If you've been waiting to find out what Reginald Hudlin's take on T'Challa is, then you're going to have to wait a bit longer, because the title character doesn't actually appear in Black Panther #1.

Instead, the point of the issue is to establish the premise of Wakanda, the tiny isolationist African nation which has spent years politely beating the crap out of anyone who dared come near them, by virtue of its ludicrously high levels of technology.  The point is nicely made in a couple of flashback sequences, as the fifth century Wakandans fend off a raiding party with the aid of medieval Kirbytech, and the Black Panther of the 1800s proudly unveils a gloriously crap-looking robot which is still perfectly good enough for the time.

Whether any of this has anything to do with an ongoing plot isn't entirely clear, but it does make the basic point that Hudlin is trying to get across: the tiny African nation kicks ass because of its advanced technology.  And this is an important point to get across, because really, it's the Black Panther's unique selling point.  It's the thing that marks him out as a truly original concept among Marvel characters.  Wakanda, here, becomes quite explicitly the wish-fulfilment fantasy of a world where some little corner of Africa held out against the European colonists.  It's Africa, the way it might have been if only the entire continent hadn't been thrashed so comprehensively for... well, most of the last two hundred years, really.

I've always found the way the Panther is presented to be an interesting issue in its own right.  It's hard to avoid noticing that Marvel's most prominent black hero is now onto his second consecutive black writer.  What a truly amazing coincidence that is.  I've always sensed that Marvel see the Black Panther as a character with an appeal to the African-American audience - I can only roll my eyes at the horrific solicitation for this issue, with its blithering mention of the "hip-hop faithful." 

But, of course, the Black Panther is not African-American.  He's African.  It's a rather different thing.  Treating the Black Panther as a hero with particular appeal to African-American readers, essentially on the grounds that he's black and that's close enough, raises some interesting questions as to how Marvel view that audience, and how that audience views its own relationship with Africa.  Something tells me that the average African views the term "African-American" with the same cynical amusement that we in Britain reserve for white yanks who unaccountably think they're Irish.

The first issue gives us Wakanda exclusively from an outside perspective - usually the perspective of racists, who seem to be peculiarly acceptable in this book, presumably because a heroic black man will be kicking the shit out them in due course.  It's been a long time since I've seen the term "jungle bunnies" in print, and again it causes me to pause and wonder about the racial politics that lead it to crop up in this book, yet nowhere else.

Quite where Hudlin stands on any of these things, I'm not entirely sure.  Which is a good thing, since it intrigues me and makes me want to stick around to find out where he's going with this.  He's clearly interested in the whole idea of how everyone else sees Wakanda; the question is whether it's going to defy one set of rather unpleasant stereotypes, only to end up as a new, and more romantic, stereotype projected onto Africa from a different perspective.  The one black American character who shows up in this issue doesn't really get to do anything other than be dignified in the fact of racism.  The fact that some white characters are made to be implausibly ignorant of Wakanda - which surely isn't much of a secret to the Marvel Universe inhabitants - just so that they can make stupid remarks rings a couple of alarm bells for me.

Nonetheless, I'm interested, and I'm reasonably entertained.  Whether I'm interested in the comic itself or simply in a range of issues that float about it... well, that remains to be seen.  But it's pleasingly ambiguous about many of those issues, and that's kind of encouraging.  I'll keep an eye on this one with some interest.

Rating: A-

back | continue