). I realize that I come close to making the claim that the comic book was prison reading (it was, but of course it was read by a wide readership), yet I want to reiterate the importance of the shift to reading towards the end of the essay. Making prisoners read only "improving literature" rather than Goines (or comic books) is cruel and petty in so many ways. 

I hope I have addressed your excellent feedback adequately, though I fear my responses may be a little more elliptical than direct.

I have indicated places of revision by putting them in bold, as requested by the publisher.

Thank you again for your work as a reviewer. It is significant in many ways and reaches beyond the immediate context of the essay under review.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

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

 

With gratitude to the author (I’ll use “they” as my anonymized, gender-neutral pronoun for them) for this original and often striking submission, I recommend that the author revise their article “The Black Panther (1973-1976): Rewriting ‘The Black Experience’ in Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan” and resubmit it after making major revisions. In its current state the article has plenty to recommend itself, even as—as the author and any other readers likely recognize—the article isn’t done: this is clear in several places, most evidently in the final paragraph, which seems to be a leftover note to self or editorial suggestion. As the author revises this article and makes it the best version of itself—which is to say, a stylish, resourceful, welcomely digressive article on one era of the Black Panther, with a surprising claim about that hero’s contexts and relation to popular literature outside of comics—I would recommend they concentrate on three things, most imperatively the first:

 

1. Central claim: I found the article’s forcefully made central claim—that “paying attention to the literary context in which the Black Panther comic appeared means paying attention to novels published by Holloway House” (1)—to be groundbreaking, full stop. I couldn’t wait to read an essay that reshaped my understanding of Black Panther and his contexts, that explored Don McGregor’s “subtle use of tropes from novels of ‘The Black Experience’ published by Holloway House Publishing” (1) and taught me how to recognize those tropes; that read broadly across and deeply into Panther’s Rage and showed me how I was reading it insufficiently until now, thanks to this article and the light it shines on Holloway House.

 

Frankly, I didn’t read that essay. In its current incarnation, the article does not quote any Holloway House novels; it mentions none by name. It brings up the novels’ tropes, but only fleetingly, never for longer than a few sentences, and seldom with any examples from the novels or much scholarship on Holloway House. It never does what I believe would be a clincher of a close reading for this article: dwelling on some significant scene or issue of Panther’s Rage and interpreting in light of Holloway House tropes, showing me panel by panel how I could be reading Panther’s Rage more historically and capaciously if I recognized their play with tropes from black popular fiction. Instead it lets Holloway House go: it largely disappears from the article after page 5, with just one mention in summary before the article’s end.

 

And the article really should stick with Holloway House and do some of the explicit argumentative moves I’ve listed above, since by the author’s own admission there are good reasons not to buy their central claim: there are significant differences between the worlds of Black Panther and of Holloway House novels (which characterize “the black experience” as urban where Black Panther is situated at once in the village and in a technological utopia), and there’s “no record of [Don] McGregor’s and [Billy] Graham’s reading habits” (3) and no evidence they were reading work by Chester Himes, Donald Goines, or any other Holloway House novelists. I’d recommend the author spend far more time reiterating their central claim, offering evidence for it, and contending with counterarguments against it. That claim should be a signal virtue of this article; right now, it’s a fascinating tidbit that’s more suggested than argued for.

 

2. Close reading: For an article in comics studies (and specifically on one of the most readable, colorful, eye-catching series of superhero comics, illustrated by Marvel’s only black illustrator at the time), this article devotes little time to close reading. It spends even less time actually looking at comics: the author is far more likely to quote Panther’s Rage (which they do at length, in block quotations and within their own sentences) than to think about its art—to consider such topics as visual style, paneling, page layout, body language, facial expressions, use of color, approaches to portraying black American and African characters, and so on. The article’s longest look at Panther’s Rage as a work of comics amounts to one paragraph, spanning pages 3 and 4, and its main focus is on the comic’s “beautiful artwork.” Is there a way to hone this close reading, or other readings like it, and put them in service of the article’s unique argument? I suspect it’s not possible to include any images from Panther’s Rage in the article—which is all the more reason for this perceptive and evocative author to conjure up those images for us, then tell us how to read them.

 

3. Sources: I was glad to see the author incorporate several pertinent kinds of sources: versions of Black Panther from the 1970s to today, some writing on black superheroes generally and Black Panther in particular, some sources on black popular literature. There are other kinds I’m not seeing. I said earlier that there are no Holloway House novels quoted or mentioned by name. There also aren’t many sources about Panther’s Rage in particular, even though it’s been recently considered both in academic writing and in some indispensable non-academic sources, like Abraham Josephine Riesman’s 2018 essay for Vulture (for which he interviewed Don McGregor) and Douglas Wolk’s All of the Marvels (2021), which includes a chapter on the history of Black Panther. I’d like to see more of those sources considered in this article.

 

I’d also advise the author to treat those sources more as conversation partners than as competitors to discredit or one-up. When the author does cite one or more sources, it’s often to say those sources are wrong (see page 6, on the relative importance of bodies and minds in Black Panther, or on page 7, contrasting prison novels and blaxploitation). Perhaps the author does think they’re wrong, but these sources deserve to be represented fully and fairly, not brought up only to be dismissed.

 

A few smaller notes, mostly by page number:

• Title: I wonder if a shorter and more focused title for this article might cut the title The Black Panther Takes on the Klan (which doesn’t come up much; the bulk of the article focuses on Panther’s Rage), or cut both titles and instead put Jungle Action or (“in the Age of Jungle Action”) in the title.
• 1, abstract: Two inaccuracies. As far as I know, no one considers the series Panther’s Rage to be “the first graphic novel.” Googling around, I see one critic called it Marvel’s first graphic novel; why not say that? And the Black Panther was not introduced “during the early 1970s”; he first appeared in a 1966 issue of Fantastic Four.
• 1, first paragraph: The author cites a source with the citation “(Borestein, 2023)”; it doesn’t appear in the bibliography on page 9. (This is an important quotation: it introduces the key term “the black experience.” What’s the source?)
• 4, 5, 6, 8, block quotations: This note may be for the author or the journal or both, but block quotations on these pages are formatted incorrectly; they appear as though they’re the author’s own prose. (Two block quotations are formatted correctly: one on page 2 and the first of the two block quotations on page 8.)
• 6, middle of the page: The author cites four sources on Black Panther. Only one (Peppard) appears in the bibliography on page 9.
• 7: On this page the author twice refers to Panther’s Rage as The Rage of the Panther: is this a mistake?
• 9, last paragraph: As mentioned above, there’s a note to the author left in the article here.
• A general stylistic note: Within this article there’s inconsistent formatting when it comes to titles. I’d recommend the author reread their work to make sure that Black Panther, the hero and his history, is in roman type, not italics; Black Panther, when it refers to published comics featuring the hero, is in italics, not roman; Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan are consistently in italics, not quotation marks; and issues within those arcs are in quotation marks. (There are some sentences that may be better off rewritten to skirt around any possible confusions, especially in the title-filled first paragraph.)

 

My thanks again for this promising article, which I predict could become not simply a publishable article but a delightful, instructive, teachable essay for comics readers, students, and scholars.

Author Response

Response to reviewer 2

Thank you for your comments, criticisms, and suggestions. They are most welcome and were stimulating and interesting. I hope I have addressed your concerns and that the essay is stronger as a result. 

Your expectations were high, and I think my revisions only begin to approximate the essay that you had in mind. I will keep working towards that essay if I need to. It is a goal worth attaining.

I have included a more extensive discussion of Whoreson  and Never Die Alone so that readers might get a sense not only of the tropes that make Goines's work relevant but also so that readers might understand the complicated relationship between the brutality of the novels and the impetus towards redemption. This is how we read those novels in the 1970s, and I hope I have translated that reading context into a form that readers might find useful so many decades later.  I have stressed the ways in which MacGregor and Graham create an alternative to the “street” version of “the black experience.” I have added sections that engage directly with the psychological dimensions of Goines’s novels Whoreson and Never Die Alone,

I have tried to do a close reading of two of the most compelling double page sections from the comic books, but I fear that the panel by panel reading you asked for would be better suited for a journal like Studies in Comics, since I would be able to offer visual images from the comic books. My intention in the essay is to open a conversation about the kind of reading that we might do and that we might think about doing (and that others might do). I realize that I come close to making the claim that the comic book was prison reading (it was, but of course it was read by a wide readership), yet I want to reiterate the importance of the shift to reading towards the end of the essay. Making prisoners read only "improving literature" rather than Goines (or comic books) is cruel and petty in so many ways. 

The period between 1973 and 1976 seems more and more to me, in retrospect and as a consequence of digging into your feedback, as a crucial period in Black reading and publishing. I used to teach either Toni Morrison's Sula OR Song of Solomon, but now after rethinking this essay along the lines you have suggested, I realize that teaching these novels together, and teaching the significant differences between them, can offer students some insight into the development of Black fiction from a more protean early 1970s incarnation into the more recognizable "cultural memory" work that we still consider -- that work started, I think in the mid 70s. This, to me, is the difference between The Panther's Rage and The Black Panther Takes on The Klan.

I hope I have addressed your excellent feedback adequately, though I fear my responses may be a little more elliptical than direct.

I have indicated places of revision by putting them in bold, as requested by the publisher.

Thank you again for your work as a reviewer and for your thorough reading of this essay. I am grateful for the entire response, from the overview to the errors that I overlooked in proofreading. It is significant in many ways and reaches beyond the immediate context of the essay under review.

 

 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Reader’s report on revised version of “The Black Panther (1973-1976): Rewriting ‘The Black Experience’ in Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan”

 

I’d like to thank the author for, and congratulate them on, their hard work on their revisions to “The Black Panther (1973-1976): Rewriting ‘The Black Experience’ in Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan.” It’s my belief that this article can now be accepted after minor revision. I would recommend that both the author and the editors of Humanities edit this article assiduously, not only for the surface-level matters of formatting and consistency but for the deeper matters of clarity, argument, and factuality. There are still errors in this revised article that I pointed out in my first reader’s report—as early as the abstract, which still gets the years of Black Panther’s origins wrong and mischaracterizes a claim about Black Panther being “the first graphic novel” (no one has claimed that; it’s also not clear which “graphic novel” the author has in mind here, since up until here they’ve discussed Panther’s Rage and The Black Panther Takes on the Klan as a pair). The article’s new writing, especially on Holloway House, is fascinating in its own right and rounds out the article wonderfully; it ought to be reread and tightened up so it can reach the lucidity of the earlier, more worked-over writing in this article. My thanks and congratulations again: I’ll look forward to seeing the final version in print.

Author Response

Thank you for your second reading of my essay on the Black Panther and Holloway House novels and for the time you have spent helping me make this a stronger article. First of all, I wish to apologize for sending the wrong unrevised abstract. There is much egg on my face! Thank you for your patient response.

I have tightened up the prose, and I have made the revisions you suggested.

Thank you again for your work and for the thoughtfulness and encouragement your review demonstrates.