Ed Hannigan

The first volume in Grell's long follow-up to [The Longbow Hunters]. I enjoyed this very much and am definitely falling for this version of Oliver Queen. (This version of OQ can be spotted wearing an ugly Christmas sweater what matches his socks. Be still my heart.) As with The Longbow Hunters, jeez the violence against woman, though. Also, TW for graphic gay bashing in the last set of issues collected here.

Except for some flashbacks, we finally move out of the timespan of Miller's Batman: Year One, into new territory; Shaman covers some of Batman's first winter in Gotham, as artifacts from an Indian tribe where he trained to become the Batman reappear in Gotham. This is the first of a couple Dennis O'Neil "Year One" tales, and probably the best of them; O'Neil and Edward Hannigan are consummate comics storytellers, and know how to write a gripping tale. It's not an amazing tale-- there are show more definitely some odd leaps-- but it is a well-told one. I also liked the reinsertion of some details from Batman's Golden Age origin into Batman: Year One, and the joke at their expense. It's actually a kind of brazen poke at a giant in a way.

Batman "Year One" Stories: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence » show less

This is a mammoth 1,236-page collection containing every Black Panther–related comic from 1977 to 1996. Below, I'll take it chunk-by-chunk, linking blog posts where I've included illustrations with my reviews. (This is not quite the sequence of the stories in the book.)

Black Panther vol. 1 #1-15
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. show more 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!

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.

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.

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 (see below).

Marvel Two-in-One #40-41
These two issues come from Marvel Two-in-One, which I think was a series where in each issue, the Thing teamed up with a different superhero. In the first issue collected here, the Thing teams up with Black Panther (duh), while in the second, Brother Voodoo, but it concludes the story begun in the previous issue and still has a decent-sized role for T'Challa. They were released during Kirby's run (between #9 and 10); SuperMegaMonkey's Marvel Comics Chronology places them after Kirby's run came to an end in issue #13, before the last two issues by other writers.

I actually liked the glimpses of the bits of drama we got of the Thing's life; the other highlight of the story was actually getting to see T'Challa as inner-city teacher (an idea coined for The Avengers, I think, which was quietly dropped later on... because really, it makes no sense). The actual story here is pretty nonsensical; a lot of the drama revolves around a list of prominent black citizens of New York City... a list that no one can find a copy of even though it was published in the newspaper! Then there's a bit where the Thing lands an airplane with one hand while holding one of its wings on with the other! There are a number of creators whose other work I have enjoyed involved in this (The Omega Men's Roger Slifer, Justice League Europe's Pablo Marcos), but none of them are doing their best work. Or even their mediocre work.

Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #87, Marvel Premiere #51-53, The Defenders vol. 1 #84-86, and Marvel Team-Up vol. 1 #100
The next story is a Spider-Man team-up from Marvel Team-Up; the omnibus places this after Black Panther #14-15, but as SuperMegaMonkey points out, it must actually precede those two issues. since Marvel Premiere #51-53 continues straight on from Black Panther #15. It is pretty dire. I don't know what's up with writers who invent lame villains who even the characters in the story call out for being lame. Why cut your own story off at the knees like that?

The three issues of Marvel Premiere continue straight on from the cancelled Black Panther ongoing, with the same creative team of Ed Hannigan and Jerry Bingham. These issues are a bit of an oddity. So, Don McGregor's original run on Black Panther in Jungle Action was abruptly cancelled mid-story in 1976; in 1977, it was replaced by Jack Kirby's ongoing, which completely ignored everything McGregor had been doing. When Kirby left Marvel and Hannigan and Bingham took over in 1979, they began a story to explain what had happened to all the story threads and characters abandoned when McGregor was fired... but then their book was cancelled too, so the issues ended up published in Marvel Premiere instead. All of that is to say, this is a wrapup to a cancelled story that was itself cancelled! And it finished in 1980, over three years after the story it was designed to wrap up! Intellectually, I admire that Marvel actually bothered... but in practice it's a terrible story and they probably shouldn't have bothered. Memory loss is a hacky explanation for it all, and there must have been a better way to handle this. Did Monica and her boyfriend (who I think all later writers just forgot about) really sit around for years before trying to figure out why T'Challa abandoned them? It admittedly has been a long time since I read the original Don McGregor run, but the explanations given here surely do not line up with it in any way, shape, or form. I feel like there's no real conclusion here anyway; just a bunch of fights and then people are like, "Oh the story is over now."

The other issues here are more team-ups: a three-issue arc of The Defenders featuring Black Panther and a one-issue story of T'Challa meeting Storm of the X-Men. The Defenders arc is by Ed Hannigan again; it has some good ideas but I feel like Hannigan's writing jerks around from idea to idea and the choices the characters make range from arbitrary to stupid. I found these a struggle.

Issue #100 of Marvel Team-Up is the story that established a preexisting relationship between T'Challa and Storm. I hadn't realized that had happened all the way back in 1980 in a story by Chris Claremont and John Byrne; I don't think it made its way into an actual Black Panther comic until much later, I want to say not until Reginald Hudlin's run in 2006. It's a short ten-pager about an enemy from Storm and T'Challa's youth popping back up in the present; the backstory is fine, the present-day stuff is kind of silly. But this small story had a profound impact on the future of both characters.

Iron Man Annual #5 and Black Panther vol. 2 #1-4
After this, Black Panther popped up here and there across the Marvel universe. One of those places was "War and Remembrance!", an issue of Iron Man where Iron Man/Tony Stark comes to Wakanda to set up some kind of tech deal, but at the same time who should return but... Killmonger! Keen to begin his takeover all over again, he defeats T'Challa and takes over the country, but of course we soon learn he killed only a convenient Life Model Decoy. Then at the end we learn that Iron Man foe the Mandarin was somehow responsible for Killmonger's resurrection.

It's nice to see McGregor's run back in play after it was ignored during Kirby's, but this story is just fine. Like, it is not bad but I am not sure it has much going for it either. It is much more a Black Panther story than an Iron Man one, though, so I can see why it was included here.

Black Panther finally got his own title again in 1988, nine years after the cancellation of Black Panther vol. 1. This was a four-issue miniseries, bringing in real social issues: a rebellion against apartheid is brewing in the fictional country of Azania, and many Azanians think their neighbors in Wakanda should aid them—and many Wakandans agree. But T'Challa does not, which leads to a challenge to his right to rule Wakanda, and then he is attacked by a group of white supremacist superheroes from Azania... and the panther-god himself!

It's a bit all over the place, and some of it works and some of it does not. I like the art of Denys Cowan and Sam DeLaRosa, though I don't really get the wisdom of giving Black Panther cat eyes in and out of costume. They do a great job with the fight scenes, particularly the showdown with the panther-god, and it's neat to see T'Challa tested in such a way.

On the other hand, seeing his right to rule challenged is not so interesting; so far, we've had Killmonger's attempted takeover in Jungle Action, T'Challa's half-brother's military coup in Black Panther vol. 1, Killmonger's seeming assassination in "War and Remembrance!", and now this. That's four time across five runs on the character! It's a natural enough well to go to when your protagonist is the ruler of a country, but if everyone goes to that well, it makes that ruler seem a pretty ineffective one.

The Supremacists are a bit dopey. Which, I guess is the point, they are white supremacists, but I think the story wants me to take them seriously as opponents for the Black Panther. On the other hand, embroiling T'Challa in real-seeming politics worked well in Jungle Action, and it's decent-enough ground here, and the ending worked pretty well, as real change comes to Azania.

Again, the politics of Wakanda here don't benefit from the fact that nothing seems to carry over from previous runs on the character: no one from McGregor or Kirby appears here as far as I can tell.

Marvel Comics Presents #13-37, Solo Avengers #9, Marvel Super-Heroes #1, Black Panther: Panther's Prey #1-4, Marvel Fanfare #60, Fantastic Four Unlimited #1, and Marvel Comics Presents #148
After Don McGregor's Black Panther run from Jungle Action was cancelled back in 1976, he actually got invited back two more times: he did a story called Panther's Quest published in Marvel Comics Presents in 1989 and a four-issue prestige miniseries called Panther's Prey in 1991. This collects both of them, along with five short Black Panther tales by other creators from the same era.

Panther's Quest sends the Black Panther into South Africa in order to find his mother, missing since childhood. Sure, we did apartheid in a thinly fictionalized version of South Africa in the immediate previous Black Panther storyline, but why not do it again in the real place? This story ran twenty-five biweekly installments of (usually) eight pages... and it is interminable. Like, eight pages will go by and all that's happened is Black Panther has punched a guy. One thing I liked about McGregor's Panther's Rage was how it really made you feel the difficulty of what the Black Panther did, but this goes too far with it, because everything is immensely difficult, everything is enormously slowed down, it never feels like we're getting anywhere, being crushed under the weight of McGregor's enormously wordy style. Being set in South Africa means we again lose the worldbuilding that made Panther's Rage so interesting, too. It has it moments, including some nice side characters in South Africa, but ultimately, a tedious slog with little to say.

Panther's Prey almost has the opposite problem: this is made up of four forty-page installments and is all over the place. Wakanda is modernizing, connecting with the outside world more—this is nicely demonstrated by the appearance of a food court selling pizza. But with the benefits of connecting to the outside world also come the downsides, and someone is smuggling crack into Wakanda and vibranium out... using an army of cyborg pterodactyls, of course! The story follows this main storyline, but also T'Challa's mother acclimating to life in Wakanda, what Monica Lynne's been up to in the U.S. since we last saw her in Jungle Action (McGregor ignores her later appearances), the guy organizing the drug smuggling operation, and updates to various members of Black Panther's Wakandan supporting cast. There's a lot of nice moments here but overall not much actually seems to happen despite the fact the story runs over one hundred and fifty pages. Black Panther doesn't even meet the villain until about ten pages from the end, and beats him by luck in about six seconds.

The other stories here are nice to have for completism's sake, but not very memorable.

What's interesting to me reading Black Panther chronologically is to see the development of the character I know from the movies. His mother, Raimonda, debuted in this volume, but she's not the imperious ruler of screen, but a South African woman romanced by T'Challa's father who returned to her homeland after her husband died. Many elements of the mythos have yet to appear at all. There's also still no sense of cohesion: McGregor doesn't really acknowledge that anyone used the character other than him since 1976. (Can't imagine why the "Black Musketeers" don't come up in discussions of T'Challa's family!)

What the--?! #9 and Over the Edge #6
The first of these stories is a ten-page humor comic satirizing Panther's Quest... written by Don McGregor, writer of Panther's Quest! Though not every joke landed, and I didn't really care for the art, I appreciated McGregor's ability to laugh at himself. If you've ever read a Don McGregor Black Panther comic, there are some good jokes here.

The other story is a Daredevil team-up from 1996; I thought this might be a humor comic too at first thanks to the ridiculous art, but no, that's just how they thought comics should look in 1996. I don't know why people keep getting Ralph Macchio to write Black Panther stories because they're almost always bad. In this one, Black Panther attends an extradition hearing for Ulysses Klaw that's attacked by Killmonger;  Foggy Nelson is representing T'Challa, so Daredevil is close to hand when the attack begins. Guess what: the introduced-just-moments-ago best buddy of T'Challa turns out to be traitor. Kid has like one line of dialogue before this "twist"; I feel like Macchio wasn't even trying. The art often fails to communicate basic essential information. show less

I know I have read some Dennis O'Neil before, but this one stuck out to me. I really enjoyed the writing style for Batman in these issues. The story is sort of an alternate version of an origin story but not really, it's sort of confusing at first to tell when exactly this story takes place. But, the story of the Bat and the shaman really catered to the story of Bruce Wayne and Batman. I would definitely regard this as one of the better and darker tales of the Bat. Really enjoyed this show more villain/arc. show less