Not enough Doom lately

I keep saying that I’m not too interested in the current movies and TV series, but that claim is easily scuttled by the fact that I have kids aged nine and almost-eight. I have seen very little of the live-actions, but when it comes to cartoons, I’m catchin’ up fast.

Still beautiful

#6 (Buckler)

This is how I met the Black Panther, 1973-1974, age nine and ten, with “Panther’s Rage” in Jungle Action #6-19. 

Puh-leeze!

I usually don’t blog what-happened-just-now style, but right now it fits. Today (Nov 29) featured the second time in a week, and in my whole life, that a working person who happened to be black addressed me – 50ish, white – as “boss.”

Fizzle

FOOM #11

In 1976, my first issue of FOOM came in the mail, about Jack Kirby’s return to Marvel. He actually hadn’t been gone all that long, but at that time DC and Marvel were perceived as Ormadz and Ahriman, and even that was too vague for me to process because the Marvel fanfare said nothing about what he’d been doing during his … uh, hiatus “over there,” i.e., the New Gods collectively speaking, and others.

Man of steel

One of the finest punch motion-lines in comics history.

Um … you do see who he is, right? Down to almost exactly the same powers? No mask, but a secret identity anyway, via an alias? Breaking chains all the time? Alien to comfortably ordinary folks? Flatly cut off from his original identity and home, yet not even the hint of emotional crisis or a personality disorder? Confronting thugs on the one hand and tycoons on the other, too, in a world where “law and order” is not necessarily something to be on the side of.

The Black Panther(s), the Coal Tiger, and US

Compare him to any other Marvel character who gets to sit on a throne and think about stuff.

BONUS POST: Thanks to Larry Lade and his March pledge at the Doctor Xaos Patreon! All you comics nuts probably already know how Lee and Kirby were developing an African black character called the Coal Tiger in early 1966, then changed the name to the Black Panther.

You might not know that the original name Coal Tiger wasn’t neutral by a long shot, as at the time, it was the media term for post-colonial African nations. The relevant name here is Patrice Lumumba, leader of resistance against the Belgian colonial government, author of Dawn in the Heart of Africa, important participant at the All-African People’s Conference in 1958, advocate for nationalizing the resources of the Congo Basin, then briefly the first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo in 1961.