FOREWORD

LIVING INSIDE THE HEAD OF THE KING OF THE WAKANDANS

Don McGregor

I lived inside the head of T’Challa, the King of the Wakandans, for six years. I listened for his voice every day inside my head. Who could know the Black Panther, in those initial years of his life, better? I am sure that in many places over the years you have heard or seen people write or say, “They have to get the voices out of their heads.” The storyteller has to “hear” the voices in his or her head, day in and day out, not just of T’Challa, but also of his adversaries like Killmonger, and every other character, friend or foe, around him.

If you can’t hear them, you can’t know them!

When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created the Panther and Wakanda, it was a new and exciting concept for comics in the pages of the Fantastic Four.1 But the concept could not be explored and defined in just a couple of comic book issues. There were villains to fight, and the new dynamic personality in T’Challa to introduce.

It wasn’t until years later, in 1973, when I was told there would be series that would be the Panther’s own in a comic titled Jungle Action, and that it would be set in Wakanda, that it then became my daily duty to not only hear the voices, but discover and come to know this magical place hidden in the African continent.

Before a story was written, I had to map out Wakanda, know its different locales that would give it visual distinction but also reality so that when T’Challa showed up in those places in the months to come the reader would already know they exist.

In fact there were a number of decisions that had to be made before I felt I could write anything on the Black Panther. Jungle Action was a bi-monthly published comic title, and in the beginning I would only have 13 pages to tell whatever story would become a major part of the Black Panther’s history. Now what this means is that if you don’t write a character into an issue, you the reader don’t get to see or know or care about that character for four months.

And if a character doesn’t appear for two issues in a row that’s the span of time of half a year that they are missing! That is a long time for a storyteller to hope that you will even remember the character by the time he or she reappears.

This also was something I felt I had to seriously consider as I spent those first months researching the Panther: If T’Challa came back to Wakanda (Marvel comics had brought him to New York City for guest stories he would appear in), what would the Wakandans think if as soon as he came back, every two months, for 13 pages, a new villain would show up and threaten them and the Panther would have to save everybody from destruction and death?

To me, it wouldn’t be long before his people would be saying, “You should go back to America; we had it pretty calm before you came back!”

Realizing this, I decided in that time while developing Wakanda that whatever story I told would only make sense if it all were connected, and thus I decided it had to be a novel, in comics form, because then whatever the threat was it wasn’t some new, easily defeated villain of the month. This led me to a further thought, as I came up with the umbrella title, “Panther’s Rage,” for this fledgling, sprawling epic.2 It would showcase as many jungle genre set pieces and iconic images that its followers loved, but the first time it would be a Black character in the title role and not some jungle White God or Goddess saving the natives, the mainstay go-to plot for many “Jungle Action” tales.

“Panther’s Rage” would also become a Hero’s Journey, a way of passage where, hopefully, you all would come to know what made T’Challa tick, and what he had to overcome, and how many of the doubts and beliefs he had were a reflection of what we feel as individuals.

His leaving Wakanda to pal around with the Avengers left the country open to revolution.

And thus was born Erik Killmonger. Every hero needs a villain in this kind of genre, and as I developed Killmonger, I believed he would become memorable in who he was and how he challenged our King. Killmonger was so fierce and righteous that when he first appeared on the cover of Jungle Action #6,³ Editorial told me he could not appear on the covers anymore. People have asked me why they made that demand, and I have often answered, “You would have to ask the editors,” because I was never told, but I’m pretty sure it was because the comics had never had such a ferocious Black character with such power and intense anger that it made them reluctant to have him so much in the forefront.

When the movie⁴ would come out decades later, Killmonger would finally be embraced.

One of the things the movie people have a luxury of when doing a film like Black Panther is they have access to a number of specialists, so they can hire people who can research costuming, they can find set designers who can offer ideas of what the places in Wakanda can look like. They have people who are knowledgeable in all different areas of expertise.

When creating a comic in 1973, you had you and the artist. And as the writer, I not only had to hear T’Challa’s voice in my head, know and analyze who he was and how events would change him, but I also had to research as best I could in that limited time-frame of a bi-monthly comic everything from costuming to the look and feel of Wakanda.

And I got lucky, because I had met artist Rich Buckler, and in our becoming friends, he insisted with Marvel Editorial, who wanted him to be on high-profile books like Fantastic Four and The Avengers, that he and I were going to work together on the Black Panther.

Those books could not have been what they were if I had not had an artist as dynamic as Rich to draw them.5 Editorial did not read my scripts; they looked at the art, and as long as it was visual and had fights, that’s all they really knew until the book came out. They had too many other, more important, for them, books to oversee than the Black Panther.

For me, nothing was more important than T’Challa and Wakanda and the people around him.

Over 40 years ago, I had Rich draw Killmonger throwing T’Challa over Warrior Falls!

For Jungle Action #7, I asked him to turn pages 2 and 3 on their side so we could emphasize visually the sheer steep drop of the waterfall and include the title of that “Panther’s Rage” chapter.⁶ Rich pulled it off.

As the Panther plunged down that deadly descent, I would explore how such violent onslaught affects our hero, what thoughts stab through him, what scars it leaves physically and well as psychologically.

If I could not have Killmonger on the covers, I suspected I would never be allowed to do “Panther’s Rage” if I asked. In comics at that time, if you were told “No” and you try to do it anyhow, that is open defiance, and there will be consequences, and odds are you won’t be able to do what you hoped anyhow, no matter how valid the reasons you believe.

So, what I did was have Rich draw a title Panther’s Rage logo. Then I went to Stu Schwartzberg, who ran the huge Stat machine room and asked him to shoot that logo into various sizes. One of the upsides to working on staff at Marvel back then was that you were there to protect your book, but also to see it safely off to the printers. And what I would do, while hearing T’Challa’s voice, is slap a Panther’s Rage Continues logo onto the title page of every new chapter as it went out.

I don’t think anybody in the Hallowed Halls noticed until Billy Graham became the artist.7 Many people believe I chose Billy to be artist to take over the art when Rich finally could put Marvel Editorial off no more, but that is not true. In the 1970s, I did not yet have any power to choose artists. Yes, Billy and I were friends from years back when we both worked at Warren Magazines, but the reason I got lucky and Billy was assigned to the Panther is that it was what Marvel Editorial did in those days. Black artists, who were just finding entrance into the field, were often put on Black titles. Thus, I had another friend and partner who believed enough in me to give me the kind of powerful visual dynamics I needed, but who could also see past the physical pain and into the wounds of the spirit that would plague T’Challa and the people around him.

As the series progressed, readers began to write to us, and the enthusiasm for Wakanda, as a unique and individualistic place within the Marvel Universe, intensified. It was rewarding and stimulating and little frightening. Like T’Challa, there would be self-doubt that we could take this to the finish line. Because if the readers wrote with strong opinions about what the stories and T’Challa meant to them, Editorial was pretty much in an opposite frame of mind.

I don’t believe it had occurred to them in the beginning that if the stories were set in Wakanda, it meant the comic would have a virtually all Wakandan cast, which meant an all-Black cast. They wanted to know where the White people were. I kept telling them it was their mythology, not mine. They established that Wakanda was this mystical, hidden, technologically advanced nation, so where the hell were these White people supposed to come from?

Some editorial people wanted the Avengers to appear in the book. It had become important to me as I got further into writing the books that the events in Wakanda and Panther’s Rage stay isolated. The Black hero did not need some White guys coming in to save his hash. The more I went to comic conventions (back when comic conventions really were all about comics!), I would hear how much it meant to people who followed the series that it stay apart and true to its spirit.

I came to believe that what we were doing was too important.

When doing a huge project like Panther’s Rage, I look back at it and liken it to an endurance race, the winning line long and distant. For me, I found I had to keep blinders on, the way they do on a racehorse galloping the track. You can’t let yourself be distracted by what is going on outside the fence, any of the shouting negative voices there that can corrode your belief. You need to keep what you envisioned clear, what you hoped you would achieve if you finished the story, because it is always about the story! If you let derision or challenge derail you, you will never know if you would or would not achieve what you set out to do, what you thought was important. That gets lost. If that gets lost, you lose. If you lose, the readers do, too! And the reasons and passions and insight that drove you on to do this insane, crazy thing, to live inside the head of the King of the Wakandans, might never become reality! If a writer doesn’t believe in what he or she is writing, why should anyone else believe it?

When the Black Panther movie was released, the filmmakers received this mammoth display of praise and love for what they had achieved, which was a staggering global response way beyond what I experienced decades ago with “Panther’s Rage,” this love for the Panther and the ideal of Wakanda.

In probing inside T’Challa’s personality, who he was, one of the things I came to believe is that despite the fact that he was a king and in that respect beyond the average person’s concerns and ways of life, they related to his humanity. It came to me that many people loved the fact that he was a monarch. T’Challa could do anything he wanted as a leader. Who could say to him, “Nay”?

But what they loved was that he truly worried about the decisions he made. T’Challa truly did want to represent as many of the different factions of his people as he could. His dedication was as much to the technological wizards as to the farmers. His concern for his warriors was as much as for teachers. He was, as far as I was concerned, a leader who truly cared about the fate of all his people, and realistically knew there were times he would fail some of them, but he cared to try to make that loss minimal. And really, I’ll bet when you think about it, isn’t that what most of us desire: that the political leaders in our life truly want to represent their constituents? And actually care about how what they do affects their daily lives?

Now, if I worry about hearing T’Challa’s voice in my head, I am also always concerned about what do I do after I finish that first race. I mean, right from the get go, before I even knew how many books “Panther’s Rage” would be I had to know where I could take T’Challa, who would be changed by its conclusion.

I have no inclination to write the same story again and again. It occurred to me when reading all the earlier books on the Panther, no one had ever mentioned his mother. If any of you read “Panther’s Rage” you will find I purposefully did not mention her, either, for two and a half years. I was saving her for the next story, “Panther’s Quest,” which I thought would deal with South Africa, and since this was the 1970s, Apartheid, and that for some reason that I did not yet know, the Panther would become a son searching for his mother in a racist regime that made such a human endeavor almost impossible.

I did not write that story at the end of “Panther’s Rage,” I did “The Panther vs. The Klan” instead because I was going through an emotionally turbulent time in my personal life and knew I could not do the necessary research for the project properly. Thus, some of you know, “The Panther vs. The Klan” came about, with Billy Graham and Rich Buckler helping me explore how T’Challa would react to racism and extremism in America.8 We all have to explore how we will deal with this very real threat.

Years later, in the 1980s, I did create his mom Ramonda’s character, and I did have to figure out how to go inside her head and learn what had happened to her so that her son never knew her and no one ever talked about her to him.⁹ Gene Colan was the artist, and once again I was fortunate to have someone who believed in this emotionally devastating backdrop and depict the human faces caught up in such racist and violent events. You can see the pain in T’Challa’s eyes as he holds a burned child in his arms, weeping, in the opening page of “Last Night I Wept for Freedom.”¹⁰

This was among my most challenging efforts to be inside T’Challa’s head and try to capture the pain and loss and despair, but also his heroic efforts and determination. The main focus I tried to always have … KEEP IT HUMAN! Gene Colan could draw such human dignity, his art seeing right into the eyes and souls of the people I created. It is like Gene lived inside MY head, the way I lived inside T’Challa’s!

Later, when I returned T’Challa to Wakanda, I knew everyone had been waiting for years to see where all the Wakandans around T’Challa were, how their lives had changed. Gene Colan was not available to draw Panther’s Prey and I made one of the best art choices I ever made in my life, Dwayne Turner, as the artist.11 The Panther was Dwayne’s first big comics story. The Panther was his favorite character. I thought I’d rather have someone starting out who loved the character, who would want to explore and capture T’Challa, the way I did, than have someone to whom the book would be just another comic book gig. Dwayne was magnificent at capturing the grandeur that I wanted for Wakanda, and the gymnastic Olympian feats of the Panther, his agile grace, his poetic power in motion!

I knew I had to expand on the Wakanda mythos, and now see how the country would interact with the global community, and the machinations of outside forces, from the United States’ own CIA to other countries’ desirous ambitions, and those fearful of Wakanda’s incredible accomplishments.

This is the last I will write about living inside the King of the Wakandans’ head. I am glad I could be there; it brought out the better human being in me. And, hopefully, you feel there are more positive possibilities because of T’Challa.

Remember, the possibilities of T’Challa lives inside us, too. Be kind to each other. Be kind to yourselves. And hang in there!

—Don McGregor

STARRING … T’CHALLA THE BLACK PANTHER

Creators: Stan Lee & Jack Kirby.

Debut of Character: Fantastic Four #52 (1966).

First Ongoing Publication as Lead Character: Jungle Action, starting with issues #5 (reprint of Avengers #62) and #6 (original material, Killmonger’s debut).

Debut of Eponymous Series: Black Panther #1 (1977).

First Television Appearances:

Nonspeaking—X-Men, episode 4–06, “Sanctuary, Part One” (October 21, 1995).

Speaking—Fantastic Four, episode 2–07, “Prey of the Black Panther” (November 11, 1995). Voiced by Keith David.

First Television Series: Black Panther motion comic, episode 1–01, “Pilot” (January 23, 2010). Voiced by Djimon Hounsou.

First Live-Action Theatrical Appearance: Captain America: Civil War (2016 motion picture). Played by Chadwick Boseman.

First Theatrical Starring Role: Black Panther (2018 motion picture). Played by Chadwick Boseman.

NOTES

1. Fantastic Four #53–54 (1966).

2. Jungle Action #6–18 (1973–1975).

3. Jungle Action #6 (1973).

4. Black Panther (2018 motion picture).

5. Jungle Action #6 (1973) through #8 (1974).

6. Jungle Action #7 (1973).

7. Jungle Action #10 (1974).

8. Starting with Jungle Action #19 (1976).

9. Marvel Comics Presents #14 (1989).

10. Marvel Comics Presents #27 (1989).

11. Beginning with Black Panther: Panther’s Prey #1 (1990).