Product Description

The Black Panther, as onlyJack "King" Kirby could do it! They searched for it! They fought - and even killed - for it! What was it? King Solomon's Frog! Alongside Mr. Little and Princess Zanda, T'Challa battles the Collectors, the Six-Million Year Man, and more in this power-packed, never-before-reprinted action epic in the mighty Marvel manner!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #801211 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

Customer Reviews

First among equals
The Black Panther represents another Kirby innovation: the first black superhero in the Marvel Age of Comics, making his debut in July 1966 in issue 52 of the Fantastic Four. Intriguingly, he arrived just a few months before the formation of the Black Panther political party in the USA.
The Panther is the alter-ego of T'Challa, warrior prince of the African Wakanda people. Under his leadership, the Wakanda developed a hugely advanced technological society while maintaining their ancestral traditions. At a time when the civil rights movement was only beginning to combat America's entrenched racism, this was heady stuff.
This collection features the Panther stories Kirby wrote and illustrated following his return to Marvel from DC Comics in the late 1970s. It was not the most successful period in Kirby's career for two related reasons. First, readers used to Kirby's work being dialogued by Stan Lee found it hard to adjust to Kirby's own, very different, writing style. Second, Kirby's 1960s work was inked by people like Chic Stone, Joe Sinnott and Vince Colletta, who smoothed out the kinks in Kirby's pencilling and overlaid it with their own style. In the 70s, Kirby was inked by Mike Royer, who followed the pencilled lines much more faithfully. Readers used to the earlier work found such pure Kirby less easy on the eye.
But how does it rate now? Personally, I love the inspired whackiness of this series. What's not to love about a series in which our hero's quest leads him to locate King Solomon's Frog - yes, FROG! - which turns out to be some kind of time machine, bringing from the future a huge-headed humanoid nut job called Hatch-22! It's wild, wonderful and utterly out to lunch, and the Kirby-Royer artwork compliments the surreal, dreamlike quality of the stories. While not 5-star Kirby, 4-star Kirby is still streets ahead of most other comic book creators.